kzuiderveld

Wanted: Experienced and Proficient Chief Architect draftsman to prepare plan, elevation, framing, plumbing, electrical, and detail drawings of a custom home suitable for engineering, bidding, and permitting. We are “amateurs” with some design and technical skill who have taken our design as far as we can in Chief Architect, based on our knowledge of local codes, modern construction practices, and design principles. Currently we have a well-developed design concept that has been reviewed by architects and builders. We have now reached the point of diminishing returns for our time and effort to transform our design concept into a buildeble set of plans. The person we’re looking for is experienced with using Chief Architect to create final design and/or construction drawings. Ideally, you are also very familiar with green building materials and techniques, advanced framing, and the 2018 IRC. Any experience you have with engineering or general contracting is a big plus! And most of all, you are willing and able to take the existing files to a state of readiness for engineering, bidding, permitting, and construction in an efficient and cost-effective manner. A little bit about the project: This is a single-family residence, 2800 sq. ft. plus full basement and garage. The building site is rural, gently sloping, located in Larimer County, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The design is traditional and includes some timber frame elements. We plan to have geothermal (ground source) heating and cooling, and passive and active rooftop solar (grid-connected). We work at home and have designed the house for “aging in place.” Please indicate your interest, and we’ll send you links to the project files so you can make an informed assessment of the work. Regards, Denise & Karel deniseandkarel@gmail.com

Hello, We've been using CA to design our future house (three-story, about 4200 sq ft); we think the design is now solid enough to start involving professionals. We would like to have help to fix obvious problems with our plan (sometimes one just has to jump through too many hoops with CA, we occasionally gave up - we're not professional architects, designers, or builders); we'd like to get the plan solid enough to act as a base to start engineering drawings. Would be great if you could help out with that as well (we're in Boulder, Colorado). If you're interested in helping out, please let us know what you can do for us and how much you'd charge. Regards, Karel & Denise deniseandkarel@gmail.com

That answers my question indeed. Thanks Solver, you rock!

Indeed! What's the trick?

Hello, In our design, we'd like the middle part of the main roof to be elevated, i.e. the main gable roof is dividd into three parts of which the middle part is higher. Instead of using attic walls (so an abrupt transition between the roofs), we'd like to use connecting roof planes instead. I attached a simple plan containing only two roof planes and a wall. I'd like to define a roof plane between the two other roof planes that connects the two roof planes, BUT the edges still need to stay where they are. It's obvious to me what the roof plane should look like (I have the four corners that define the roof plane), but I can't figure out the magic chant in CA9 that would yield the roof plane I'm looking for. Any experts that can tell me how to create the required roof plane? parallel roofs.plan

I'm running a plan check on my design - it complains about "The layers may be reversed for this wall". But: I can't find that wall in my diagram; in past checks, I usually managed to find the trouble maker (which had a circle around it) but this time no luck. Been staring at the design for a few minutes to no avail. Is there a way to configure CA to draw a fat colored line or shaded area where it finds the error? Would make error checking so much easier...

I have the same issue (vector view missed up), but usually it's only the first rendering that is screwed up. Forcing a refresh (usually by rotating the scene) fixes the issue. ATI/AMD Radeon HD 6970M OpenGL Engine, 4.1ATI-1.48.16, video memory 2048 MB, Driver AMDRadeonX3000GLDriver

Yeah, but conceptually a kitchen garden is not part of the terrain - it should be a collection of 3D objects placed on the deck above the garage. Instead, I'm modeling the garden beds as a collection of rectangular railings with using soil as the floor finish - kind of works, except the soil bleeds through the walls in 3D view (as the floor finish is defined right to the edge of the bed) - that's called Z-fighting in computer graphics... Can be remedied by specifying an invisible wall just inside the framing of the bed, but man, it's workaround after workaround. I already verified I can drop plants on top of the soil though :-) Thanks for the encouraging words, Chopsaw!

Well, I started with imported the original site survey and then tracing over its contours to get the terrain iso-contours into CA. Since then, we modified the contours ourselves to approximate what we think the terrain will be (still not quite done with that). Since we have the original site survey still imported as an image, it'll be easy to create a plan that has the existing (survey) and new (primary/secondary CA contours). I'm a DIY and still climbing the learning curve - but I'm glad I don't have to use CA professionally as the software sometimes drives me nuts. Besides the inability to select pre/post terrain profiles, it also has the limitation of only showing the terrain at one specific floor. We want to have a kitchen garden on top of the garage, well, good luck modeling that if the terrain is associated a floor lower.... I very much appreciate the existence of chief talk that allows me to browse through the collective knowledge of CA users to find answers to some of my problems. Thanks to all!

