Dermot

There is a "Send to Back" tool. When you select almost any object, you should find a tool called "View Draw Order Edit Tools" on the edit toolbar. If you select this tool, the program will then change the edit toolbar to a set of tools that allow you more control the draw order. Send to Back, Send Backward, Select Drawing Group, Bring Forward, and Bring to Front should all be available. If you look at the status bar, there is a description of what each tool does. There is additional information in the help system that you can get to by hitting F1 when you hover the mouse over any of the tools.

Your drawing does not have enough info to make an accurate model. You will need some horizontal dimensions or angles otherwise people will get very different results. As far as how to do this in Chief, there are a lot of different ways. You might want to play around with the Input Line and Input Point tool. These tools will allow you to input a line very accurately by specifying coordinates or lengths and angles. Also, you can select any line in a polyline and open the specification dialog to get more accurate controls. You should see the Selected Line or Selected Arc panel which should allow you to specify start points, end points, lengths, and/or angles. It also has the ability to lock some parts and only change others. Most of this information is covered in our training videos and reference manual.

Select the Text Line with Arrow tool. Use the marquee select method to select all your leaders. Use the Open Object tool. Modify the properties as needed.

You could just create a hole in the polyline but in my opinion, you are doing it the hard way. Stop thinking in terms of how you used to draw this in CAD and try to think about what you are trying to model. If you change the model, it will look correct in all views, and even more important, it will stay correct if you need to move or resize one of those windows later. Try changing the wall surface material instead or applying a 2D fill style. Or even better, use a different wall type that already has the shingles built in. Or, if you really want a special area then I would use a wall material region instead.

You can modify the Drawing Group from within the dialog box. You can't change the order within the drawing group though. The tools on the edit toolbar are more powerful.

There is an easier way. Select the terrain perimeter. Use the "Make Terrain Hole(s) Around Building(s)" tool. Modify the shape as needed.

"I can create the first, but when I create the second, it joins up with the first and makes a single stair section." Don't panic. It probably only looks like a single stair section but you do actually have two separate stair "sub-sections". Stair sub-sections are like different line segments in a polyline. If you select either one, you should see the extra edit handles along the center line indicating that you have multiple sub-sections. Also, you should see that the sub-sections are labeled 1-1 and 1-2 and you should see both sub-sections when you open the stair dialog.

The most likely cause is a video card or driver issue. You should check out this tech support article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00106/troubleshooting-3d-camera-view-display-problems.html If you can't resolve the problems on your own, then please contact technical support during our normal business hours.

First of all, your picture is too small to see much detail. Second, without a plan, people are not going to know what's going on and would only be able to make guesses. If you are still using X9, there were a number of improvements made in X10 so that this happens a lot less often. If you are using X10, I would encourage you to submit this problem to tech support so that we can look into making additional improvements.

Just to clarify... Regarding #1, roof slope indicators are just labels so you control the text size the same way you control almost all other labels. You need to modify the text style used by the layer that controls the label. For the slope indicators, that is the "Roofs, Labels" layer. Regarding #2, you can turn off all roof labels by turning off the layer called "Roofs, Label". You can turn off the label for any given roof plane by opening the dialog and checking "Suppress Label" on the label panel.

Assuming that your walls are connected to form an enclosed space, see if this help article helps: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00285/restoring-the-living-area-label.html

Since no one from sales has commented, I will give you some of my technical perspective. Chief Architect will take advantage of multiple cores for a wide variety of our internal algorithms which is why a multi-core processor is one of our minimum system requirements. As a general rule, the more cores you have the better the program will perform. Processor speed is still an important consideration though and you will not get the same performance using a processor with twice as many cores if it has half the processor speed. Ray tracing and some of the advanced rendering techniques are some of the more important places that we take full advantage or your multiple cores. Building the 3D model, which happens any time you create or make any changes in any of our camera views, can also use as many cores as you have available. Many people make the mistake of assuming an elevation view is a 2D CAD view (which might be true in some other programs) but in Chief it is really a camera view and is derived from the same 3D model that every other camera view uses. Displaying a typical plan view may not use all of your cores (although this also depends on what else is going on during the drawing process). Drawing operations need to happen in a well defined order so it's not something that can easily be split up over all of the different cores and get any kind of performance improvement. Also, for most users in most situations, displaying plan views is not where you will see any slow downs. Most of the time the program will be waiting for you to do something rather then you waiting for it to finish drawing. I would worry less about how many cores the program is using and more about whether or not the program is performing to your satisfaction. If you find a situation where the program does not perform to your expectations, you should report this problem to our technical support team. You should send them the plan that demonstrates the problem along with a clear and detailed description of exactly what you are doing when you see the problem. If we can determine when and where these slow downs happen, we can often make significant performance improvements that have nothing to with the number of cores you have.

