RodCole

I used to use it quite often a few years back, but not so much anymore as others have pointed out. The method I used was to export from CA as a 3DS file and import into TurboCAD Pro Platinum then export as a U3D or 3D PDF file. So far as I know this method still works. Getting the objects on correct layers can turn out to be a bit of work though. Maybe there is a better format that maintains layer assignments that I am not aware of. Hope this is helpful.

Joe You can also find it in the Announcements Forum here on Chieftalk. Should be an interesting Webinar.

rck-teck I do this quite often, I get quite a few contractors who are not exactly framers, but want to do the work themselves. This becomes more important when the plan has specific framing requirements from an engineer. I also get requests from plans examiners that want as much detail as they can get on the location of hold downs. Probably as much for the plans examiners and the field inspectors as it is for the construction crews. As Chopsaw says, the wall detail is a good place to add text and related info, but it can get a bit time consuming and possibly error prone due to having to keep CAD Symbols in their proper locations. What, to me, would be ideal is to capture 3D hardware symbols from the model. This way everything could be placed correctly and ideally carry offset info as well. I would also like to have the ability to display the 3D hardware in the model inside the Wall Detail that would contain it.

My guess is that this is what is referred to as fireflies in other rendering programs. The solution is, like you have found, to allow more time to refine the image. The other issue is on the development side where the programmers find alternative ways to render the scene from a technical standpoint that does not produce fireflies in the first place. This has been an issue for a lot of programs, not just Chief.

Have you tried using Solids yet? The reason I ask is that for design purposes, it is sometimes nice to have a little less distraction when evaluation space requirements. What I like about this approach is that I can create solid to represent any body type and size that I want. It is also kind of cool to play with the material definitions as well.

The last time I used Revit was version 2017. IMO it is a great program, but ultimately it arrives at the same flaws we find in other programs such as Chief, and that is that in an effort to provide a simple/easy to operate application they keep adding more and more stuff that integrates with even more stuff in a way that is anything but simple. Not a bad thing in the sense that they are getting more powerful, but still a rather large learning curve. Google is definitely your friend when using Revit in that many others before you have struggled with accomplishing the same simple tasks and have provided their solutions. What I do like about Chief is their focus on providing a wide range of tools for you to use however you may choose to use them. Whereas, Revit tends to work toward doing things for you. Not a bad thing since they are seeking to provide features that many people want, and in a rather polished fashion at that. From my experience Chief is a very powerful program as well, and it is capable of accomplishing rather large projects as well. Good luck, and keep us posted on your progress toward making Chief do all the things you want to do.

You might want to look at a few other videos on programs such as Revit, which is an automated architectural design program, similar to Chief, and it is also a structural design software as well. I would like to point out that the pace of development of these other programs is progressing at a rapid pace, but the curious thing is that many of the so called new features being released have been around in traditional CAD programs since the late 1980's and early 1990's. My point is that it I think it would be good thing for Chief to accommodate as many existing technologies as possible and I believe they are, just not at the pace of some of their competitors. Back to the Future, as in 1991, is happening all around us. The question is how will Chief adapt.

Nestor Curious why you think AC is a 2D program. AC can actually do 3D very well, just not automated out of the box. One of the things that I have always loved about AC is it's ability to program so many things yourself. The difference that I see is that with AC you can do just about anything you could think you might want to do, but you either have to do everything yourself, or buy a slew of add on programs to automate things. That brings with it a whole new level of expense and complication. With Chief you get a great deal of tools built in that allow you to quickly put together a 3D model, but you miss out on some very powerful capabilities that are available in a traditional CAD program as well. Chief started out with basic 3D modeling tools and symbols created by Chief and other vendors in outside programs until the symbol tools where released. IMO Chief still does not have the 3D Solid tools that were available in other CAD programs those many years ago. That is why I still see a need for both, but my program of choice is not AC for a lot of reasons.

