Gawdzira

Post your plan and I will try to export for you.

The reason that I make a new Anno set for "Rain Gutter Plan" is so that when I send the rain gutter plan to layout I know that my rain gutter notes are going to be on that drawing in layout and I will not have a stray arrow pointing to a downspout show up on my electrical plan or site plan or hvac plan or.... I use the Anno Sets and Layer sets like Larry. I am going to try and review the discussion regarding the layersets as king but for now, I believe in the anno sets as king. They were developed to be king based on very clear direction from the dominant users on the forum and from a construction documents stand point make perfect sense to me. To me, they are the individual sheets of Mylar.

Can of worms, meet Mr. Can Opener...(Not addressed to you Michael, or Lew). I highly agree with what Michael wrote above. When it comes to design I push the keyboard and mouse out of my way and grab a roll of trace paper and some pens. The computer is an awful tool for design (my opinion). I love the computer for production and presentation (mostly). Recently, I have had the best reception from clients when I grab my colored pencils and draw on top of an elevation. There is something primal that we respond to when something is hand drawn. It can have a lot more emotion. I am wandering off the topic. If you want to offer your input to the designer she/he can take that from any medium you offer. If you want to be able to manipulate the design work (via the cad program) and working on his file, you may have a hard time finding an architect open to that sort of potential mess. You are probably better off with a piece of trace paper and a scanner to share your ideas. You can even do this with a "go to meeting" type of interface and pointing with your mouse at their screen. I could go on but the oven is ready for the pizza (literally, I am cooking a pizza).

In real life or for CA? In real life, try farm supply. In CA, I made it with moldings.

@ Joe, how much training have you had in the software? I have not used Softplan so I don't have an opinion in that direction.

The image attachment feature has a second button you must hit to upload the photo. Designed to annoy. Best guess, go to your attic level and place the window.

1000 words. I built a curved roof in hopes that I could do a match roof to the window but that did not work. so I did it with a cad line measurement that is pretty close to get the arch height.

Copy and paste. There is no way to over ride the actual dimension, only append it. I always do this with cad line arrows or by placing text over the dim to mask it.

You can import .dwg into a chief file. For the layout I would import the .dwg into a plan file and then send that plan file to layout. This is not the best way to deal with the title block. If it was me, I would use that plan file info in layout to trace in layout to create the title block cad lines in the layout file.

Save them to your library.

Don't use floating dormers. Just cut the roof back and put in manual roof planes for the dormer. The dormer side walls will be attic walls. But that is just me possibly because I don't use the floating dormer.

I get frustrated by the lack of ability to resize the window seat using the dimension strings. I am very much used to adjusting wall positions using the dimensions. In order to position and size the window seat I end up placing some cad lines to snap and center to.

Are you working in X6? If so, try using the window box tool in the window menu. There are a few things I don't like about this new tool but for the most part it is working well.

Post your plan file if the layer is displayed and that did not fix it.

Try zooming in closer. If no, try turning off the extraneous layers and turning on the layer "Main Layer Only" for the walls. If no, draw a cad line 6" away from that corner and snap to that first, then snap to the wall location.

Those roof planes need to connect not just crash into each other very closely. Use the hot key "2" (default) to connect. in plan view select one of those roof planes on the adjoining edge and then hit the hot key, this will highlight the adjacent roof and then you can select the proper edge to connect.

The roof DBX gives you options for one to lock and one to change. You probably want to lock the pitch and change the fascia height to match the more dominant roof plane. It will make your plate height change on the sub dominant roof plane.

I have my layout referencing a seperate file for the as built/demo plan from my remodel plan. In the remodel plan I have a (locked) layer that is the existing walls shown as dashed lines. Any time a wall is moved on the remodel plan it exposes a wall to be demolished.

I am trying to get my windows to "pop" in elevations sent to Layout. I have was hopeful that the Exterior Casing layer would actually affect the line weight of the window casing in the vector views but it appears to not do that. In the attached image I have the Exterior Casing layer line weight set to 222. If I turn off the Exterior Casing layer the window casing goes away so there is a direct link.

One way to achieve what you are looking for is by using the Reference sets. You need to learn a bit about these to make good use of their potential. Basically, once you set up a reference set you can use it to display objects on other floors. Check the file I uploaded and go to the Foundation Layerset. The reference display set is properly set in this file and I altered the reference set to only show the footings for the posts. You can make multiple reference sets so that you can use others for the various files that get sent to Layout. Backing up, you really, really need to study Annotation sets for about 10 minutes so that you can produce drawings in an efficient manner. Not using the Annotation sets is ignoring one the most valuable production tools that you paid for when buying CA. shuey 2nd house tweaked ref display.zip

Upload the files to DropBox if the forum is problematic. Either way, 1.save and then close out the files in CA 2. zip the files 3. the upload feature for the forum is 2 steps, first you select the files then there is a button to upload the files For larger files I usually use Drop Box. Easy to set up a free account.

I believe you may want to post your plan and layout files in order to get a good response to your questions. It is all guess work at this point without looking at what you have done to organize the project.

I am getting gorgeous exterior ray traces in about 2-3 mins with minimal set up other than figuring out where i would like to the sun to shine. If you don't get paid enough to produce those renders than you might want to raise your rate.

My work flow is this: Existing/as built plan (this is a unique file to my remodel plan file) -> hide all layers an only expose Walls Main Layer-> Cad detail from view -> select all the lines of the cad detail and change them to line style dashed with line weight of 10 -> assign the lines to the layer "Existing Walls Dashed" (this is a custom layer) -> block the cad lines together and assign that block to the "Existing Walls Dashed" layer -> copy and paste in place into my remodel plan file -> lock the layer "Existing Walls Dashed". Any walls that don't change will read normally. Any walls that do change expose the dashed lines and therefore delineate the removal of an existing wall. The whole process takes less time to do than the time you just spent reading my post. As long as you read all the way to the end, the end, the, now.

Two good sources below. https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?/topic/65-chief-architect-help/ http://www.chiefexperts.com/ When I was first learning the software I bought several hours with the Chief Architect Training. I would work for about 8 hours and then have an hour booked to deal with the questions I developed. Someone like Dan or David will have a lot of real world project experience to go from and can probably customize something to your needs.