JiAngelo

The walkline doesn't show on landings. You would need to manually draw it. And your middle triangle tread is not code compliant.

I think the inner wall needs to be thickened to reflect the required 6" minimums. The example below shows 6 winders with about an 18" inner wall. You could get to 4 using 12" easily enough. I would talk with an inspector before I drew anything less. The foot can't get hung up on anything less than 6" on the inside. (like if you tried measuring the six around a corner.) I hope this helped.

On the style sheet of the stairs DBX there is a winder minimum and a walkline setting. However, you'll go crazy trying to draw the winders precisely. It is actually drawn as a set of curved stairs, then specified as a winder on the DBX. You then join this to your straight set of stairs. But I always end up with a curve on the inner radius. My preferred method is to draw cad lines of the minimums that I want, Then draw two landings for each winder tread. drag the corners to match up with the cad box of the winder shape. The program will automatically draw and stack the winders for you (on the floor initially.) The order in which you paste them determines which is up or down. Then add your straight runs to the landings. Then Chief will auto connect everything and adjust the rises accordingly. The 180 degree wrap around 4 riser you originally drew is a bit trickier. I'm going to need to think on that a bit.

The "reference" is on another floor. You need to switch to that floor and move that wall to the same location or understand the reference is telling you how far apart they are - like making sure a cantilever doesn't extend farther past a referenced bearing wall than desired.

For residential applications, winders are required to be min. 10" deep at the 12" walkline and not less than 6" deep on the inside turn. Commercial requires 11" at walkline and 10" at inside turn.

Thanks Glenn. It took me a while, but I finally figured out how to do the point-to-point move. Pretty cool.

Separate plan files for each building is best. The living area is correct per building, individual roofing, wall & floor defaults can be set/maintained individually. I haven't mastered the reference display, you need to pin down the xyz coordinates of each building - and it always seems to vary between my plans because I don't start drawing at 0,0,0 in any of them. Rene Rabbit can help you if using reference display is your preference. Instead I export them as a 3D Collada files, then import them into my terrain plan file as a 3D Model which I then drag and drop on the site, then in 3D view I lower each of them into the ground until the garage is level with the driveways. Typically this is 4', 7', or 9' depending on my basement wall height. For me this method has always worked quickest and best until we had a subdivision file with over 40 houses and the file gets too large. Reference display avoids the model sizes adding to the plan file and your library file. Eventually I'll take the time to master it. Terrain file is on the left. Added building model on the right with lighting and night-time view. Good luck.

Understood. I forgot to send you this picture of the front porch And here's an example of the rear (still needs some work.) Good luck.

Chief_QA is the correct approach. I'm still wrapping my head around it. I still prefer a site plan file, then separate plan files for all the reasons mentioned by others above. i then export models of the two plans and position them where I want on the site plan (much easier than figuring out the x,y,z locations of imported plans) All 3 file plan details and cameras can be exported to one single layout file for submittals and presentations.

If you make the front porch walls same height as rest of walls, and turn off the roof over the back porch you get a much cleaner look at your problem. The roof is much simpler then. FRONT PORCH There are two valleys your porch roof is getting in the way of. Extend your porch front wall out 2' from 52' to 54' (I got rid of the one inch on 52'1"....) Let the front porch wall extend left/right to the angled walls (which doesn't impact your garage windows.) Then raise your porch only roof up about 4'-5' if I'm scaling things correctly. Voila. That side of the house now works. REAR PORCH Your back porch roof is a bigger problem. I changed this room to roof group 1. Then turned roofs back on. This only partially draws the roof over the back porch. Best option to make things work was to increase your main roof to 8/12, then make the rear porch wall 4/12 roof and the side porch wall 3/12 roof, so that their ridge was pointing closer to the main house ridge. (note: raising the 3/12 roof to 3.25 or 3.5 might make them line up exactly at the ridge intersection. i'll let you figure that out) I then turned off automatic roofs, changed these roof materials to standing seam so that I could easily see their intersections with the main roof and then extended those rear roof planes until they intersected with all of the adjacent 8/12 roofs. I'm not understanding the 20 degree walls, versus 22.5. I hope this helps you.

Download Catalogs "Vehicles No.2 Utility", "Vehicles No.3 Watercraft" The first one actually has two trailors with double & triple axles. You should be able to stretch and position the model so that it is a pretty good representation.

