KnotSquare

I created a video on how to do this:

If you watched any of the timber frame video, the posts, beams, girders, purlins and knee braces are all built using solids. I have to learn how to enter those into the Material Lists as they are to be, true dimension, rs lumber.

Rene, I have a commercial building that is going to permit. I would love to chat once this is out if you do not mind keeping this thread on your watch list as it seems to be you and I or sharing an email and we can start a new thread. I am a little more than a Designer, but if you read the code, Architect and Engineer; nowhere. Me: ASU, Architecture B Program, combined degree in Architecture and Structural Engineering. Instead of pigeon holing myself as AIA or PE, I went AIBD. Best of both worlds and reciprocity is soooooo much easier. I have seen you (recently) I think during a review of new X15 features (but maybe another video) show your curved leader process. Not an issue. I see how you do that with ease. I fall asleep to this or Building Science shows or anything to further my knowledge. It can take me a week to watch one show because I watch as far as I can and then does off. Love learning. My roof problems are extensive enough I would likely have to share PDFs from ACAD to demonstrate the section as it is to be, even the roof; solved. In Chief, I am just not to that point, but getting stronger with lighter projects. I am juggling 12 right now, including a train station and a hotel, both 1800s conversions. I live in Butte, Montana and the history in this town is hard to surpass in the US. Great buildings. My family owns the Hennessy Building at 130 N Main St. in Butte. Butte had electricity before Manhattan, NY. I have spent months in a wheelchair in my 20s and then was married for a few years to a woman with a boy with Cerebral Palsy. I also specialize in accessibility due to my experience, but my real passion is conservation. Many of my homes have R-70 walls with R-10 windows. Code requires R-60 in ceilings. I got into this field in part after winning a few design competitions in San Diego, and after a plane crash ended my Top Gun career, but mainly because I grew up in the mountains of Montana and am opposed to urban sprawl and see a real urgency to help the most energy hungry industry in the world. If I cannot stop it, I can influence it. My son is going to be 19 this summer, and I need to leave him something. Here in Montana, our building season is only 3 months in the prime, so it is hump time. I type fairly fast, so this comes out pretty quick. I wrote lots of AutoLISP routines before doors and windows were ever considered to be automated as the are in Chief. "Menu driven". I also love to teach, have no fear of competition and post my videos for free to teach all that I can without the time to edit, but I have a small following in the 3 weeks I have into serious lessons. With genuine respect for what you do, I would like to hit you up when the smoke clears. Spring is here and deadlines are a callin'. Let me know if that sits well with you. When it comes to the Fisher House, once things slow, I would love to share that model and see how I can improve my Chief skills. I can do AutoCAD with my eyes closed, but Chief; I have a lot to learn before I can trust the output. Why the time into my plans? My house plans run about $20-$75k depending on what you are doing, but I provide an erector set. As for the simple Detached Garage, that is a test run that is about to go to ReadyFrame. If it comes back flawless, the house for the Pecks is next and somewhat complex in a few areas. Pre-cut and bundled walls would speed up erection, a much needed aspect considering the short "prime" building season. The garage is so simple, I will be sorely disappointed if I see a saw on site. That garage was much less than $20k. I do treat my clients right and work with people more than I work on projects. An old man that loves this stuff so much I will likely die with a trackball in one hand, 3DConnexion in the other. I have an excavation company awaiting office plans, so I hope we can continue... Mark

Found it? suggestion@chiefarchitect.com

I submitted it as a case as I could not find a suggestion box. Is there one?

I will put in the suggestion for selection as well.

Rene, I do appreciate what you are saying, but it comes down to my level of confidence in trusting Chief to build roofs correctly and then I need to learn how to place the items I create as 3D Solids or others outside of automatic features in the Material Lists correctly. I have already found that Chief is not that accurate with anchor bolt count as if you have a slab with a footing, no walls, it will add anchor bolts to your list. I use the slab with footings to create a thickened edge for my patios, etc. In ACAD I can draw the section with fine detail and confirm that the height proposed by Chief is matching up. On my Fisher Residence, a timber frame home and barn, wrapped entirely in conventional framing I have yet to meet with success. Once I do, I will then spend the time to learn layouts as I know I am doing repetitive work. I have yet to test sections, but love that we can now snap to elevations. This is a step in the right direction and I would guess that we can snap to sections now to, just haven't tried. Like you, I have never drawn a straight leader and use splines in ACAD for detailing out drawings so the leaders do not mix in with the straight lines in the drawing. What I wish I could control was line work. If you see one of my framing plans, a beam is a line-dash-line, joist: line-dot-line, truss: line-dot-dot-line, header: line-dash-dash-line and so on. I started drafting when the main method was a drafting table. These symbols are very important when I engineer my plans as a simplex loaded beam typically will size smaller than a complex loaded beam, so telling the contractor where a beam starts and stops so that beams in a line are ordered at the right length is critical to the accuracy of my plans. I am still learning what Chief can and cannot do, and the roof in Fisher is particularly complex as we are trying to meet PassivHaus standards. I have a timber frame with spans from the ridge to the wall of only 9' in the horizontal plane, yet I have 2x14 material on top of that just to pack in the insulation. It surely is overkill for structure. I have yet to get this roof to cooperate, but I now have time as they have turned their attention to the barn for this year, the house next. Fortunately the barn in not insulated, so I get to cut my teeth on a timber frame there. mark@knottystudios.com Mark Farrar

