Michael_Gia

It’s actually quite brilliant. I think Chief is the only software of it’s type that requires you to create your construction documents from a file/program that lives outside of the program in which you create and draw your actual plan. It’s cumbersome. Go back and take a look at Renerabbitt’s post about this. The Project Browser should be where you organize your construction documents. Kind of like an augmented Saved Plan Views to include Notes, Cad, and Schedules all in one place along with which page on your layout they are to be sent to.

Drag and drop between two layout files will be huge.

I think if Saved Plan Views could be expanded to list not only plan views, but anything you send to layout and grouped by layout page then you could work on everything in your layout without ever having to open up your layout. Not sure if that’s clear but, in short I’d like to build an outline of my layout within my Plan. Then when my Layout is opened all the pages populate with all the “saved plan/cad/notes”. All that’s left to do is space them out on the page so that they’re not overlapping. Anyone get me?

I wish Chief would pay a guy like Joe Carrick to make a video on how he uses Saved Plan Views and how he incorporates them in his workflow to go from Plan to Layout. I understand them from an organizational point of view but I fail to see how they can improve efficiency.

I think he’s referring to “zoom” like in Archicad.

I know I should be using them. I almost wish Chief wouldn’t give us any other option but to use them. Just seems like a chore to me.

Maybe I’ve just gotten lazy, but I’ve gone back to plain old anno sets.

Thank you Dermot that made a world of difference. I forgot that framing was on. I also noticed I had every label under the sun turned on. So, I turned off all labels except window labels and this improved 80%.

Here is a plan of an 8-Plex. If you take a front elevation standard view, panning around is unbearably slow. Bear in mind it is what would be considered a large model for Chief, I think... https://www.dropbox.com/s/aa3pxdkmq5qb546/> CITY PLANS 625 St-Laurent.plan?dl=0

Thanks for the tip. The zoom tool helps, otherwise I have to wait for the mouse drag to catch up only to find I’m not anywhere near where I wanted to be.

I’m talking about elevations in plan view not layout. Or is there some “live view” toggle in plan? I’ll try turning of dimensions and isolate just the model and see what effect that has. thanks!

Thanks for the response. The new machine has not crashed yet but it’s sluggish when panning in an elevation, although a little less sluggish than the old machine. As the photo shows it’s a pretty big house but nothing crazy. The problem is consistent. The bigger the plan the more sluggish it is. I’ve reported this to tech support. It’s the reason I eventually but the new machine. It’s very peculiar that the problem is only apparent in elevation panning and not 3D model orbiting.

Would you be willing to send me your plan and I’ll send you mine so we could compare how sluggish or not sluggish they are? Because if it is legacy stuff in Chief then we actually have a bigger problem because that’s not normal.

I use Standard render mode, no macros, only rich text, lines and dimensions of course with story pole dimensions. I have shadows on. 3000 square foot homes, two stories. I keep all lights off. Here’s a screen shot...

Thanks all, but the main slow down is panning around in an elevation view or cross section view. I have to go back to doing my elevation annotations in a cad detail window which just seems like a step back. Other than that the performance of the new Mac is snappier for 3D orbiting and Raytrace, unfortunately I need to create construction docs more than anything else. The 3D for me is just a visual aid for my clients and for me to verify that stuff is fitting together properly. I'm just letting everyone know that Chief is not yet optimized to work on a Mac anymore. I'm hoping they fix that.

RayTrace is about 6 times faster though so there’s that... Not what I really need but it does confirm that it’s not a hardware issue but a software issue. I think?

Ok, so I’ve been having problems since X10 with Chief being very sluggish especially in elevation and cross section views. Program even crashes when trying to pan in an elevation view. So as you can see in my signature, my MacBook is quite old so I just bought the new MacBook Pro, 16 inch. 16 gigs of ram, 8-Core, 1TB storage, etc... I still have the same sluggish performance as mentioned above. Generating a 3D view and orbiting around is faster than before but elevation and cross section views are only marginally less sluggish. Yes, I’ve called tech support and they’ve been no help. I don’t know why they don’t just admit that they have problems with performance in the macOS Environmennt? Instead they give me the old “it must be your outdated laptop” excuse. Hence the new purchase. I really don’t want to go back to Windows at this point but I might have to.

Other than the car and a few exterior light fixtures your image looks cartoonish. I’m not trying to dump on you but I don’t see the benefit here over the standard view even if it took only 3 seconds. If it’s not going to impress your customer than I’d rather use a water colour with line drawing over top otherwise I’d be ashamed to send this to a client with the tag, “here’s a realistic image of your home mam”. PBR is too much work to use as opposed to RayTrace because of the setup time which you don’t mention. I would prefer online Raytracing performed by Chief’s servers and sent back to me when complete. This is because RayTrace is easy to setup and then always produces predictable results. The drawback is only the downtime you have to sacrifice while it renders. If this could be offloaded then we could continue making money while Chief does the heavy lifting.

I’ll say it. Chief Architect is no longer compatible with the MacOs.

Ok, the problem fixed itself. (for anyone having the same issues) It seems the recent MacOs update needed to get through a few days of rebooting to sort things out. I upgraded Chief on the same day as a MacOs update, so that apparently is a bad idea... Although I wasn't having printing issues with other programs. All good now, but I was sure cursing Chief over the last few days.

The program shuts down completely. (Sorry for delayed response)

What does that mean?

Printing has become a real pain since the update. Program crashes midway during a print either PDF or printer. These are the only issues I have. I’ve resorted to snapping screenshots instead. On the plus side the “undo” function is much quicker. Anyone else experience this?

Send them as an image that way they won’t change when you go back and change something on your plan.

Used MacBook Pro. Keeps its charge. Performance consistant throughout life of computer (doesn’t really degrade) Slim and light. Durable construction. My Macbook spends more hours sitting on a dusty 2x10 than it does on my desk.