You are correct, it was a mess. Couple of quick notes when drawing. Don't turn on "Ignore Top (2nd) Floor" in roofs dbx initially. That took me the longest to figure out. I'll show you later what it tells you. Using the Garage as 0" and the main house as +1'4" causes Chief to build successive floors based on 0", not +1'4" Why did you draw the foundation under left side of the main house and let Chief build the foundations under the right side of the house? That's a rhetorical question. Isometrics show you built only the first floor roofs over the garage. I turned auto roofs on (next image) Tried to clean it up and this ridge circled red kept popping up. The more work I did with the second floor, the more ridges and valleys started popping up. It took me a minute to comprehend the 16" floor reversal was the culprit. Chief was drawing all my second floor rooms above 0' - I didn't want to continue this way so I, Deleted your basement walls. Selected all 1st level rooms that didn't have a floor on the left side of the house and checked "Floor Under This Room" in Structure DBX. Made the floor 0" here. Selected the remaining rooms middle and right side of main house, made floor 0" here. "Floor Under This Room" was already checked. Selected front porch made floor -4" here. (you originally had it 1' instead of 1'4") Selected garage, checked "Floor Under This Room" and made floor -1'4" here. This now looked identical to what you originally drew, with 0" the main floor and the garage -16". And then I turned Auto Roofs on. Much cleaner. Then I rotated it and found your front porch and bedroom roofs are overriding the main gable. Examining the floor plan I found nothing matches up along your front walls to make a clean gable truss running straight through the home..... So I extended the right front "closet" wall temporarily through the entire home. I changed it to blue so that you can see it. I broke the left gable end wall at the blue wall intersection and changed the upper half to red. I also changed the right gable wall to red and then opened both walls and changed the roof to gables. Then I selected the front half of porch and bedrooms circled in red opened both rooms and changed them to roof group 1 (R-1). Also I selected the right wall of bedroom and made it a gable (forgot to highlight this - and the file I attached has all walls I turned to gable in red now.) I also did the same thing to the garage bumpout walls (making them gable) and told Chief the back bumpout wall was a 6/12 pitch. Then I made the blue walls invisible (but it still divides the rooms in two for now). Much closer with Auto Roofs still turned on. But it doesn't quite match your original drawing. Now, because you said the rear of your house has some vaults, I drew some second floor walls and this is where I discovered I had to turn off "Ignore Top (2nd) Floor" in roofs dbx because this wasn't permitting me to see how the 2nd floor at standard wall height interacts with the auto roof. I used the blue wall as the front of the 2nd floor room and extended it from the right bedroom to the left bathroom exterior walls. Made both endwalls gables, and the ceiling height 3'1-1/8" to match my original information (in hindsight 4'1-1/8" might work better to match over the garage... I then broke the front wall over the blue wall 10' left/right of the front door using temporary walls, made this broken section a gable, then copied your dining windows to this floor centered above the door. I had to raise them 2' to get them where you see now. .Notice your second floor is sticking out of the roof over the garage, so you can see where it is. Now I'm going to play with your room over the garage. Most attic rooms inside room trusses will slope from 4' at the side walls to the allowable ceiling height. You can go lower, but I usually wait until I have room truss data to do this. At stairwell width, the a second floor flat ceiling has to drop from 8' to 4'10 1/8" before those extra rooflines disappears. The stairwell is off center of the gable. Changing the room to no ceiling initially revealed an extra 1'7" to play with, And I dog-eared the doorway one foot at a full 80" high opening because the roof would impact it.. I also determined the room can also be 8'6 wide at 4'10" flat ceiling height. Then I realized the program was drawing all roofs 1'4" above the ceiling plane of the 2nd floor.(SMH - this was probably my own fault when adjusting the foundation earlier) The right picture is after I corrected all your roofs. This forced a 2' dogear on the entrance to the attic. You could explore lowering the garage ceiling 1', but that means it gets closer to the laundry door (whose height doesn't change.) I can explore that later if necessary. Changing the ceiling height to 4' room truss height, (4'1-1/8") also allowed the room to increase to 10'4" inside the room trusses (safely) Your truss guy will determine the actual width permissible. You may be able to lessen the dog-ear once you have truss data given the rigid foam insulation. I'd wait and see. I then extended the front of this room to the outside garage gable wall, copied your dormer windows, making them 6'8 from the truss room floor and only 5' tall. I put red dots where you can see the 4'1-1/8" flat ceiling intersecting the windows. In glass house view you can see the room inside the trusses. I renamed the 2nd floor stair opening room to open below. Broke my new wall over the blue wall to either side of the stair well and extended it back to the beginning of stairs. Added some room names and a text box that automatically calculates ceiling heights. Open Below is measured from the first floor. Lastly, Why are your stairs 11" treads (nosing to nosing) which creates a 12" tread and 6-7/16" rises? Those are commercial dimensions. In residential we typically use 9" nosing to nosing, which results in a 10" tread, and less than 8-1/4" on the rise. typically 7 to 7 1/2 works well. This allow you to have only 14 treads to reach the next floor. The stair landing is then inside the laundry closet. Giving you more head room underneath for storage. I left your framing intact for you to delete. All this with auto roofs still turned on. I made the blue wall visible again and saved the entire file as 3 and attached it. Before you turn off Auto Roofs, delete all the blue walls - don't for get the one under the stairs. You'll find Chief is still building things automatically properly now. If you turn off ceilings over the attic, you'll almost have the same room view that "Ignore Top (2nd) Floor" gives you. But now you know why the room can only be so large. Now turn off Auto Roof. In attic room, change ceiling height from 4'1-1/8" to default 8'1-1/8". You can do this in 3d view while viewing the room. It changes to the same view you'd have with "Ignore Top (2nd) Floor" checked, but again now you know why it is designed the way it is. Lastly, it looks like Chief builds soffits at the upper ceiling height and facia at the roof height, I think your 6" roof surface is causing this. Rotate your model and you will find a 6" gap between the siding and gable ends facia. Maybe you need to move the OSB/FOAM/OSB to the structure layer (like it is for floors) and let surfaces just be shingles & underlayment. I'll save this for later. I hope this helps. Sorry for the length. HousePlan working3.zip

