Dermot

Currently, we only draw the stairs below if they are in a room. You could also create a room with invisible walls to show your outside stairs.

This works better in X8. The room dimensions are both rounding the same now. You might want to consider upgrading.

The plan you have attached is empty. A zip file that's only 164 bytes can't have anything in it. My guess is that you had the plan open when you tried to zip it. You may want to try reposting the plan to get a better answer then a random guess. There is a possibility that your rooms are not really the same size. There is also a possibility that this is something that works better in X8 then it does in X5. There is also a possibility that this is something that the program needs to handle better. No one is going to know for sure unless you post the plan.

The original poster's problem was that she was getting unwanted wall pieces being generated underneath the "follow stair" railings in the open below rooms. She was still using 18.1 and this was a bug that we fixed in 18.3. I have no idea if this is the exact same problem that today's poster is running into.

I believe this was a bug that was fixed in the 18.3 update. If you are not using the latest update, you should be. If you are using 18.3 and you are still seeing problems, you should report this to technical support.

Because all automatic behavior should have an off switch.

You should not turn off the option to automatically connect island rooms. 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 will very likely have problems with things like room definitions, floors, ceilings, moldings, and more. If you don't like where the program puts the automatic room dividers, 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 the room dividers, then just turn off the layer. As always, if you have any problems with this, I would recommend you contact technical support for more help.

Yes, report this to tech support on Monday. Basically, the program is crashing but recovering (that is what the error message means). It may be the result of a system problem or something that you are doing that is not common but either way we would like to know about it. You should always report these types of problems to tech support so that we can make changes to the program to prevent this from happening in the future. Also, tech support can usually find a solution for you to avoid this problem for now.

Yes. You just need to open the ramp specification dialog and find the plan display options. What you can't do is have the program automatically create a handrail against the wall (instead of a full railing) like stairs will do automatically.

The biggest difference between X7 and X8 is the shadows. If you turn off the shadows, it should look more like what you are used to.

I suspect that your camera is not using the sun angle you want because it was saved using a different one (or the generic sun). Open the Adjust Sunlight dialog while in the camera view and make sure it is set to use the sun angle you want.

You can set the floor height for the deck in the deck room dialog.

The program will not automatically add any support structure for stair landings. You can manually add your support structure using the framing tools. Or you can create a deck for the landing. If you create a deck, you will have to manually set the height that you want. You may also have to drag your stair ends away and then back to make them connect to the deck.

First, don't panic. It sounds like there was a little bit of a hiccup with the daltile library update because it moved from bonus to manufacturer. It should be easy to correct but if you are having any problems please contact support for more help. Once a material is used in a plan, it should stay there forever (unless you manually delete it in the Plan Materials dialog). This is also true for every other library object. We keep a copy in the plan forever as long as it is still being used. When we update a manufacturer library, some items may become obsolete and will no longer be available to use in new plans. We have no control over what manufacturers decide to do with their product lines and we can't distribute obsolete content. The only way that I know of to make sure that you can use discontinued manufacturer content in new plans would be to create a copy of it in your user library.

Regarding resolutions, here is my understanding of how it works in Chief: Current Screen As Image - This basically just captures the pixels from the current window. Depending on your screen resolution and the window size this could be anything from ok to very poor resolution. This will never be greater then screen resolution. Export/Import Picture - Since you can specify the resolution, this can be very high, very low, or anything in between. Live Views - Image is always regenerated using printer resolution at the time it is printed. What you see on your computer screen is not necessarily what will be printed. When you send it to a PDF file, it should look fine when printed but may still look pixelated if you look at the PDF on your computer screen and zoom way in. That is kind of like printing it out on paper and then looking at it with a magnifying glass. There may also be a hardcoded limit for the maximum size. I vaguely remember the engineer who wrote this code telling me something to that affect. Something having to do with very large images causing performance problems or running out of memory on some printers. At any rate, he is not available at the moment.

I suspect that the original poster was using "Current Screen As Image" because a "Live View" should not look blurry when printed.

