Doug_N

Such is the life of a building designer. No one cares if you have a life or not.

I am planning a vacation and will be out of touch, both by internet and by cell for a few days at a time, and would like to work on various projects. Tethering by cell phone is how I will forward work in progress to clients, but, well you know what I am saying.

This brings up an interesting question. Can you go offline for a significant length of time and still have CA working?

I have discovered via tech support that if you check the "wall extends below floor" the area below the floor also disappears. Mystery resolved.

OK this may be an interrupt problem. Do you have a graphic pad? Something is interfering with the stream of data from the mouse. Try uninstalling all interface drivers, reboot your computer and let the system reinstall all drivers.

This may be a mouse surface detection problem. Are you using a mouse pad or the surface of your desk? Sometimes different surfaces can drive a mouse to skip some areas. This will result in really erratic behaviour. Just a suggestion.

I have submitted this to tech support but thought the rest of you may be interested in this situation. When turning a wall invisible, only the portion of the wall above the default floor elevation becomes invisible. Any portion of the wall below the default floor level remains visible. It would seem that this is not how previous versions behaved, as illustrated in a training video for version X9 https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/323/creating-a-split-entry.html here is what it looks like in ver X9 Here are the results that I have observed in X11 For those of you that are interested in the project file, I have included it as submitted to tech support. Split Entry.zip

In the pictorial view, we are looking to the southeast. I suppose I could do this in two plans and then superimpose the existing grade in one plan over the historical grade in another plan. The top of the retaining wall would be a constant height over the existing grade while the bottom of the retaining wall followed the historical grade. so the top stays level, and the bottom is curved following the historical grade. The trick is, how to construct and model that wall. At its maximum height, it would be about 3' tall and at its shallowest height, about 1' tall. So how to model that changing wall height.

Joe, your plan sounds very interesting. Foundation => Level 0 => Ref Saved Foundation Basement => Level 1 => Ref Saved Basement First Floor => Level 2 => Ref Saved First Floor Is this it, the named views?

I have a very interesting challenge ahead of me. I am modelling a retaining wall that will have as its base a historical elevation of a paved walkway. The existing grade, a parking lot at the edge of a harbour, is gently sloping in two directions, a crown, running east and west, down the center of the parking lot and a slope that starts at the west along and north and south line that goes towards the east. There is also an east west line at the northern boundary that defines the edge of the parking lot and then sharply drops (at about a 26 degree slope) into the harbour. The length of the lot east to west is about 782' long. The historical grade had a saddleback droop at around the 400' mark about 24" deep. That saddle back is the base for the retaining wall that will run along the edge of the parking lot. Here is the question. How can I model two terrain surfaces at the same time? One that shows the existing grade and one that shows the historical grade?

Mike, your post is ambiguous because it is not clear if you are looking for help, or are offering to help others.

Joe, that is the strange part, Glulams are covered in the code, as are engineered I-joists. LVLs are stronger than regular lumber but you can't even use them without an engineer stamping the drawings AND making a report after a site visit after the install. My argument is that if the company provides an engineer certified span table, then a designer should be able to select that member and use it according to the manufacturer's recommendations.

Robert, Thank you, that was perfect! Joe, your panel was great as well, thank you.

A client wants to have a 16' wide by 7' high segmented roll-up garage door with glass lites similar to the ones that are typical in auto repair garages. I have searched and haven't found any. I remember someone posted a video on custom garage door panels but I can't find it. Does anyone have a link for that video?

Mick, thanks for the spelling error note!

I downloaded the plan and had a look at it. The Ontario Building Code requires that 5% of the floor space in a bedroom be unobstructed window opening. A window at the end of a hallway, such as in the dormer depicted would not qualify. I realize that you are not in Ontario, but all building codes have some very similar elements, and I would suggest you look into code requirements before going too far down the design path. The consequences of building something not code compliant can be very severe if anything goes wrong at a later date, or if the construction is flagged by a building inspector. Doing work without a building permit often attracts court action by the municipality, if not for the contractor, certainly for the homeowner. I am not implying that this is what you are doing, just offering some advice for those who are not familiar with the constraints imposed by building code and the municipalities who administer them.

If the roof is being generated by a room spec you can delete ceiling layers in the structure dialogue, and then as Eric suggested, build the framing.

I know this is going to sound heartless but it seems clear that you are a complete neophyte to the program. We all try to help one another here in this forum but when you don't even know the basics of how the program works you are going to have to spend a bit of time going through the beginner video tutorials to learn some basics. If then you have some problems I am sure there are a lot of us that will leap to your assistance. In the meantime, if this is something that you need urgently, I would suggest you hire someone to do the drawings that you need.

The material region behaviour is related to how windows work in X11. For the first time, you can move a copy of a window installed on the first floor to the second floor. The window itself, however, is still a first-floor window even if now installed on the second floor. If you do a window schedule, you will see that the window is listed as a first-floor window. What is more, if you use a material dropper on a window that was actually installed on the second floor to move object properties to the first floor copied window, the window will drop to the first floor leaving the window casing, and the opening in the wall in place. The "moved" target window will be embedded in the first-floor wall with no frame and no opening. So if you create a material region over the second floor that covers both of the natively installed window and the copied window, in some cases, only the natively installed window will be cut in the material region. This behaviour does not seem to be consistent, so what is going on is somewhat obscured.

I discovered a strange behaviour in Chief Architect that happens when you need to create a bump out on an exterior wall. In my experience, a bump out is a bay window with sides that are ninety degrees to the wall. When the bump out is shallow there are no side windows in the bump out. The bump out that I needed to model has a raised floor and if the offset distance for the front wall is not more than 14" the side walls extend to the room's floor level while the offset wall is trimmed to the correct shelf height. I have reported this to Tech Support, they duplicated the problem and so they are working on it. Bumpout Problem.zip - Support Answer - Josh M Friday, May 24, 2019 - 04:03 PM PDT Hi Doug, Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I have submitted this issue to our software development team so that it can be addressed. As you mentioned, there seems to be a correlation to the overall depth of the window when it has a raised floor platform. It appears that having a foundation directly below the window is also a factor. Until this is resolved, I would recommend either adjusting the depth to be slightly larger (A value of 15" seems to work ok) so that this oddity doesn't present itself, disabling the raised floor for the window, or build the boxed bumpout manually by adjusting the walls on Floor 1. Thank you again, and we apologize for any inconvenience that this caused. Kind Regards, Josh Chief Architect Technical Services Doug Norton Friday, May 24, 2019 - 11:17 AM PDT Side walls of window bumpout are not trimmed to raised floor level, This seems to be related to the size of the offset of the bumpout wall. This only seems to happen of the offeset distance if 14" or less

Eric. Your answer is the most elegant! Thank you for that.

Well thank you Mick. I tried turning off all the layers except the terrain layers to see if there was a remnant of the terrain left somehow, but that didn't work either. I am going to try the pink trick and see how that works

Perhaps it is something that I did earlier, but I can't create a terrain. So this is what happened, I created a terrain on the 2nd floor by accident. Since I had set the boundaries I thought, why not copy it and then go to the first floor, and paste-hold position. So I did that. Then I went back to the 2nd Floor and deleted the offending terrain. The new terrain wasn't a terrain at all, it was just a polyline. So I tried to turn it into a terrain perimeter, no luck So then I deleted it and went back to the menu to recreate a new terrain. Nope it is greyed out. Curious. Any suggestions. See the file attached if you think you may have a solution. Thanks Doug Model One.plan

OK thanks I missed that.