JiAngelo

I think @Garybills is correct. 10° is about a 2/12 pitch. A cantilevered canopy over the front door and balcony.

My problem is the materials selected. For instance, James Hardie lap siding reports in linear feet, as does Certainteed's D5 Monogram siding. My contractors charge by the square foot. Changing all the walls to stucco or Certainteed Board & Batten would give me the correct square footage, but it is easier for me to add a 0 width layer for paint to the siding walls and get their square footage when necessary. I can ignore the paint color if I don't need it. (And its not a paint color anyone ever selects inside the home.)

Don't laugh, but I often add a 0 thickness layer to either side of my wall's framing and assign it Sherwin Williams colors. SW7100 for exterior and SW7000 for interiors. Material report gives me the square footage of the paint colors and I export it to an XLS that SUMIF's the paint colors to give me the overall total. I use @basketballman's method to verify.

Thanks Rob. It was actually on the Layer Text Style for camera layer and on Framing, Labels for the beams. Thanks again, I'd have never found it. Merry Christmas.

I'm still on X16. I have a house we designed that is across the street from another house in the same subdivision. Long story short, I drew this house upside down (front door facing north.) In plan view, I had rotated the drawing so that front door faced south and continued finishing the house plans. Whenever I created a new room, the label was upside down initially and I simply rotated it 180 degrees to match my plans orientation. Now that I'm finishing my layouts, I've noticed the callouts and framing labels are all upside down and there appears to be no way to rotate these. Am I missing something? Merry Christmas.

Rename the 3rd floor room "open below"?

I'm not at my computer, but if FFE is 32" above terrain, and you are using 2x10 floor joists and 1.5" sill on concrete blocks walls, then label the room you want the ramp inside as a garage with floor -4.5 below stem wall (or just check floor supplied by foundation below and change floor height.) 10"+1.5"+4.5" =16" below FFE. Then install ramp inside this room from 0" to 16".

Lower the floor to lower ramp height. Then place the ramp in the room sloping up to the highest ramp height. (Generally the default floor height)

Think of it as an extrapolation error. Chief doesn't see the intersection correctly and extends a wall material to hide it using the default siding color. If the house was default blue you wouldn't know chief had cleaned it up. Similar to some of the crazy attic walls shapes Chief sometimes draws.

The different colors is because one is the default wall siding blue color and the others you have painted white. Either paint the blue one white or change the default wall siding color to white.

Create a 3D gable end solid intersecting a cylinder solid set to intersection at desired radius. Subtract cylinder from gable end arch. Then position as desired.

Copy and paste it on the second floor.

Check and see if they were imported as a block. You.may need to explode it into individual parts. My engineers have a bad habit of doing this.

With autoroofs on, draw an invisible room under the sloped area. Break the outside wall and tell chief the invisible rooms exterior wall is high shed gable. Once autoroofs is turned off you can delete the invisible walls. Choosing between manual or autoroofs method comes down to how far along in the process I am.

Bob, I fired up X12, worked exclusively on the CTF4 version. I raised the roof 12" to allow headers over those windows and used an 8.5" pitch, adjusting the dormer room to fit. I then switched to the second floor and drew a truss, changed it to Attic, then opened the detail and increased the middle bottom chord to 9-1/4" (the floor). I copied the trusses, using a 4-ply at each end to support the joists under the dormers. On the deck side, I held the dormer back a few feet to keep the hip look with larger windows. The attic space is a little over 600sf and you can reach it using your original stairwell, but the head height doesn't work on the landing. I've attached the X12 file. CR WILLIAMS for CTF4-X12.zip

Bob, I am still on X16. I've dabbled with X17, but it doesn't excite me. I've attached the updated file. Version 3 is using your perimeter walls, Version 4 is using a 16" truss heel height. I abbreviated your file name. I forgot to answer your original question. You didn't have auto-roofs turned on. That's why the roofs weren't changing to hip. When I turned it on it said you had some edited roofs which it deleted and redrew as all hips. Also, ignore top floor won't work with dormers (because it is ignoring top floor.) And I just realized you have floor to ceiling windows, which means you need a floor above to place headers over the exterior openings on the second floor. (or you need a raised heel height for trusses to hang on those headers.) I went back to the second file you'd sent me. I unchecked ignore top floor, changed 12" ceiling height to 1-1/2" (basically a 2x6 sill atop the floor structure.) And then turned on autoroofs. (for version 3) In version 4 I changed your heel height to 16", deleted the perimeter walls and only used the dormer walls, adjusted to fit under the side roof planes. This version has the roof building off the outer walls +16". In both I extended the roof down over the stairwell to encapsulated it within the roof planes. (I trimmed those walls to 6" overhang so that it didn't project past the Hip ridge. The dormer is drawn at 97 3/8" ceiling height. I didn't want to mess with the 60" kneewalls until you had stairwell figured out. In V4 I went ahead and built some room trusses along the main area, using a quadruple truss where the dormer starts to thrust out. I also created a cross section to make sure the stair height was equal or greater to 81" nosing to ceiling. It looks like you may need to raise that heel height to 18" or 20". V3 will build the roof trusses on top of the 3rd floor. (another downfall of that method.) In both I tried extending the dormer to the rear of the home, but it is not centered on the door below, and can't cantilever past since there is no header below to carry the load. Take a look, I hope this helps guide you. CR WILLIAMS for CTF3.zip CR WILLIAMS for CTF4.zip