This has been a very interesting topic to follow along with. Just thought I would throw in my 2 cents as well. I agree that a bit more work would be in order to make this process work better. I set the bounding box using two one inch cubes, one for lower left and the other for upper right in a similar fashion to what Joe is doing. Being able to set these cubes to invisible would be a nice feature as well. I set the material to glass, and at this size it is not that big of a deal. I really like Michael's suggestion of having the option to control the offset of the bounding box borders. I would like to add an additional feature as well and that would be to have the option of disabling the insertion feature so that 3D symbols could easily overlap and be set to a common reference point. This would then easily accommodate complex assemblies. That in combination with the replace geometry feature would, for all practical purposes, enable the use of other more powerful 3D modeling tools to provide a kind of instancing feature of complex assemblies within Chief. It seems to me that this topic could stand to be taken up in the suggestions forum.

It is a bit complicated to set up, and also time consuming to maintain, but CA's cameras will capture and automatically update whatever you set them up to do. From what I remember, Revit will automatically link to one view and one view only. With Chief you can set up as many links as your heart desires, but you have to do it yourself. I actually prefer the way Chief does it, but I do wish is was easier to work with.

My experience is somewhat similar to Shane's in regards to setting up individual wall panels for each unit of a multi-story Hotel building. The panels were manufactured off site using metal framing and other various materials.. Each floor had special requirements regarding the gauge of the metal being used and shear bracing requirements. We had no need for CNC on this particular project, but the design challenges we encountered I believe would be similar regardless of the size of the buildings. All of the shop drawings, floor plans, installations drawings and Submittals were accomplished using Chief Architect alone. Good luck

I am in Tigard Oregon. If you would like to discuss your projects, send me a MP. Rod

Actually Chief has already hit it out of the park as far as what they have done on their end is concerned. Chief's layer filtering system is absolutely elegant, the problem is without some kind of a coding prefix to use it is almost pointless. This is a bit frustrating since the only current way to deal with this is to rename every layer in the system which is very time consuming, and also very difficult to maintain with the lack of tools available in this regard.

Larry Thanks for your reply. I was aware of the space and other characters trick, but no harm in showing that since a lot of folks on here may not be. The reason that I use codes in front of the layer names is so that not only can the layers be ordered and grouped in the list according to industry standards, not just alphabetically is because it lets you also use a portion of the code to filter out everything but the particular layers you want. Say you wanted Structural Roof Framing, and also the Architectural Roof layers as well. When using the layer filter box, all you have to do is type in the particular matching characters and you instantly have a subset of just the layers you want in the dbx. This is why having numeric capabilities is important, otherwise you would get a mess of everything that has those letters in it without any particular organization. For whatever it is worth, I would not go the route of doing anything more that matching the code representing a particular group of layers to the corresponding Annotation Set. Just my 2 cents. Ben The tool tip is very helpful for some things, but from my experience it does not distinguish between system layers and those layers that the user created.

Ben, in addition to the ability drill down into all of a layers current uses, it would also be very helpful to be able to: 1. Have a separate column in front of the Layer Name column that we could add an alpha numeric code to so we could better organize layers. 2. It would also be helpful to be able to have another column that would indicate which layers are system layers and which are user created. 3. I would also like to be able to reset system layers to their default names on an individual layer basis, or at least have a tool tip that would display that info.

This thread reminds me of an magazine article I read years ago about how the price of cad software at that time was considered to be ridiculously high. I believe the comparison was that software should not cost as much as a new car. I suppose that in those terms the price has came down a bit. To compare this to the new car analogy above, maybe the price of software should really be $29,995.00. That should satisfy the folks who believe in psychological pricing. Don't tell Chief though.

Blender is a very capable program for this type of modeling. Kind of an odd duck for those in the construction industry, but it is free. Other than the time it takes to learn how to run it.