Actually the technology is out there. A couple of years ago we read this, https://www.moasure.com/products/moasure-one Single-dimension measurements taken with Moasure ONE – for example a 300ft length or height - are accurate to within 0.5% (plus or minus 1.5ft Area calculations made with Moasure ONE – for example a 50ft² area, are accurate to within 2.0% (plus or minus 1ft²). And held off until this year when we decided to purchase Stonex's s70g tablet + software and an A15 antenna that's accurate to less than 1.5 inches (left pole image). It's A45 antenna is accurate to below 3/4 of an inch (right pole image). The software will actually run on your phone, but a phone's GPS is only accurate to about 12-15ft and it is always jumping around. (Download GPS Test from the android store to test yourselves.) Here's some Stonex product information links. https://www.stonex.it/project/s70g-gnss-rtk/ https://www.baselineequipment.com/stonex-cube-a-gps-software https://www.baselineequipment.com/shop/images/p.3496.3-cube-a_v6_brochure_eng_cp.pdf There are several other companies out there that provide similar. This is just the one we settled on for $6,500 including both tablet and pole mounted antennas, tripod legs so that the pole will free stand. In our state of Ohio, the Department of Transportation provides free access their GPS satellites. Our surveyors/engineers provide us DWG files of a site drawn to the state plane coordinates. We import this to Chief and "ignore" the fact that the data points are located far from the origin. This is necessary if you are passing the file back and forth with your surveyor/engineer. You can even import as elevation data to create your terrain maps. We've add our house footprints, tree data, entrance sign data, landscaping retaining walls, detention tanks, etc... and then we walk the site with the tablet to verify/stake additional locations. We were even able to interface with Google Earth and provide the City a view of trees we plan to keep (green), trees we plan to remove (red), and street trees we plan to add (purple). We've exported the updated DWG/DXF and given it back to our engineers to update their files several times. (The tree location data was theirs originally, we just determined which were being removed/saved, etc...) This past week we relocated on-the-fly our water/sewer/gas tap locations because our engineers keep drawing them in the driveway locations - despite having the building footprint with garage clearly labeled already in the subdivision file... When we first looked at moasure it was $99/mo subscription based to export data. It looks like now it exports natively, but I can't find where it allows importing a dxf file. If this is more cost effective, then to get around this limitation, Import the dwg/dxf file from your surveyor or engineer. Identify 2-3 fixed points in this file that you can find readily on site and measure with moasure. A manhole cover, existing building corners, etc.. anything fixed and an agreed upon known. Manhole covers are great if you need elevation data accuracy. Using the moasure, record those known 2-3 points, plus any others you want to transfer. Import this dwg/dxf into another chief file. Place everything on a new cad layer. I'd name it "CAD, Default-Moasure", -2, -3, if I needed multiples. In your surveyor/engineer chief file, draw a line between two of the known points and record the distance and angle of the line. In your moasure chief file, draw the same line. Check to make sure the distances match. If they are slightly off, determine one end is your primary point. Just remember the secondary will be slightly off. Record the angle. Compare the angles and determine the rotation necessary to match them up. If one is 3d and the other is 15d you'll need to rotate +/-12d to get them to match. In your moasure chief file, Place a fixed temporary X point on the primary you chose. Select the entire file and rotate it the angle necessary to match up (around a fixed point). Then cut/paste the entire selection into the engineer file - I generally choose to do this off to the side, away from the other data points. Then while it is still selected in the engineer file, select point-to-point move. Click A on the primary point from Moasure group and click B on the same primary point in the surveyor/engineer group of data points. Your data will now be overlaid. Choose different colors for the Moasure layers and it will be easily identifiable from your engineers original data. You can later adjust elevation data based on the known fixed point elevation with +/- what moasure recorded at each of its points. I'm not seeing an example where it knows precisely your elevation is at say 899.10 above sea level. Every example seems to measure the difference between other fixed points +/- of 0. Unfortunately this rotational manipulation would need to be done every time you use moasure even if on the same site. The stonex is currently allowing us to view 4 different subdivision dwg/dxf files loaded, all on the same google map (allowing satellite view underlayment if desired), displaying at the same time, so that when we drive to the next site the tablet shows us exactly where we are standing within the subdivision. We check a manhole or other known survey point to verify x,y,z accuracy, then locate existing points for our subcontractors or even add new points if needed which we can download later into the respective subdivision file and forward to the engineers for updating. Pretty cool.