As I suspected. Thanks, Lew!

I generated a terrain of our building site by tracing over the iso-height lines of the site survey; CA correctly displays that data, we consider that the "before" situation. Now I'd like to use new iso-height lines to approximate what we'd like our terrain to be. This would be the "after" situation. Is there a way to easily switch between the terrain for "before" and "after"? Seems that CA only supports one terrain.... Thanks, Karel

I expressed my frustration to support to be treated like a second-class customer, but it's their choice. Hope they will change their stance.

So you're owning X8 outright, which is different - your SSA is likely valid until after 2/15/17. I just started the rental, so I'll be auto-renewing every month until it's paid off (or if I cancel, which is not unlikely as I'm a DIY). The cut-off date for X9B access is SSA valid until 2/15/17, while my monthly SSA is valid until 1/28/17. I presume I'll get access to X9B on 1/28/17 after monthly renewal (SSA then expires on 2/28/17) , but I'd like to have X9B now instead... It's pretty frustrating to be a paying customer of CA, but being denied access to X9B (for now).

Nope, unfortunately not true. I am renting the software (auto-renewal every month), so my SSA is valid until 1/28/17 in my case (then it gets renewed). This does disqualify me (and likely everyone that is renting) from using X9 beta. I contacted support, but I'm getting the cold shoulder unfortunately. Would have loved to try out X9.

Rich, playing the video in the web browser gives you a low-res preview. Video looks fine after downloading it and playing locally. Scott, thanks so much for the effort and time you put into banging on my plan. I knew of several issues you identified, but it was great to see how you found and fixed them. I'll start drawing a new model tomorrow (Denise just gave me new drawings) and will try to avoid some mistakes you pointed out.

I sent Scott a private reply, but his suggestion should indeed work. One key insight: his workflow would have used level 0 for foundation, level 1 for basement, level 2 for main floor and the terrain would be defined using level 1 (basement). In my workflow, level 0 is foundation/basement, level 1 is main floor - this is courtesy of following CA's recipe (https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00376/creating-a-walk-out-basement.html) that creates a walkout basement by increasing the stem wall size of the foundation.

Wow, that would be awesome. I attached the plan, but please keep in mind that this is a WIP and the plan has several issues that still need to be addressed that I know of (roof, inconsistent materials, non-standard wall/window sizes, yadayada) and many more I don't know of right now) - but likely good enough to show folks what kind of house we have in mind. As of now, I didn't do much work on sculpting the terrain - we might have to do that in a separate program and then import the results back into CA. There's simply no convenient way that I found to tell CA "the soil excavated from the basement needs to dumped at the north side of the house, please make transition from grade level 1 to level 0 at the west and east sides of the house and please make sure that the grade slopes away from the house at each wall." I suspect I'll have to write some software myself to do these calculations for us. I'd appreciate any feedback - please keep in mind that I'm a newbie (and not an architect either) and that this my first design... River Way House Jan 4 2017 - Sleeping Porch.plan.zip

While I still have lots to learn, that is not the issue I'm struggling with - has absolutely nothing to do with cameras. I simply wanted to add terrain features by *editing* the plan of level 0 - and that's not working as terrain is associated with level 1. You got to admit, it's a little counterintuitive to have to draw the driveway to the garage on level 1, while the actual garage (and 80% of the landscaping) is on level 0... Thanks for your help!

Hmmm. From my simple user's perspective, it really should not matter on which level the terrain is defined - but I'll heed your advice and keep things unchanged.

... and that was I feared would be the answer - recreating the terrain will take me a while because I have to re-enter the iso-contour lines. Oh well.

Thanks Joe - but that doesn't work (or I don't understand your suggestion). While displaying floor 0, I can't define terrain features - that only works on floor 1. I want to "move" the terrain definition.

Hello, First post - I'm a CA DIY user currently climbing the learning curve. I'm using CA do get our house design in CAD (so we can iterate over it ourselves), but we'll leave the engineering to professionals... Because positioning of the house is so important on our property, I actually build the terrain first (i.e. imported the height contours from a survey), then designed the house (two story + walkout basement). Low and behold, I now realize that the terrain features are only visible on floor 1, not floor 0 (the garage + road + landscaping will all be at this level). Is there an easy way to tell CA to "move terrain definition from floor 1 to floor 0"?