Just to clarify, Is your maximum building height 35'? And are you trying to use all of the 3rd floor? I ask because you've built your 3rd floor directly over your second floor perimeter walls. The room defaults to 12" tall. It should default to 109 3/8" or similar if you are ignoring top floor. Typically you check ignore 3rd floor because you want the roof built on top of the 2nd floor walls and somewhere inside this rooftop you plan to place an attic area inside of trusses. Here's a plan I'm working on now. The red lines are my truss control lines. The blue lines define a 5' kneewall that slopes to 8' ceilings on the left side of the house and 9' ceilings on the right side of the house. The blue lines are my attic room limits. If my roof was hipped, I'd have a red outer box and a blue inner box over this same area. Here's my room trusses Red is 9' ceiling area, White is 8' ceiling area, Blue is the 8' ceiling area for the shorter trusses on the left. I did this to stay under 35' from the front door sill which is our area's requirement. Applying this logic to your current model results in the following. I used an 8/12 pitch to determine where my 5' kneewalls and 8' ceiling heights would be within this hipped area. This assumes you are permitted 32' 9" to the ridge. And a 9/12 pitch would widen the room areas, but the highest ridge is then 34' 6". Is that allowed? Also, notice you have a couple of greater problems. Your stairwell & door are in the wrong place. That's not where stairs up from below lands. I've drawn the correct location above with a note. The correct location also requires 81" ceiling minimum at the top of the steps and all hips won't achieve that at 8/12 or 9/12. Here's a 3D cross section at 5' high. Again the 2nd door needs to fall under the roof line. Here's a dormer drawn to capture the 2nd door (I've deleted the first.) The interior shot shows 5' kneewalls rising to 8' ceiling plane. Notice the door still cuts the exterior roof plane. You can widen the dormer and extend the roofline down (cathedral into the stairwell), but its hard to mirror that look on the other side because the two gables bumps aren't equilateral. If you could give me a bit more direction, like max height and what usable room space you are trying to achieve, I can work through it with you. I would also assume you want a rear dormer overlooking the view from the deck. Let me know your thoughts.

Gene, I happen to be working on a ranch. Here's the steps I followed. Make a blank second floor and specify a ceiling height (97-1/8") and your floor structure (9‐1/4"+3/4"). In Build Roof dbx select ignore Top (2nd) Floor. Draw your room. Select and Open those trusses and select "Attic Truss" Open 3d view and turn on floor surfaces amd you will see the plywood hovering above the bottom chord of a standard room truss. Pick one of those trusses and open truss detail. Break the bottom chord between the attic room ends and increase the middle bottom chord to 9-1/4" Close the truss detail and go back to the 3d view and you will see all the floor trusses should be shown correctly. Hope this helps.

Check to make sure lower walls are aligned.

Add another floor then tell roof dialog to ignore 3rd floor. Any walls and rooms you draw up there will automatically fit under the roof extending from the second floor.

You will use a pony wall with block on bottom and 2x4 on top. Set the pony height to 4' bottom and in a 7 foot room the 2x4 upper wall will be 3' 2nd floor will be 9' studs. Initially all walls will be stacked framing. Select the common wall and set to balloon frame. If auto frame is on, Chief should adjust. Below your post click add files to include a picture. If you screen shot and press control v it should paste inline. It would save me from guessing wrong. And I'm not back to my computer to draw something wrong and send it to you.

A cross section would be nice. But from what is described you have a balloon framing situation. A floor above and below but instead of joists resting on a lower wall, you want it to balloon past the floor and make both the upper and lower walls framed as one. It is still two floors. Open the structure dbx and you will find options to change the framing methods.

Choose 600dpi for best results at actual size. Use 1200dpi if you plan to enlarge the image. The latter is what we send as proofs to agencies and PowerPoint slides.

In your new model, select the wall plane and you will see why the gap is there. I moved it left initially to cleaned up. But was still getting a gap on the exterior views. I switched to the exterior view and assuming you are done moving exterior walls, turned off autoroof and broke the planes and extended them to match your picture. This changed the interior wall plane. I see you cleaned up the corner wall upstairs by keeping it the same 3-3/8" "Attic Divider Wall" and adding an exterior surface to a new wall definition. That works. Now you need to work on your stair hole Glad I could help. Good luck.