For me, the quickest way was to set main pitch to 10/12, draw the main house perimeter, gable ends, ceiling height 12', Draw garage, ceiling height 9' and I assumed gable end, along with the room to the right of the main house, also ceiling height 9'.. Then draw front covered porch and front bump, ceiling heights 8', roof pitch 2/12. I didn't bother changing to metal roof because I want auto roof to remain ON. I did change these two rooms to roof group 1 and made sure the right front bump wall was gable end. On the main house perimeter, I centered the front door and drew two temporary partial walls 10' to either side of this front door. Broke the front wall at the temp walls and the middle wall with the door I changed the roof type to gable. You can then uncheck auto roof, delete the temporary walls and draw the interior to how ever you want. (change the front door wall back to gable so that it becomes one with the other two if you need to slide the windows left/right) You can also now change the main ceiling to 9' (to match the garage) and if you draw a truss it will show the 3' heel height automatically. The only problem with this method is the heel height is across the entire main house. Alternately, if you only wanted the raised heel along the front and same wall height along the back, Start over (auto-roofs on) and make the main house 9' ceiling same as the garage and right extension. Make a blank second floor that is only 2' high. Then draw over the main house walls, about half the depth. Like so, Add those temporary walls, break the front wall at those walls, and make the center door wall a gable. This changes the main gable slightly (red circle) but the rest is identical and the back trusses now line up. I can post the plan, but I'm on X-15 and not sure if that is what you are on as well. I generally try to do as much as I can with auto roof's then go rogue on whatever little is required manually. Under either method, with auto-roof off you can change roof group 1 to metal roofing. I hope this helps.

