Michael_Gia

Not sure if this helps, but I took a page out of Revit’s hotkey philosophy. That is I mostly use a two letter system. You’ll instantly get more combinations and it’s a lot easier to string together 2 keys that make sense. examples: m,r for material region t,m tape measure d,e end to end dimension d,a angle dimension d,m manual dimension it’s endless.

The roof above the garage is just a room with the ceiling height set to the height you want your parapet walls. Add a cap on those walls, your floor finish is EPDM and you can even use the automatically generated baseboards as the flashing by adjusting their heights and material. You can use the same principle for your balcony on the right and just set your walls to the railing type you’re looking for. What René said for the canapé roof over the door on the left, or just cheat with 3D solids. (If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying) Of course, use proper detail drawings to illustrate these features and not some 3D generated section. My opinion of course.

Situations like the one below are a problem in Chief. Sometimes they will disconnect randomly or move and resnap arbitrarily. Dimensions will un-attach randomly no matter how many times you reconnect them etc... I usually "solve" this by creating a thinner version of the wall which seems to work most of the time, but Chief still behaves weirdly around small offsets. What do you guys do?

It's the door opening indicators that are really missing to achieve this look.

To use Chief terms, the Elevation marker on the right measuring the Floor at -118 1/8" always measures to what you have as "Floor Structure" which can be set in the floor defaults or on a room by room basis. Don't think, concrete or any other material, because your floor structure may contain more than one material depending on your plan. Up here in the great white north, my basement Floor Structure has, 2 inches styrofoam, polyethylene, and 4 inches of concrete (total 6"). This way it shows up and calculates proper heights according to code up here.

The same stuff that didn't work properly in X13 still doesn't work properly in X17. Lots of neat new features but with even more bugs. Visually better though.

you know you're a redneck, when your detail plans have a gun rack... (sorry, couldn't help myself)

X17 is the buggiest version in a long while. I really hope they fix all the crap under the hood in the next iteration.

I see what you did there...

beautiful! You got it to improve the lighting, landscape, perspective all while preserving your structure and design elements. well done, human.

This is worth a 10 minute look…

@ComputerMaster86 I think the key is that you have to give AI a lot less to do if you don’t want those AI “hallucinations” as some people call them. In my example, I started off with a decent pbr from Chief with the actual materials I wanted and as good as I could get the lighting and perspective. ChatGPT did a good job because it didn’t have to invent too much. When it does I will usually reply with “pretty good but change even less from the original image” I rarely have to use this, so I do think ChatGPT is learning.

@JBi-PDX Ctrl Tab Shift Ctrl Tab (backward)

@Chrisb222Nice, I also get decent results with ChatGPT but would like some kind of built-in AI. Not like SoftPlan. I'm sure Chief can come up with an intelligent solution. Here is my Chat GPT workflow. I upload a PBR render. My prompt is: "improve the lighting and landscaping and material quality but do not change the materials or architecture." Chief PBR ChatGPT:

This is wishful thinking. You got lucky. There is no built-in magic button to sit trusses on top of the top plate. It's a complex mathematical calculation, don't even ask about it. In the future: 1) draw your roof. 2) take a cross section and measure how much you need to raise the roof by. 3) select all roof plans in 3D and hit "Transform Replicate" tool and move in the "Z Delta" by that amount. Chief roof tool seems to have been designed specifically for rafter style roofs where carpenters build the roof on site. I'm assuming you order prefab trusses from a roof structure company like 99.999999999% of the world.

@SHCanada2well I prefer that they have filtered through the myriad of AI engines and chosen one that works best for what we want to do. That is, make a great render and don’t touch the architecture. (or as little as possible) Also the idea of allowing plugins and opening up the software to 3rd party plugins would also be great. This way Chief can direct all its resources to stuff we actually need and fix stuff that is broken.

Check this out…

Panels of any sort don't curve unfortunately, which is what DBCooper predicted.

Ok thanks Eric, and as @DBCooper mentioned I was only able to get 2 rails but then I checked, "include bottom rail" and was able to get at least 3 horizontal rails that follow the spiral staircase. Not to code yet but maybe close enough to give the client a visual.

I want to achieve this style railing. This is what I have created so far. How to get the spindles to go horizontal? If I apply a horizontal tube railing style from the catalogue it does not want to curve and follow the staircase. Is there a style of railing in the catalog that can produce a horizontal 1/2” tube that spirals to follow a spiral staircase like this?

Cumbersome as it is just give your materials easily recognizable names. Set up your template or your latest plan that you want to use for a save as method, with materials that are easy to pick out from a material list. Ensure that your wall definitions, floor and ceiling structure have those materials that you’ve customize the names for. to double check I use the perspective floor overview and run around with the rainbow tool to make sure all the materials are what I expect them to be, and that they are set to “area” in the material list tab. then what I do is just export a comprehensive material list to excel where I sort the table by the material name. One list to rule them all. I also use the “generate report” feature and enter a price of $1 to get the total for a specific material. Both work. I have to thank @robdyck for these tips and techniques.

If you go into your wall definition and chose or add a new material for the drywall that's easy to spot, like "para-CAD drywall 1" or whatever. Then go into > 3D > Materials > Plan Materials (or use the Rainbow tool) Make sure to adjust the "Material List" tab in the material dialogue box to "Material List Calculation" and set if to "Area" Then re run your Material list. If the Material list is still not giving the area in square footage then you have to click into the line item on the material list, click on the number in the "Count" column and hit the Wrench icon to update that material to "Area" (Unfortunately Chief doesn't always do this automatically) If you do all that then you can add a "1" as a price to give you the total cost which will be your total square footage of drywall in the Total column at the bottom. That's a little cheat as long as you don't mind $463.76 as your total square footage. Or Chief could ask their software engineers to spend a total of 46 seconds to fix these and other ridiculous quirks in this very unfinished aspect of the software. such a shame, it's not far from being a truly great tool. Oh well, maybe X18?

Reminds me of a quote; "There is no royal road to geometry" You gotta do the work. Buying someone's template cheats you out of the very important exercise of how to create one yourself. There's no point to using a template you didn't create, UNLESS! You are past the level of being able to create your own and want something more sophisticated like those created by the very splendid dudes referenced here.

They want us to use templates and Project Management. For our own good?

You're over thinking and working. @DBCooper gave the correct answer. I would not mess with terrain on floor 0.