I have experience with both Revit, for large scale commercial projects such as yours, and Chief Architect for residential design. I downloaded the files you provided and took a quick look around. From my experience working with commercial projects it is very nice to have the DWG files to work with for the inevitable missing dimensions rather than PDFs alone and then trying to get these dimension from Bluebeam. So I see that as a plus. Noting the 2D drawings that I looked at, am taking it that you do not have the 3D model needed to produce the renders. Is that correct? I would suggest that you provide a list of the rooms that you would like to see rendered rather than the entire building. This will help to minimize costs while still getting you what you really need. The level of detail required will also become important as it will effect the time required to produce the model. I have found that a few high quality renders will go over better than having a lot. Don't overlook the value that a good model can add to a project in many ways. I would also point out that the word render can mean different things to different people. I use Chief and Octane Render for what are called Ray Traces, or High quality renderings. But there are a great many other types of renderings that can be created very quickly as well, once you have the model and sometimes a variety of effects can be very helpful. Send me a Personal Message "Envelope Icon @ Top" If you would like to discuss this a bit more.

What you are looking for is your Digital Locker. That is something Chief will have to set up for you and probably already has and you just have to go to it. This is where you will have access to the program files and other downloads. Good luck.

When Chief first came out with Ruby I tried to do something similar to this, but I was attempting to use elevations to generate the information I needed for the calculations. That did not work well given that most of the macros I needed would not work in elevation views. The prescriptive method would be a very useful tool to have indeed. We would still need to pull elevation information for some applications. I'm all in on this one. Keep us informed on your progress Joe.

Hmm. Not that the yummy shark thing does not sound appealing, but I think I will pass. To be honest I have not entered any of the contests Chief has featured so far. Not that I would not have liked to, but the window of opportunity has been a bit difficult for me to work into my schedule. If they would post upcoming contests, say a month in advance, that would make it much easier for me to work on. I also like the idea of having a contest slash friendly competition where users could decide on a particular plan or plan idea and then people could submit their work. The main point of this would not so much be to win, or out do others, but to see a variety of approaches to a particular design problem. Everybody wins this way, and creativity is the central theme. Again, please allow time for this type of approach to be meaningful. Two Cents

I haven't had the need to do this for quite some time, but if you really need an automatically created framing member and you also want it customize to suit your particular situation then you may want to consider using the copy and paste method. Again, this is from memory since I haven't needed to do this in a while. Use Save As to create an exact copy of your current file. I append Shadow or just SDW to the end of the file so I know which is which. Adjust default settings or edit the members you want to be unique and then select those members only and copy them to the clipboard. Open the original file and use the copy paste hold position option. Repeat this process as many times as needed to get the final design you are after. I hope this is helpful and also that I understood what your question was. Edit: In your case you may want to delete the offending curved wall in the SDW version of the Chief file and then generate the framing, then copy/paste the newly created members back into the original file.

If ray tracing is something that is important to you, then I would suggest that you check out Octane Render. It only works on later NVidia GPUs though, so if you are in the market for a new card then now is the time to check it out. A free trail is available from Otoy. You can use Blender for the file conversions if you need to. Blender is a free program and does a good job of file exchanges. Edit: Probably won't work on your current card, or the 880 for that matter. But you can read up on it and check out the gallery while you are at it.

I agree its kind of puzzling when you see that kind of behavior. But, not that hard to get used to once you know what is going on.

There is another issue I have found with C channel behavior in Chief when using mirror copy. I kept intending to report this, but I don't actually remember doing it. I have not been involved in a project using C channel for a while now, but from what I remember Chief was not doing a transform of the actual C shape, but just the basic box of the profile. As in, it will mirror copy the Channel, but it does not actually flip the Channel as one would expect from a true transform matrix of the actual shape. This would probably be a good time for others to verify this behavior. Who knows, they may have fixed it by now. BTW on large projects that make use of similar room and therefore floor beam arrangements, having this work properly would be a real time saver. I will try to check this out again as well.