Unfortunately I'm using x15 and not used to creating video demonstrations. My approach was to first to tell Chief how to build as many of the roof planes properly as I was able. Here are the steps I followed; First turn on automatic build roofs and notice how crazy things get. Instead of asking why, I simply worked with what you had cleaned up conflicts. SCREENED PORCH & DINETTE - Here, both rough ceilings should be either 86 1/2" to match the Dinette, or 85 5/8" to match the Screened Porch. (see room dbx) - However both roof planes also need to be 3-1/2 to come under the right upper window sill. - and the side porch wall needs to be a gable in roof DBX Notice in 3D view this cleans up the roof lines on this side of the house nicely. ENTRY DOOR / STAIRS AREA - Entry is 97-1/2" rough ceiling - Make Utility under stairs also 97-1/2" rough ceiling - Switch to LVL2 - Make Stairwell 23 5/8" rough ceiling. - Make Storage 23 5/8" rough ceiling - Create a room right of Storage by extending existing Storage rear wall and Study side wall. - Break these walls at the exterior intersections of storage and study and then make the new outside wall segments "invisible". - Open this new room's dbx and name it "open below." Set rough ceiling height to 23 5/8" and uncheck flat roof. Notice in 3D view the problem is only over the stairwell. - In plan view, extend Storage closet door wall across stairwell towards shower. Break this wall over stairs and make it invisible. - also select bottom left outer wall of stairwell open it and change roof overhang to 2" (this cleans up overhang intruding on adjacent Bath window) In 3D view all roofs should look correct, except for Bedroom 2 area. - Change BR2 to Roof Group 1 in DBX. - Change bottom exterior bedroom wall to 4/12 pitch. - Change midwall between BR2 & Master Bath to "High Shed/Gable Wall" - Change Master Bath upper exterior wall to 4/12 pitch Notice in 3D view these roofs look correct, but don't intersect and roof group 1 doesn't create the valley. - In plan view, draw a line through the middle of bedroom 2 running left to right. - Locate this line 9' away from bottom exterior wall (which also places it 9' away from the Master Bath's exterior wall.) - This is the midpoint of the roof planes (where the plans should intersect to create a peak) - Drag Master Bath roof plane peak to the CAD line. - Drag BR2 roof plane peak back to the CAD line. - While BR2 roof plane is selected, drag upper right corner further right to meat Master Bath roof plane valley peak. IN 3D VIEW everything should look correct except for a 12" notch near the lower valley intersection. - select BR2 roof plane and drag the notch roof downward to meet the the BR2 Bath roof overhang.facia - drag the notch's left corner right to meet the valley intersection of BR2 plane. Let me know if this is helpful. Solver has me playing around with recording videos but it would take me weeks to get something as coherent and comfortably clear as his are.

Thanks DB. That helped me figure it out. It works like Rene said, but there are a couple of major problems. FIRST, Subdivision dwg/dxfs are in real world dimensions, based off a state plane coordinate system. You can't "move them to the origin (0,0,0) in Chief because then when exported they won't show up in their real world location. Like our surveyors, we have mobile tablets that tie into our state's satellites which enables us to walk around on site and verify lot lines, curbs, sidewalks, trees, utilities locations, etc.. in real time. We can even overlay this with google maps in aerial view. You can do the same thing with a mobile phone GPS but it is only accurate to about 12-32 feet. Our tablets are accurate to 3/16" - 1/4" (~1cm). We actually spent Friday morning staking out all water/sewer mainlines, curb valves and street light locations in another subdivision. The subdivision isometric that I sent previously is located in our North Ohio State Plane, around X=22089396 7/16", Y=2501979 1/4", where Z=0 when we are not using the elevation data. Otherwise Z=~900 in our area. Here I've attached a zoom of the same isometric with two referenced floorplans in the ISO (circled in red), which brings us to problem #2. SECOND, I gave both models the identical coordinates & rotation but they appeared in two different places (compare 2nd jpg with 1st.) This tells me that I would have to go back through all floorplan drawings and set an identical origin point. (The house on the right was drawn farther from the origin point because I'd first pasted some subdivision PDFS into this plan, then drew the house to the right of those PDFs.) THIRD, If all my floorplans had the same relative front left corner origin point, I would still need an excel table of my subdivisions 45 build pads stating their front left coordinate location and the angle of the front build line with said angle reflecting the direction the house is facing. Here I used 180 for lots south of the road, which means 0 would be the angle for houses on the opposite side of the street. However the road is actually running at S87d19'6"E and build pads on the opposite side of the street then would be N87d19'6"W. (meaning 0 is -2d40'54" and 180 is actually 177d19'6" to be perpendicular to the actual road.) Since we can't import the excel table, cutting & pasting every coordinate and rotation would be required (4 x 45 = 180 operations) in the DBX-Floor-Reference. For me, it is much simpler to rotate, drag, drop multiple models, then copy with offset to adjacent lots, mirroring the units for lots across the street. However, Rene is correct my method is extremely resource intensive. My user library is over 250gb due to all the past models we've created. I've had to increase my OneDrive storage to 5TB (our tablets connect to it) and I'm getting ready to buy a new computer with several M.2 NVMe SSD's. Last two images are the concept drawing we submitted to the City of Westerville and a google maps view of the completed subdivision. All designed in Chief, including remodeling of the two pre-existing single family homes at the entrance.

Ken, You're going to need to be a bit more specific. I ran around on discord for about a half hour. The name fits it's definition. lack of harmony between notes sounding together. I searched high and low for "reference a 3d model" clicked through both links....

