MoeGia

I love seeing the Chief Staff interacting on this board. Lot's of useful information going both ways. Thank you all for taking the time; your time and patience is greatly appreciated.

Yes, it can be done, but it needs some careful planning. I would position the barn in the bar plan in the relation you want it to the house using the grid (0,0). By locating exactly as it will appear in the house plan, you can use edit area all floors to copy, then paste hold position in the house plan. But before you do that... If the floor and ceiling defaults are different in the two plans you are going to have to correct those heights to relate to one another. You can do it before or after. Make sure auto rebuild roofs is off otherwise you'll loose the barn roof placement when you copy/paste/hold position into the house plan. You could practice on a copy of each plan so you don't wind up with a mess. There are lots of topics about this subject, so try a search. Many would create a symbol out of the barn to place in the house plan. That only works if the barn won't be changing. Good luck,

In layout, select the viewport outline. Open the layers property on the edit toolbar that pops up. Be sure the layer the PDFs are on is set to display. Or you can do a search for PDF not displaying and see if you find an answer.

@FellerHomes If you mirror the building, the elevations WILL mirror. If you have already sent the elevations to layout, you will have to update the layout box to see the newly reversed elevations. BTW, I find the center of the building and Edit Area All Floors Reflect About the centered line to keep the plan near 0, 0, centered on the screen and within the layout boxes. I create a box 12' from each side of the building to include dimensions and notes, the use the those limits to find the center. It makes flipping elevation text a breeze (select all, reverse). Everything is where it belongs. If you reflect about a line off to the side, you'll have to recenter all your text and layout viewport boxes.

I've been using since V3.0; almost 30 years. I've been a Bata Tester for many of those years. As a Beta tester, I spend 4-5 months testing the upcoming upgrade. I enjoy the process but it's a significant chunk of the year to devote to product testing. Would I be willing to spend that amount of time if SSA increases significantly? Would folks paying $2k a year for subscription software be willing to invest the time to improve the product? Maybe Beta Testing goes away and new features are added on a more regular basis, instead of a yearly upgrade? Maybe knocking out the low level users will allow Chief to focus on advancing features instead of making it easy for new users. I don't think that's a bad thing, but without new users, we're all screwed. The time to become productive in a new software will become more of a factor with this pricing structure. It does feel a little steep. Time will tell, and things will change. We can count on that. All in all, using Chief is one of the best decisions I've ever made. It serves my business and my market very well. I know the decision is going to be a lot harder for new users, but I look forward to seeing where this change takes us.

You can make a new layer such as walls, interior. Move your interior walls you don't want to see in section to that layer. In your section view layer set, turn that new layer off. Also, remember to turn that new layer on/off in all of your layer sets so you don't have missing walls where you want them!

Don't use the 'Reverse Plan' command. Draw a line or point in the dead center of the plan and all dimensions ( I usually draw lines 10' off of each side wall as a guide). Use 'Edit Area all Floors' and reflect about the current point (center line and point). You still have to clean up elevations and sections but CAD and text stay in the correct position. It's easier, but not fun.

I would like to see a graphic within the terrain dialog box similar to the story pole dialog. We could set terrain to lowest slab, top of garage slab, or with reference to the top of subfloor, whichever makes most sense for the site. Or preferably, multiple locations if we want Chief to do the magic. Maybe that would remove some of the manual work? Chief's terrain build function has always been confusing. Why set the terrain height from the center of the building? I understand they have to start somewhere, but that location ONLY matters on a flat lot. The terrain relates to the perimeter and that is where the calculations should be made from. It's been a long time since terrain was worked on; a tune up would be welcomed.

I store my Data folder on OneDrive to share between my desktop and laptop. I store all of my Referenced Files in the Data folder (Preference setting). You'll experience the things noted above, but as you move forward, everything will become much easier. I also keep all Chiefs files 'on my machine' for speed, as opposed to working directly from OneDrive. If you have the program running on two machines, you'll probably see the User Library file appended with the computer name. I assume Chief only references the original file, not the appended files. I'd make the change on your machine first. You may have to rename the appended file to keep the reference to the current file only. I don't make library changes on my laptop so can't speak to that.

