Michael_Gia

I think you need more videos. Not enough info but keep in mind that Chief has a very particular order with regards to which floor you change floor elevations from. You’ve probably already experienced having momentarily gotten your floor heights just right and then you nudge a sofa 1/2” and suddenly the bathroom floor on the 3rd floor has dropped to the basement. Welcome to Chief where everything is connected. It’s more origami than architecture. You’ll get used to it, and the more you do you’ll realize there’s no better software of this type to go from concept to construction documents all while being able to sit with your clients and design asyou draw. You’ll sign contracts and make money and then you’ll love Chief again.

You can’t. It’s a PDF issue. I’ve tried “flattening” exporting in various formats in Illustrator etc and I can’t get rid of them. This has been posted many times. I’m hopeful one day someone will figure it out and let us know.

Earth tilt. unless it’s during the equinoxes, 3rd week in March and September. also not a astronomer

Terrain perimeter is drawn on floor 1, ideally. 1 option could be, if I understand you correctly, is to draw the stemwalls on floor 0 so that your garage floor is now floor 1 where you would draw your terrain, then the living area on floor 2. In another variation you could always use reference displays with a layer that isolates what you want to show from one floor projected onto another.

I noticed there’s been a lull in YouTube videos from Chief lately, maybe it’s because they’re working on all those shiny new, “What’s New In X17” videos?…. Maybe?

Use invisible walls at 90° on one side to stop the joining from happening.

Watch this…

@RBSdrafterHere is one video where René is using a moulding to generate a sidewalk. This is a little more involved than what you are looking for but the procedure is the same for a simple curb.

uncheck curbs for the road. only use the molding for the entire curb. add breaks where you want the molding/curb to graduate down to street level. In a cross section, shape the molding as desired to create the lowered curb etc... Not sure if I explained myself correctly. there's a video of this floating around, probably from René or Alaskan son or someone else.

Roads meeting driveways often produce unpredictable joining issues. Don’t use roads with curbs. Instead use terrain features that you can shape easily. Use 3D mouldings to create curbs which you can also shape and manipulate as you want. More work but way more predictable and the connections will stay as you have drawn them as opposed to the automated curb feature in roads which, even when they do happen to connect properly that can all of the sudden disconnect and produce artifacts like in your post. This won’t improve ever either. But we’ll get cute new features like 3D dimensions that nobody ever asked for or uses.

I backup the important stuff by dragging it over to iCloud since I'm on a Mac. I'm assuming the odds of both cloud services going down at the same time is probably rare? I used to back up to an external drive every few months but I've gotten lazy.

OP was asking for shadows in floorplan view, not a sun study. In Chief you can do something similar in an orthographic 3D overview. OP was looking for something like a drop shadow effect like in Photoshop. Feel better now?

I’m here to tell you, it’s not you. Chief is still unpredictable with curbs and automatically joining to roads and stuff. I take a different approach. I use a road with no curbs. Then I use a molding polyline to create the curb. This way I have complete control of how the curb is shaped in 3D space, independently of those dumb roads. On occasion I even have to use a slab for the road to avoid issues with complex intersections etc.

Dropbox works for us. (Watch how you name stuff, though) We are able to markup plans and documents and even add notes to documents that are shared with an “@person” which will notify them of a change. The only way you could do this sort of collaboration with Onedrive would be to setup a SharePoint site where all those sharing files are in the same organization. For current projects, I start the project folder name with an underscore “_” so they float to the top. Once the project is complete I remove the underscore to throw it into alphabetical order.

I wouldn't worry about this too much. Anybody working with Autocad deals with this sort of thing on a regular basis. The scale tool in Autocad can fix this in under 1/2 a second.

It's fixed now.

Howdie, When I export the 3D model to Autocad, it shows up as a 3D wireframe version of the model. The same model opens up with proper exterior surfaces in the free Autodesk viewer online, however. Is there a way to export to autocad with exterior surfaces as well, or is this a limitation of Autocad?

lol you guys all sound like, "the horseless carriage will never catch on", what if you run out of gas? Besides there aren't enough roads...

check out.... https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00038/resolving-a-gap-between-floors-in-camera-views.html

I’m curious, who is ever going to look at your truss drawings and actually use it to build or even install a truss? I realize some remote places don’t always have the benefit of a local truss manufacturer. As the Minnesotan mentioned, usually your truss company will have you approve their drawings and those drawings will accompany the delivery which any carpenter is already accustomed to reading. Are you just curious or are you going to manufacture those yourself. (cause I know some people do)

Pretty sure that just got imported as text.

The hardest thing in rendering is lighting and materials. Ai is great for that. As far as your background or anything else you want to control then you can just prompt the ai to “keep background”

We all know it’s coming. Archicad has introduced their version. I’d like to see the same in Chief…

I use an M3 pro Macbook pro with X16. Although I am able to do PBR (RTRT) it takes about a minute to render a view that takes the same view less than 3 seconds to render on an RTX 4060 laptop. Although the MacBook is a little snappier for creating and orbiting around standard render 3D models. I personally still find MacOS better than Windows 11 and the laptop experience is still clunky on Windows pc’s.

Change sun intensity to 7,000 You probably have it set to something like, daytime 100,000. Also, don’t use a sky as a background. Experiment with a more subdued background that’s more cloudy.