JiAngelo

Rob, For the typical house/garage scenario, where the garage floor is 1' below the stem wall, unchecking on the foundation room's structure tab "Room Supplies Floor for the Room Above" leaves the foundation garage floor where it was and creates another slab for the room above (because it is named garage). If you then change that room above to be named study, for example, and set its floor height to 0, you have a framed floor drawn flush with the existing house and you can still see the slab at 1' below. For this "Garage to Living Space" question, it is a bit trickier because the top of stem wall for the garage area is ~2' below the house (your 3' is due to the additional distance of the house subfloor.) Best way to show this building on the example above would be to make the foundation walls pony walls. First I changed the Foundation garage floor to -2' and then I dropped the upper pony walls another -1'8" so that the garage foundation is about 4" above the existing concrete floor (this looks like your example picture above.) I then selected the "Study" exterior walls and on the structure tab selected "Balloon Through Floor Below". Turn on framing layers and Chief even draws the interior rim board for the balloon framing automatically. All done with auto-framing on.

Short of designing your own door, for every door style you may want to use a pet door in, I placed two "Euro H Plank" cabinet doors back-to-back - resized them both to be 10"x16"x1.5" and 3" up off the ground to maintain the integrity of the door frame and the door sweep. I centered them on the back of the door and then moved them 2" forward into the wall. You can then material paint each side a contrasting color Or view them easily in technical or hand drawn lines. You can cad block the two doors and save this to any library to use on any door style. This doesn't create a hole, but then we look at all our other doors closed typically, so showing a louvered flap like above, or using a shaker panel cabinet door style should suffice.

That trapezoid is the room you need to create on the second floor. Make the room height the smallest trap leg. It will then be under the existing roof. (Unless the height is too tall) Once you are done with any roof work turn auto roof off and then open the room and make it's ceiling the default height you want. Chief will create the trap shape along with a ceiling line telling you where the slope down begins. Make the second floor wall a rail overlooking the lower room.

This wouldn't address walls spanning several rooms with multiple heights. I created a 3 room box, (2) 9' ceilings, (1) 10' ceiling. The only schedule change was Chief additionally count's the (2) 1'3 1/6" walls sticking above the 9' ceilings until the roof intersects them. It still only sees two sets of outside walls. And consider the interior wall of the Study, it is 9' drywall on its side, but 10' on the Entry side. Next, if you break every wall intersection, the 1'3 1/16" wall sections aren't counted anymore and the total is off by another 3-1/2" or so, after excluding those two walls.. Of course, the room schedule gives you the ceiling height, but won't return the perimeter.

Most convert to raster or the vector data is inaccurate. Also you would need to resize the result to match real world dimensions. For small sites it is easier to import the pdf, scale it to real world dimensions, lock the layer and draw terrain, lot lines and elevations over it. For larger sites, our auditor has dwg/dxf files we can download with terrain elevation data using Arcgis. Your New York area uses this system as well. Here's a link. 2023 Erie County Tax Parcel Data now available! Erie County makes available tax parcel data in GIS format for free. As of October, our 2023 parcel data can be downloaded. If you are interested in obtaining the 2023 GIS dataset of tax parcels,… read more

You need to do the reverse. Keep the DWG in its own file, then reference the house plan file into it. Here's the help page. Contact ReneRabbitt for better instructions. I'm still wrapping my head around this, but it works similar to the cad detail footprint. you can select the entire referenced plan, point-to-point move it and rotated it to match your dwg lot orientation. You can also raise or lower it on the z axis to get your garage doors to match up with the driveway, for example) Not as good an option, but one I'm more familiar with is to export the house as a Collada model then import it as a library object. You can manipulate it the same way, just have to remember the model is oversized to include your gutter and overhangs, so you can't manipulate it with the same precision. It also hogs resources, which isn't a problem for me until I have more than 10 models in the same plan (like a subdivision).

Printed fine for me. I've attached your plan so that you can try it out. Create a view with normal walls locked makes it easier to maneuver and place the cad boxes. (otherwise you have to cycle through Chief selecting wall elements first every time you want to grab a side of a box and stretch it to cover the gaps. 1553193773_HatchingFail.plan Test Hatch Walls.pdf

With auto-roofs on this is a problem. I set those rooms to the lowest height I want, typically 4' 1-1/2", no flat ceilings, draw everything the way you want it, then turn auto roofs off. Then raise those room ceiling heights to 8' (or whatever you are wanting to use for the flat height) and Chief will redraw the room with the slopes. that match your sketch. They will even show a solid dotted line where the slope changes to flat.

Alternatively, you can make a layer called "Walls, Hatching 2" for example, then created a filled-by-layer CAD box and change it to reside on that layer. Then paste those boxes resized over the individual gaps. Turn off both layers to see your normal plan, turn on both layers to see Marketing plan. I'm showing the layer in red first, then black, then hatching off, walls on.

Create a wall schedule, add "Total Width" to "Columns to Include" and "Display Totals Row" Multiply wall length by ceiling height and you have your wall area of both interior and exterior walls. In the past I've also changed drywall materials to measure by square foot rather than per sheet. The materials list would then give you the square footage. I use "drywall taped" for exterior walls and make a copy renamed "Drywall Taped2" and use that for one side of the interior walls. WB1 is ceiling finish (see room specification). WB2 is the other side of your interior wall in sheets. WB3 is ceiling drywall sheets. WB4 is exterior wall areas WB5 is interior wall areas. Measurements are off by the intersections, of course. But if you did the same thing for siding, you'd get the deck exterior included in the sf. Not perfect, but pretty close. EDIT - compare 27.75 wall length x 9' wall height = 249.75 with WB6 239.23 -which is missing 1 intersection. and compare 68 wall length x 9' wall height = 612.00 with WB5 572.27 - which as 4 overlaps in the outside corners and missing 3 intersections with interior walls.

SInce the treads are already built, make a template of a few of them (to verify their consistency) take one and add control lines using a square that plumbs the nosing overhang of the tread above (to subtract this), and then measure 6" in from either end of the template tread nosing and square a line 90 degrees off the front tread you can determine the rear offsets of the nosing overhang. In chief you can draw the inner trapezoid fairly easily. Then extrapolate the template tread using the control line offset measurements. Now extend the front nosing line and the rear nosing line of the tread above out until they intersect and you will have your radius.. .

I have all schedules in one cad detail named "SCHEDULES." I zoom in to the schedule I want, then send current view to layout, adjust scale and box perimeter. Since I know where the other schedules are in the cad detail, I can cut and paste the same box and simply slide the box perimeter to bring the desired schedule into view, OR return to the detail zoom to desired schedule and repeat. Added bonus, on new floorplans I can cut and ctrl-v paste the schedules from one plan to the new plan's cad detail also named SCHEDULE and they repopulate with that plans data. By using the same detail name, opening an earlier layout and changing the plan file name to the new plan causes all schedules within the layout itself to re-populate, only caveat is adjusting boxes if a plan has more items to display than the current box location allows. If you use the same camera names you can cut and paste them as well and they will update to match the plan name as well.

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.