I label one a left and the other a right. I agree that the program should see them as different objects. The program treats swing doors the same; no distinction regardless of swing. It's a disconnect for sure but local practices for calling out interior door swing varies. IMO, exterior doors should transfer the swing to the label. Casement windows show the DESCRIPTION correctly but not the label. I manually label them with a LH or RH, but would love the swing to be included with the label.

Don't bother reinstalling. Have you forced a roof rebuild? Are the roof planes joined together properly? If there's a slight misalignment, you'll see odd behavior. I didn't look at your file but is the camera cut too close to the bay?

Try rotating the pier/slab 90 degrees, then dimension. I find that dimensions often don't work on one side, but do on the perpendicular edge.

IMO, 16 GB memory isn't enough to run Chief on a PC. I would go for 32 GB. Maybe Apple uses memory better, but I would spend a little more to upgrade from 16 GB.

Ethan, If your 'room type' is set to report in the schedule dialog, you don't need to specify directly in the room type dialog. In your template plan make sure your room schedule defaults are set to include all rooms you want. As you label rooms, they should populate to the schedule.

I also have a Surfacebook 3. I can't run X14 on battery; it must be plugged in to use the NVidia card. After working for a few hours, Windows Explorer crashes. I get those freezes for a while until it eventually locks the computer up and my taskbar disappears. If I close down Chief when I start getting the freezes, the laptop recovers. There's definitely a relationship between how long the program is running and freezes. I usually turn off Onedrive which seems to help.

I was able to install version 10 on a Windows Surface laptop running Windows 10 but could not get it to install on my Windows 10 desktop. I never figured out what the magic was. You could download Chief Architect X8 to open those old plan files. You can save them in X8 and then work on them in a current version. There will be cleanup but you'll have access to your old files. https://www.chiefarchitect.com/search/?default_tab=all&q=opening+old+files+in+x8

I usually find this as well. and have wondered the same. However, I could not work in much of X14 Beta; it was far too slow. The public beta is better, but I am hearing lots of fan spin-up with simple commands. Something seems off.

I see it also. It also happens when moving between plan and elevation views when using custom library icon items. I don't care for the behavior.

Also be aware that Chief sizes it's columns from the outermost trim. A 10" Chief column will have a much narrower shaft (7"?). Chief's top trim is out of proportion to stock sizes. Since columns are ordered by shaft size, you'll have to do the math to get the proper size and look. In the long run, it's better to make your own.

You should be backing up the plan file to an empty folder within the client folder. Do not back it up to the CA Data folder. I think the color difference is because you don't have textures turned on in the new computer. Try F6 as in your other thread?

I would use invisible walls to create a room the size of the gable roof you would like. Set the front wall as a gable and auto roofs should create the roof, or you can do it manually. Use a bracket from the library, manually placed. If desired, you can set the walls to no wall definition once you are finished with auto roofs.

Even a blank placeholder in the bottom of the callout would be preferable to the wrong size callout. Although, I would rather the page number show all the time for quality control. I have reported it.

Don't forget that you can now copy cameras between plans. Very helpful if you're working on a plan that doesn't come from your current template. I locate all of my plans with reference to the 0,0 point which makes bring section cameras easy. With copy, past hold position, they come in on grid.

Yes. 'Reflect about' keeps the elevations much cleaner. You can even keep the plan on grid if you are careful. I draw a line on each side of the building a set distance from the building-say 10' on grid. Then a line down the center dimensioned to each side line (a point works too). The edit area all floors and reflect about the center line/point. This way all dimensions go with the reflect. The reverse plan is an old tool that should be depreciated or enhanced. It might be okay for schematics but once the plan is developed, it's more work to use than it needs to be.

I see this too in schedules and in a CAD Detail dropped into plan from the library. The CAD detail corrected itself, but the schedules have to be manually corrected. I sent the CAD detail in to support but it was not reproduceable. Please send in your X13 layouts or plan for review.