Michael_Gia

Is there a quick way to get all of my exterior walls to go back to the default material for the exterior? At the moment I have to click on every wall, go to the materials tab, select the offending material, chose "library material" then select the little check box at the bottom, "use default material" This is a very common occurrence since I can go through dozens of material changes with my clients before they settle on something they like. I'm sure there is a quicker way. Also group selecting walls doesn't always allow me to change them all at once for some reason.

I turned Project Management off but I checked "manage external resources" It's not clear what this actually does. Can you explain?

I've perused many forums, Revit, Archicad, Softplan etc. They all complain about the same stuff. It could be all summed up with, "stop giving us new features and just fix the stuff that's broken/not working to our liking" And all these companies know that only new fancy features is what maintains their client base and attracts new subscribers. And we want that, because only a healthy wealthy Chief Architect can keep improving. Chief's Room Definition paradigm is what allows us to go quicker than any other software of this type, from concept to 3D rendering and construction documents. The downside is you have to get real comfortable with patching things up with 3D solids that are assigned their own layers. Material lists are still inadequate. Client 3D viewer is still half baked. And this new File Structure is awesome but only if they implement a cloud version so we can really collaborate with others and even ourselves, since a lot of us are often on the road or abroad and use multiple computers. Chief still assumes we are all sole proprietors, all hunched over our one computer in a basement somewhere with no internet.

Other than a slick new project management system, I don't feel there's much else especially with respect to a lot of the long standing issues we've all been whining about. I can acknowledge that this new file system is the way to go, I just hope it doesn't take me as long to adopt as it did with Saved Plan Views. Anyone else have anything to add?

Wall height in Chief is controlled by Room Height.

It's "keep hierarchy" now.

Step 1: Windows + Shift + S

Hey, I'd love to upgrade to X17. I now see that big beautiful green UPGRADE button teasing me... Is it too early? Any issues?

Don't get offended, my man. I'm responding simply to OP's problem, which has nothing to do with code compliancy. He just wanted Chief to not add nosing overhangs, from what I understood. And maybe the building codes are ridiculous in my area but that's a discussion for another day and time, as para-Cad mentioned. (which I totally agree with as well) Anyway, let's be friends.

There are more codes than the one in your backyard.

As much as I would like to jump on the Chief bashing train, if you look into it there are is a ton of software that wont run properly on windows/arm configuration. Look at the Surface Pro and see all the complaints surrounding that half-baked idea from MS. arm/snapdragon are there to compete with the macbook's dominance in laptop portability and is intended for people who's software demands are at most the likes of microsoft office, email and Teams. It's for folks who like to sip bubble tea in a coffee shop cross legged in sweat pants all day and pretend they are busy. For portability I was looking into the Dell Latitude 7350 with the detachable keyboard in order to replace my useless ipad. I need something when I go on site during construction. the 7350 at least has an intel core ultra processor which should run Chief and the built in graphics should also do some lite PBR albeit slow. I'm used to slow PBR on my Macbook anyway, lol.

In the Structure tab of the room dialogue box, "Relative Ceiling Height"

You need to figure out the ideal pixel density that your video card needs to translate and throw onto that monitor. For an RTX 2060 that is 90 to 110 ppi, I believe. I’ll bet that most people on here who complain about their system or Chief being slow, is because they make the mistake of buying the highest resolution possible for the size screen they want and don’t pay any attention to PPI.

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?