Richard_Morrison

These are good points, Graham. I think there will always be room for people who know what they are doing. Years ago, drafting was a well-respected profession, where the drafters actually knew how things went together, and their drawings were often a work to be proud of in themselves. It also took some apprenticing and experience. It would have been difficult to retire from a completely unrelated job and start a drafting business with no training. Now technology has made it possible to make mistakes far faster than before, and gaining entree into the business is far easier. Technology has replaced drafting skills in many cases, but it has not made people smarter. It may take awhile for Darwinism (in the form of litigation) to catch up. Details that have been pulled out of Chief's standard details and slapped on a page without thinking are eventually going to reveal that important things like shear wall transfer and proper eave venting might not have been included. When a novice drafting service works for an educated customer like a contractor, many of these issues are avoided, of course. When that same novice drafter works for an uneducated homeowner, it is like the blind leading the blind. And it can be maddening for an experienced professional to have to compete for the business of that homeowner against a novice drafting service who is far cheaper. Throwing a few cabinets into a kitchen plan seems easy to a homeowner, but they probably don't have the experience to understand many of the subtleties that you bring to the table that will actually make a great kitchen out of a mediocre to average one. Educating the consumer is an ongoing task.

Scott, thanks for your hosting the conference yesterday. What I came away with was that in a basement situation, everything related to concrete -- slabs and foundations -- should be on level 0, everything else should be on level 1, with the concrete walls necessary for correct representation, drawn as normal walls only. Foundation walls and normal walls on the same level are fraught with peril at the intersections. I took a look at your plan. While I didn't get a chance to fully troubleshoot this, it seems like there are multiple walls at the garage attic kneewall; both regular and attic walls existing in the same space. The problem is somewhere around there, I think. If you look at the second floor exterior room definition, it includes the perimeter of the garage below, which it shouldn't. HTH.

Let's let this go. I was licensed in California in 1983, working toward licensure before that, getting every newsletter from the California Architects Licensing Board, and I absolutely know what happened.

Maybe your next door neighbor will build something like this, and you will start to appreciate some regulation. Or maybe this....

Geez, Perry, where do you come up with this garbage? The California Board of Architectural Examiners (as it was called back then) had a category of license called "Registered Building Designer" from 1964-1985. They eliminated this category in 1986, offering the existing Registered Building Designers the one-time opportunity to "upgrade" to the architect category. Only about 300 of the approximately 700 active registered designers took them up on this. Yep, pretty nefarious plot all right. (rolling eyes...)

You open the mulled window, go to the Label section, and choose the correct radio button.

I would suggest Label>Show component labels.

Not currently. But an excellent suggestion. (Why don't you post it there?)

Why not use the native Chief print to PDF?

This may not be useful to those who don't do architectural-grade specifications, but if you'd like to do full sheet (24" x 36" or larger) specifications in Word, with maybe 5 columns, you will be faced with the 22" maximum page dimension that Word allows. There is a work-around by creating everything at 1/2 size, and then enlarging the output at 200% If you want a 5-column layout to be 22" tall by 32" wide, say, make the Word document 11" tall by 16" wide, and use a font size that is 1/2 the size of the font you'd ultimately like to have. (I find that 5 pt. works well in Word for the standard text; 8 pt. for Section Titles, which ultimately will become 10 pt. text and 16 pt. titles). Write your specifications, and print to PDF. Then place the PDF in Chief with a 200% enlargement. It is easiest to edit this document in Draft mode in Word. There you go!

If you can't state with some assurance how many pounds per linear foot of design load the header is carrying, and whether there are any additional point loads, you are way over your head with the engineering, and any discussion on this forum is pointless. Hire an engineer. The only thing the free engineering software will do is give you a false sense of security and let you make mistakes even more quickly. Engineering is not something you want to learn on the fly. EDIT: BTW, According to ASCE 7, there is a 10 PSF snow load that needs to be designed for.

Well, I can think of a few issues. One, for the energy heels to work, the roof must be raised off of the top plate by 7" min. Was it? Two, you should be editing the trusses in the Truss detail window, not the section. You can get much better answers if you post the plan you are having trouble with, and have specific goals in your question.

You could probably get help from someone here with accuracy or detail issues, but this description is not enough to have even a clue what you are talking about.

What is the exact problem you've had? My experience has been just the opposite, provided you know how to use them. It would be helpful if you would add a signature line with your version of Chief.

Perry, it seems to me that if someone with your experience and familiarity with Chief has to do a test model first, then something is seriously wrong with the "user-friendliness" of the program.

This is how it has always worked. And I don't particularly have a problem with this. The problem is that if you reduce the stem wall height to get the footings to come back up, and you enter in too small of a stem wall height, it will bring the floor up with it, too. It used to be that you could just put in an arbitrary small number to get the footing to rise to the level of the foundation floor, but it would go no further.

I'm proposing two rules for foundations building here, the bottom line of which is "floor elevations control everything": 1) Top of footings can never be moved higher than the bottom of the foundation floor elevation. (This is the way it USED to be.) 2) Changing stem walls heights can push footings lower (or up to the bottom of the foundation floor), but can NEVER force the foundation floor elevation up. In other words, stem walls are a calculated distance, or if explicitly entered, a way to move footings down. They should NEVER move a floor elevation.

Yes, I know how to fix it. But the point is that I almost always want the stem wall to change; I seldom want the footing elevation to change, unless I explicitly request this. Why should the stem wall height be automatically changed if I raise the floor, but fixed if I lower the floor? Why would Chief assume this? This is just counterintuitive, not typical building practice, and wasn't this way until a couple of versions ago.

Yes, that's a problem. But the big problem is that the stem wall height is not dynamic relative to the floors and easily screws everything up; with the result that the footings can be jumping up and down behind your back. I have made a little 60 sec. video to demonstrate this.

EDIT: Then, never mind.

PTP.

Yes, it's in the cabinet DBX, under backsplash. A cabinet can have a backsplash independently of the countertop.

We had another one like this posted recently. You WANT monolithic slabs, I think. The issue is that you have "Floor supplied by room below" for all rooms. Use the Match and Apply tool to get these unchecked. What is happening is that you have a single foundation room below. When you lower a floor, it changes the floor elevation height below. (I don't know how many times we have to scream about this before Chief perceives this as a problem. Some people currently think it's just "user error." Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Perry. lol)

ArchiCAD has an interesting approach. They use technology called "predictive processing," maybe named just to get a patent on it. You can have a bunch of views with tabs. When you make a change in one tab, the updating to the other views goes on the background, so that when you open another tab, the change is already done and the update seems instantaneous. That said, I recreated Scott's storage building (and then some) in ArchiCAD just to see how it would behave compared to Chief. 2D panning was instantaneous, and I don't think any 3D views, including sections and elevations, took more than a second to two to rebuild. They've figured out how to deal with large models.

While there are workarounds, such as Joe's, to speed up the issues related to large numbers of faces, this defeats the whole purpose of BIM. With a stripped down model, you can't get accurate material takeoffs, dynamic door & window schedules that are accurate, etc. There is something to be said for using the right tool for the job. Chief is a great program, but it isn't designed with 100-unit apartment buildings in mind.