It has to do with your pony walls. Take a look at your windows in an elevation view. If the window is entirely in the upper portion of the wall it will display differently. You can modify how your pony walls and openings display in your Pony Wall Defaults. In particular, you may want to adjust the "Display of Openings in Non-Displayed Parts of Walls".

The post I made here might be helpful:

Personally, I find it much easier and more accurate to edit objects with line weights turned off. You can toggle line weights on and off using a toolbar button, using the menus, or even setup a hotkey to do this.

I suppose that works... but in my opinion it is easier to just use the cabinet filler tool. Under the Build menu right under your normal cabinet tools are the Cabinet Filler tools. These tools will place a 3" default cabinet filler that already has a blank face. If you zoom in and place one in between the cabinet and the wall, it should resize smaller to span the gap. The only reason that I would use an actual cabinet is if you need to show sides or a back but in those cases I would still start with the filler and then uncheck the "filler" option so you don't have to edit the face items.

If you are trying to move a newel post within a railing wall along the wall, just place a wall break.

From the image, it looks like your stair thinks it is connected to a railing at the top. When the stair is connected to a railing, the railing usually makes the post, not the stair. Since there is an obvious gap in your railing, I would first try to fix this and see if you can line up the railing post where you want it. You can always manually place posts but I don't think you should need to in this case. If all else fails, post your plan or contact tech support for additional help.

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00802/troubleshooting-exception-and-assertion-error-messages.html

Open the stair dialog and turn off "Automatic Stair Openings". When automatic stair openings is on, the program will create an opening in the railing where the stair connects to it. All openings in railings will normally have a post on each side. If you turn off the automatic openings, you will have to create your own openings manually. Also, just as an FYI, for more control over your post spacing you can always put wall breaks in the railings. Wherever there is a break, the program will place a post.

Sounds like you changed the settings by clicking on the "Num Style" button. Changing these settings mostly only affects the dialog boxes and not your cad display as you might have noticed. You can either change them back or just exit and relaunch the program to go back to the system defaults.

The molding work-around will give you those extra lines but it should probably not be necessary. For normal wall cabinets, using face frame construction, we try to align the bottom with the top of the face frame piece which should give you the recess you are looking for. There are a number of things that might prevent this from happening, such as building a frameless cabinet or how you have modified the cabinet face. There is something different about your plan that is causing this and I could only make guesses as to what. The best thing to do is post an example so someone can dig into it further. If your plan is too big to post, there are a number of things you can do. First, you can always zip up your plan to make it smaller. You could also make a copy of your plan and remove the things that don't affect the problem area. In your case, I would simply copy your wall cabinet into a new blank plan and post that. BTW, if the copy doesn't have the same problem then that is a good indicator that the problem is somehow related to your cabinet defaults. If all else fails, then I would recommend contacting tech support again.

Just looking at the third picture in the first post shows what the problem is. The reason you can't delete the "Reflected Ceiling Set" in the Layer Set Management dialog is because it is the active layer set for the current view. It shows you this in the lower part of the dialog. Select a different active layer set and then the delete button should be enabled. You also won't be able to delete the "Reference Display Layer Set" for similar reasons. For all other layer sets, the delete button should be enabled and you will get a message explaining when you can't delete it if it is being used somewhere else in the plan that is less obvious.

Eric's method is a good way to find things. I happened to find it by creating a full overview and turning off the roof. You can also see it in plan view if you look for the pink edge lines close to the walls. It is hard to select unless you click right on an edge line and you probably need to use the tab key to get it.

The short answer is that you have a custom ceiling plane. These don't magically appear by themselves so you must have drawn this at some point. Just delete it and then reset your wall heights back to default. The longer answer would have to include all of other things in your plan that I thought were either strange or wrong. I see nothing in your plan that requires all of the manual work that you are doing. The lowered ceiling looks like it could be handled through your room defaults and you could probably even use the automatic roof tools. I saw a number of problems related to your walls though so I would consider working on getting those right first and then worrying about your ceilings and roofs. I'm not sure why you painted a brick material onto a Siding 6 wall but this probably is not what you want. You can't change the structure of a wall by painting a material on it. You should probably reset all of your wall materials back to "use default" first and then fix the wall definitions. In addition, it looks like you are having some wall alignment issues with the pony walls. In general, Chief does not really like pony walls that are thicker at the top then the bottom and this is why your interior walls have gaps at the bottom when attached to them. You should try to model your walls as close to how they will be built in the real world to avoid these issues. I would then focus on your rooms. If you ever find yourself trying to change all of your rooms by editing each room in your plan, I would suggest that you are doing it the hard way. You should probably reset the room structures back to "use default" and change the default room for the floor instead. You might want to use the "Reset to Defaults" tool as a start. In general, you should only edit the room structure of an individual room when it is going to be different from all of the rest. Once your walls and rooms are correct, I think the roof will be easy. I would highly recommend that your review some of our training videos and help articles. You might also want to consider some of our various training options: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/training/