JiAngelo

You need to paste, not place the second doorway. Place the first one. Copy that one, control v and aim about 4" left or right of the first opening and click there to paste. Mull them together and there is no inner framing or jamb material. I can't get the same result with windows.

Copy and paste a second door w/ zero separation between the two. Raise the sill on one to your kneewall height off the floor. (see left opening below) Widen each door from the opposite end until they represent the proper width. Select both and mull them together. (see right opening below): I couldn't get it to work properly using a window. And, I'd cheat and use a slab or solid to create the sill cap - the cap disappears when mulled, even if you raise the lower door to give it a sill as well.

Make the fireplace chase "room" 20' tall temporarily and uncheck roof over this room on the structure tab. The long walls of the FP need to be gable roof. Then create your room addition and you should see the fireplace sticking out of the roof. Then take a cross section and change the FP room height to 2 feet min. Above the ridge, per code. 14'-15' is what it looks like in your picture. There's a chimney cap in the library that I often use or I will draw a slab and place it to act as a cap. You could also place a roof with 1/12 slope and reduce the overhangs to 4" to give a similar look.

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.