The short answer is yes. The long answer is a little more complicated. If you send a view to your layout as an image (Current Screen As Image), the best resolution you can get is whatever the current screen resolution is. The only way to get a higher resolution image is to first export it as a higher resolution image and then import that image to your layout page as you have already been doing. This is the only way that I know of to get a high resolution ray traced image onto a layout page. You can also send a view to your layout as a Live View. A live view may look burry on the computer screen but this is because we limit the resolution on the screen for performance reasons. When you print out a layout, we regenerate all of your live views using printer resolution so it should look good when printed. You can also send views to your layout as Plot Lines. Plot lines are not images. They are actual lines that get drawn on demand. Since they are not images they should not have any resolution problems. Assuming that you are using X8, I would recommend that you try using the live view instead of sending the view as an image and see if that gives you the results you are looking for.

No. We have no known issues in X8 that would cause this. My best guess is that you either have something unusual in this particular plan or that you have some kind of hardware/driver/system issue that is causing the problems. In either case, I would recommend that you work with our technical support team to try and resolve this issue.

Try the File->Import 3D Symbol tool.

It works for me. My best guess is that you are not centering on the correct object. You can center the text on either the page boundary, print boundary, or on the pdf box. If you hover near the edge of each box you will see the box highlight as well as a line showing the direction. It sometimes helps if you zoom out a bit and pay attention to what get's highlighted.

Re: #1 - Scale Snafu As mentioned previously, you can toggle the display of line weights off or on at any time. Also, if you are working in a CAD detail on something small like a molding profile, then you may want to use the Drawing Sheet Setup tool to adjust the scale for your detail. The drawing scale can be setup independently for any CAD detail and you may want to adjust this depending if you are working on something small like a molding profile or large like a site plan. I would not recommend changing your line weights in your Layer Display Options to try and solve this problem. Re: #2 - User Catalogue Missing in Action Odds are really good that what you added to the library was not actually a molding profile. If you select an object in plan view, the program should display what kind of object you have selected in the status bar. I believe the only thing that can be added to the library as a molding profile would be a "standard polyline". When you are in the door dialog and you want to choose a new molding for your casing, the mini library browser that opens up will be filtered to just show you moldings. If you open up the full library browser, you should be able to find what you added to your user library. My best guess is that it was a cad block.

The original poster's problems were solved by updating his version of Chief to the latest one. Assuming that you are using the newest update for your version, my best guess is that you are having a video card driver problem. You may want to check out this help article on camera view problems: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00106/troubleshooting-3d-camera-view-display-problems.html If all else fails, then you should probably contact technical support for more assistance.

Thanks for the feedback. It looks like there are a number of issues here that we would need to resolve before we make any changes.

Cross section lines are not really intended to be part of your working documents. They are only added to section views so that dimension lines can locate cut surfaces. They are not permanent and will get regenerated any time the view is regenerated. One could probably make an argument that they should not appear in live views either because this is inconsistent. You can always turn off the layer though. Our long term goal is to make them go away by improving our dimension tools for camera views. From the reference manual: Cross Section Lines Cross Section Lines are created in cross section views to represent any objects split by the cross section line of the camera. They are placed on the “Cross Section Lines” layer, which is locked by default, and they get deleted and replaced whenever the view is redrawn. When a dimension is drawn to locate an object split by a camera’s section line, it actually locates Cross Section Lines. So that dimensions can be retained when Cross Section Lines are regenerated, a Point Marker is automatically created where a dimension meets a Cross Section Line and the dimension locates it instead of the Cross Section Line. See “Point Markers and Dimensions” on page 1059. Cross Section Lines will print when their layer is turned on; however, they are not included when the view is sent to layout. The Point Markers created when dimensions locate Cross Section Lines, however, will both print and display in views sent to layout. See “Layout” on page 1235. The “Cross Section Lines” layer can be unlocked, allowing Cross Section Lines to be be selected and edited. Additional CAD objects can also be placed on this layer when it is unlocked, as well; however, when the view is redrawn, all CAD objects on this layer will be deleted and replaced with a fresh set of Cross Section Lines.

You can create any polyline area you like to use with edit area. Just draw a normal polyline, select it, and then use the edit area tool.