Dermot

Scott, That looks like a very nice laptop and Chief should perform very well on it. I personally would have a hard time justifying the price though. At almost $3000 it's pretty much on the high-end of the price range for laptops. I suspect that you would also get good performance out of a machine that is half as much. Typically, spending twice as much will not give you twice the performance of a good machine (on the low-end maybe but not on the high-end). I would guess that you would only get something like 10% better performance. Whether or not spending that much more for the added performance is worth it to you depends a lot on your business model and personal preferences.

My guess is that you went into your preferences and turned off "Use Enhanced Lighting". If this is the case, then turn it back on. Reflections won't work unless use enhanced lighting is turned on. There is no reason to turn off use enhanced lighting unless you are working with tech support and trying to troubleshoot video card problems.

I would recommend that you keep the option to automatically connect island rooms turned on. An "island" room is created when you have an interior room that is not connected to any exterior walls. If they are not connected, you could have problems with things like room definitions, floors, ceilings, moldings, and possibly other things. If you don't like where the program puts the automatic room connectors, then you can manually draw your own. Once you have drawn your own, you can then delete the automatic one and it should not come back. If you don't want to see these room connectors, then just put them on their own layer and turn off the layer.

You could also use a manual dimension line. Just draw a dimension going from the wall to the framing, select the dimension and drag the end to the wall sheathing.

It looks to me like you added the molding to the toe kick area and then tried to move it out so it is flush with the cabinet box. You will probably have better luck adding the molding to the cabinet box (raise it up some). If you need to, you can adjust the bottom separation (face frame) so that you have something to attach the molding to and not conflict with your drawers.

You could try looking at this help article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00958/message-couldn-t-find-electrical-objects-in-the-electrical-library.html

Room schedules won't display the heights of any custom ceiling planes. You can have any number of custom ceiling planes at various slopes that may cover any portion of a room and the room schedule is just not smart enough to determine which height(s) you want to display. From what you have described, you might be better off using a shelf ceiling instead of a custom ceiling plane. Shelf ceilings allow you to have an interior room with a lower ceiling and lower walls that are independent of the overall structure. They will also display the correct ceiling height in the room schedule.

The line weight scale is set for the layout under File->Print->Drawing Sheet Setup. You might need to change it in your default layout template as well.

You should probably post your plan. My best guess is that you changed your stair baluster symbol into the cable railing instead of creating a panel style railing and changing the panel symbol into the cable railing.

I don't have HD Pro in front of me but I don't think you can create your own custom gutter or molding profiles in Pro. Also, if you were to create either a CAD block or Architectural block, this would not be able to be used as a gutter or molding profile in any of our products. As a general rule, a molding profile needs to be a single closed or open polyline. If you have more then one polyline (or any other object, like a circle), then you probably can't use it as a profile. You could still use it as a cad detail by making it a block but not as a custom profile. Also, this forum is generally used by Chief Architect Premier and Interiors users. We have a separate forum for the Home Designer products. You can find it here: https://hometalk.chiefarchitect.com/

I would just use the stair tool. concrete stairs.plan

Regarding the dimensions, according to Richard, this is a bad idea. You two should discuss it and then let us know if we really need to change anything.

You can't do it with one dimension line, if the distance you want in inches is over a foot. In this case, I would use Glenn's method of using more then one dimension line.

If the dialog box is not working for you, but the edit toolbar button is, then this sounds more like a system problem. We have seen a number of reports from people that were experiencing problems with not being able to select certain panels on their dialogs that were all caused by an update to their video card driver. The solution that worked for them was to roll back to an older driver. If you are seeing similar problems in other dialogs, then I would guess that you are having this same problem. If you can't solve this problem by rolling back your video card driver, then I would encourage you to contact technical support for more assistance.

That's really odd. I just tried Help->View Reference Manual and it gave me the pdf for the X8 Reference Manual with the correct stair dialog. I can't explain how you might have gotten the wrong version. You may want to try an uninstall/reinstall or you may want to contact tech support. The bottom line is that you won't have all of those stair tools in X8. You might want to consider going to X9 and if you have SSA it should already be in your digital locker.

My guess is that it's because you are using X8.

If you need a wider opening for your appliance then you need to build a wider cabinet. If you need a narrower opening, then you can either use a narrower cabinet or you can build a narrower appliance opening. Take a look at the attached plan and picture. It has a simple full height cabinet but instead of an appliance section stacked vertically, it has a horizontal layout with two extra vertical separations around the appliance section. You can adjust the width of these separations to create any sized appliance opening you need. appliance section.plan

I'm confused. Looking at the picture, and in all of my tests, it looks like the room base molding stops at the face of the cabinet the way I would expect it to when you have closed toe selected. When it's not a closed toe kick, it goes back to the toe kick as it should. Regardless, if you ever have a case where the automatic room molding does not start or stop where you want it to, you can convert it into a molding polyline like Eric suggested. This will allow you to control it much better. There is more then one way to change the door handle position. If you want to change it for all doors on the cabinet, you would change it on the Door/Drawer tab of the cabinet specification dialog. If you want to change it for just one door, you need to select the door and then on the Front/Side/Back tab, you can select the Specify button for the Appliance/Door/Drawer to modify the settings. If you have already modified the handle position for an individual door (using the Specify button), changing the position for the whole cabinet (on the Door/Drawer tab) will not affect it. You would then need to set the individual door back to "use default" (using the Specify button again). If this does not help solve your problem, then you should probably post your plan or contact tech support.

The short answer is that you can now control whether or not text is always uppercase through the Text Style. I would also recommend that you checkout the reference manual. Just click on View Reference Manual from the Help menu. I did a quick search for "uppercase" and found the section in the manual discussing this under "Files Created in Version X7 and Prior":

I believe this is a problem with your video card driver. Most people have been able to correct this problem by rolling back to an older driver. You might want to try that to see what happens. If that does not solve your problem, then I would recommend that you contact tech support when they are available. On a side note, I would strongly encourage you to speak to them as one professional to another.

If you remove the fill on your landing, you will then see everything under it. Maybe this is ok but maybe it's not. Another solution is to change the draw order. Move the door up so that it is drawn after the landing. Landings are drawn with stairs in group 22 while doors are drawn with other openings in group 25. Move your door up to group 21 (or any other group with a lower number) and it will draw on top of your landing.

The same reason that standard wall studs are 92 5/8", so you don't have to trim all of your sheetrock.

Your picture in post #5 looks correct to me. You have no lights in your plan. As a result, the program will automatically create a default point light in the room the camera is in. It usually puts the default light in at the default ceiling height ( around 97" above the floor). In your case, you have an open below room above you with a vaulted ceiling. This means that since the default light is at 97" it will be shining up at the stairs as they go up to the second floor. The light on the floor is from the sun coming in through the windows behind you. To solve this problem, you need to add your own lights and adjust them to get the lighting you want.

I think this means that your model you are exporting has too much data in it. You may need to remove or hide some things you don't need to show your clients.

You could try using the Replace From Library tool. It will allow you to select a cabinet and replace it with one from the library. It has options to change all other identical cabinets to the same one.