Dermot

Chief Architect Moderators
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Everything posted by Dermot

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. You can set the floor height for the deck in the deck room dialog.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. I suspect that the original poster was using "Current Screen As Image" because a "Live View" should not look blurry when printed.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. Try the File->Import 3D Symbol tool.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. This is the way Chief was designed to work. It's remembering the room that used to be there even though you deleted all of the walls. When you draw the new walls your new room just inherits all of the settings from the old room. I understand that this can sometimes be confusing. I would love to make this less confusing but it's not always easy. Over the years we've tweaked the code to try and be smarter about when we keep rooms and when we toss them. There are probably more improvements we could make. Maybe we shouldn't remember the room when there are no walls in cases like this? Maybe we could have a manual tool for clearing out any temporary room data? As always, feel free to report these kinds of issues so that we are aware of them and can try and figure out ways to improve them.
  19. The "rules" regarding rooms are a little bit fuzzy but I will try to explain some of the more confusing ones. Rooms are formed automatically when walls are connected to enclose a space. New rooms will usually pick up all of their settings from your Floor Defaults. Floor defaults can be different for every floor and are always set when the floor is first created. If you change any settings in your floor defaults, you may need to also change them on the other floors that have already been built. The program does not like "island" rooms (interior rooms where the walls are not connected to any outer walls). We will automatically connect island rooms using invisible walls to prevent any problems but you can turn this behavior off it you want. If you do not connect your island rooms, you may see problems with your floors, ceilings, room moldings, and probably more. If you remove a wall, disconnect one, or mark a wall as "no room definition", then technically you would no longer have a room and you would lose all of the settings for the room. The settings I am talking about are pretty much everything that is in the Room Specification dialog. Since it is really common to temporarily remove or disconnect walls while editing plans, we keep rooms around for "awhile" while you are working. How long we keep them around is a little bit ambiguous but I know if you save and reopen the plan any temporarily rooms will be gone forever. Another thing that happens is that if you divide a room by drawing walls to form two rooms, the new room will usually be a copy of the original room. So if you split a bedroom into two rooms, they will probably both be bedrooms. This is normally a good thing but can sometimes be inconvenient when trying to create something like a closet space. Another thing that can be confusing is what happens when you move walls. If you move a wall that is dividing two rooms by a small amount, the rooms should always keep their current settings. If you move a wall by too much though, then you may lose the settings for one room and make a copy of the other room instead. In the picture below, the right side shows what happens if you move the interior wall up by too much. Instead of getting a large bath and small bedroom, you will lose the bath and get two bedrooms. I think this has something to do with the fact that we keep track of the rooms before and after every wall move and it's not always easy to determine what the new rooms should be. If you find situations where you lose your room settings where you feel you shouldn't, then please feel free to report these to tech support. We are always looking for ways to improve these kinds of things.
  20. In X6 and prior, you could only create rendered images that were screen resolution or less. You could also create raytraced images that were much larger then the screen. In X7, we added the ability to choose the resolution of your rendered images when using the Export Picture tool. You would have to first export the rendered view at the resolution you wanted and then import the image on to your layout page to use this feature. In X8, we added the ability to send any rendered view to layout as a Live View. Live views are designed to look good when they are printed. Live views may be displayed on the screen using a much smaller resolution in order to speed up working with your layouts. If you zoom in and notice that the view is pixelated or blurry, you might try the Update View button to improve how it looks on the screen. In general, this is not necessary because the live view will always be updated to an appropriate resolution when you print your layout.
  21. It is always our goal to make it so that legacy plans and templates will come into the latest version with out having to do any significant work. If you ever have a legacy plan that looks fine in an older version but doesn't look right in the latest version, then please report this to our technical support team. Please be sure and include the original legacy plan along with a clear description of what is not working the same. You can report these kinds of problems here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/#contact
  22. Have you tried the Transform/Replicate tool?
  23. Your template plans were either installed by or saved with the beta version. Updating the beta version to the release version will not automatically update your templates, even if you uninstall and reinstall the program. If you are using your own custom templates, then you just need to open them and save them with the most current release version. If you are only using the templates that were installed with Chief, you can just rename your templates folder. When you next run the program, it will automatically copy the newer templates that were installed into your new templates folder. If you need more help, contact tech support.
  24. Your preferences are corrupt. If you delete that file, then the program will automatically create new preferences for you when you launch it again. If you continue to have problems, then please contact technical support.
  25. As far as I can tell, no one has reported this bug to us yet. It sounds very much like it is something unique in your plan since no one else has been able to reproduce it. When these types of problems don't get reported, then it is much less likely they will get fixed. Please report these kinds of problems directly to tech support instead of just discussing them on this forum. Be sure to also include your template plan along with clear step-by-step instructions for how you get the crash. Instructions for how to contact support are here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/#contact Why not just draw the revision cloud instead? There are two ways to create a revision cloud. One way is to select one or more objects and use the edit tool to automatically form a cloud around them. The other way is to just draw a revision cloud similar to how you would draw a normal polyline. It seems to me that creating a cloud around a different object, moving it, and then resizing it would be the harder way.