Thanks Rene. Took me a while to find "Referencing a 3D model" - I didn't even know Chief could do that. I thought it applied only to floorplans. I'll play around with this over the weekend.

Hello, Are you looking to achieve something like I've attached? Here we created preliminary isometric views of a house sitting on lot 6. We didn't include the road, since the sidewalk abuts the curb. We widened the terrain by 5' to either side, which is the minimum setback distance to the next home. We added a fence at the rear side yards to show where the propertyline actually is. If this is what you are looking for, here's two ways to do this fairly quickly, OPTION #1 Follow SHCanada's CAD instructions in a separate file. Create the terrain then adjust its shape to either fit the lot, extend a bit past the lot to include how much extra you want, or terrain the entire subdivision. Last option will bog down 3D generation especially if you have elevation data present. Export a 3D model of your house, then import this and drop it on your desired lot. Orient the model how you want on the lot in 2D, Just remember the model is generally 15" larger in all four directions due to gutter and overhangs. Generate your 3D view and adjust the Z-axis of the model to intersect with the terrain (I generally use 2' above to give me 8"-12" of exposed foundation.) OPTION #2 Follow SHCanada's CAD instructions in the same file as the house plan. I typically will draw the lot first and isolate the build pad (the blue polygon is my buildable area after I follow all the subdivision setbacks.) Then I draw the plan to fit inside the build pad. If the house is drawn first, I'd draw the CAD over to one side initially, or cut and paste it from another file. Ideally the Plot Plan CAD should be on its own layer. Either way, the Plot Plan CAD needs oriented (rotated) so that it matches how you want the house to sit on the lot. This is easy with a square lot. For cul-de-sac or curve lots, you need to pick an approach - centerline of lot (perpendicular to front) or match parallel one side of the lot are two approaches. Generate your 3D view and you probably don't need to adjust the Z-axis much because Chief did that for you automatically based on its defaults. Option 2 is how I did this for years, until we started designing subdivisions. Option #1 allows me to spin the model and drop it on any lot in the subdivision file to see if it fits (if you have build pads drawn.) Last drawing is our next subdivision. The buildings are all models on different layers. Only the roads, parking, sidewalks, power poles, ponds and landscaping are drawn in the file itself. The image shows a 40 unit housing density in the upper left, but we also have 30 unit & 36 unit layouts on a different layer and can toggle between them. This is a condominium project, so lot lines are fictional and we wanted the freedom to build 1-2-3 family dwellings in any grouping dictated by market conditions. I hope this helps.

Thanks Chopsaw! Changing it to 1.5" dropped the exterior material 1.5" below the sill plate....TOO MUCH. I changed it to 1/8" and it covers the sillplate without being noticeably below the corner trim boards, which do extend to the bottom of sillplates automatically. Thanks again. John.

Hello, I have a new floorplan that has developed what looks like a missing sill plate between basement & main level. It does not appear adjacent rooms that step down (like front/rear porches & garages.) I tried building all framing and all that did was make the sill plate appear (see third picture.) I should be seeing exterior coverings extending below sill. My first thought was to make the sill plate concrete - this would be a quick fix, but one of the sill plates is across the front elevation which requires stone extending downward. Has anyone else run into this, I tried searching the forum. Thanks, John..

I can't find the 3D bonus catalogue in any of my X8-X14 versions, or on Chief's site.... does anyone know where I can I download the .calibz?

I have this issue when creating PDFs in other programs as well. Settled on having Acrobat compress the files after they are created. Typically a 30MB file will reduce to 3-7MB's If you don't own acrobat, here are two online resources that you can drop your PDF into and it will return you a compressed file for free. https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online/compress-pdf.htm https://smallpdf.com/compress-pdf

In Ohio several county auditors provide this data for download. In our home county they have parcel data and gis data in separate files. We can download both and import them to give us the topography and lot lines. I searched Austin Texas and found you can download DWG files of the data at https://austintexas.app.box.com/s/nu5ju1ni2vz0oonm67f014xqdwip526k/folder/42061586880 Here's the main website https://www.austintexas.gov/department/gis-data It includes some arcgis links which we also find useful. Hope this helps.

This is how I typically do this. Draw a molding line in plan view where you want the 1"x10" to be. Open dialog and change it's width to 10" and raise its elevation to say 10' initially. Switch to camera view, select the molding then raise/lower as needed to get it where you want it to be.