I am a little older than you and started using AutoCAD at a junior college in California, circa 1988. I then introduced the first computers to the Architecture Department at ASU and recently found out that the software I taught back then was still around. Form Z.. No idea what it is like now, but I would send a sphere, unioned with a pyramid and recatngle and hope the machine did not crash while it rendered overnight. Still find AutoCAD my go to for Construction Documents, but I am also using Chief only since X11. Wish I had a little more control in the line-work area, but Chief keeps improving. Loving that I can snap in elevations now! If they would only have the same manner of selecting via ACAD. Right to left is window, left to right... I posted a 15 minute video showing how I combine the two in a very easy to understand Detached Garage design: It's a quick video and kinda cool to combine the best of both software. www.knotsquare.us Mark Farrar

Hey Rene, Big fan of your videos and the serious customization toolboxes you create. A cabinet into anything as well. I do some pretty custom stuff myself, but in a completely different arena. I posted a like for Alaska_Son in the event that he was a timber frame fan. It is a long video that demonstrates some of my techniques of using Chief Architect in conjunction with AutoCAD. It is almost 2 hours long, so not for everyone. Maybe he is not, but put it out there JIC. Mark

Thanks Alaska_Son I just posted a video on this topic. It is scheduled to air at 6PM MST today. https://youtu.be/rJLRnbVqF3o Mark

Searching first, I found the topic in the Forum, "Polyline solid subtraction" by MN_JohnH with a short video "Recording #1329" from solver. So I tried creating it from a rectangle and then a polyline solid. While better results, still not actually removing the material, but leaving an outline of the cut out in Vector View. I save this as Girder to Post Detail Polyline and attached it as well. 1 min 39 sec video showing my issue "with this object": Is Chief not capable of subtracting from a region where a previous subtraction occurred? In plan view, you will see that there are two tenons next to each other at the end of the girder. This is reserved so that I can offset the mortise coming into the opposite side of the beam where the should also has already been prepared. So I took a section view: The the skin peeled up above the shoulder??? Well, I got it to work, but some strange behavior as can be seen in this video when I basically solved it with the video from Eric and a little trial and error: https://youtu.be/lELYPaZGHfI What I was after and the solution is in the video should anyone need the same solution for "embedded bollean" functions. A subtraction over a subtraction. Mark Girder to Post Detail.zip Girder to Post Detail Polyline.zip

Egad DBCooper. Of all things. Thanks, I was wracking my brain yesterday. Mark

Curious.... I just took a Perspective Floor Overview. The walls are on in my layer set, but they don't show up?

It's all there in a perspective view, but in plan, I cannot seem to get layers to turn on. If I open another project, all is well. I had to increase the stem wall depth as the county is requiring 48" of R-10 insulation vertically on the wall as well as under the slab. That was my last change. Peck Garage Foundation Fix.zip

Also, I found a video from Eric that helps with coplanar issues on roofs with common plate heights: akabuilder roof 2 - Chief Architect Timeline: 0:00 In the 1st 3 minutes, shows how to locate where the wall is to move to and how to drag a wall to repair a roof. 4:35 2nd method to accomplish the same (Auto Rebuild Roofs). 4:49 Move to be coplanar with another roof plane. 5:00 1 key programmed to Intersect/Join Two Lines. 5:45 Boolean union two roof planes. 6:00 Use 1 key programmed to Intersect/Join Two Lines to get rid of an extra line segment that is in line. 6:13 Use 1 key programmed to Intersect/Join Two Lines to straighten out a roof segment. 6:30 Use Orthographic Full Overview to join two roof planes. 6:53 Still need to drag the wall over as was done in the first method of this video to repair wall. 7:03 Then use Auto Rebuild Roofs to fix the roof planes as done manually earlier.

On the CA website there is a video titled, "Sloping Roof Plane Baselines". It is quite clear how this affects rafters, changing the angle of the top plate, but this is somewhat unrelated to what I was trying to figure out for this roof issue. In a rafter situation, the BASELINE is on the inside edge of the framing since many rafters have a bird's mouth cut, though not always all the way across the entire plate. When it comes to trusses, does anyone know if CA treats the BASELINE at the outside of the framing (bearing) wall? Most trusses rotate at this location and setting the baseline height would mean something different in this case. The roofs I am attempting to join will be from the Master and the Garage with the first using parallel cord trusses and the latter, standard trusses.

Chris, Nice idea to give me a determination. I will give it a go, but the factor I will be changing is the top plate height. Thank you for a method to try. Mark

A search did not find an answer, so hopefully someone can tell me how I might get these two roofs to plane out, specifically the higher roof lowering to the roof in the left foreground. The walls are not aligned and if I needed separate plate heights due to this, is it possible if the eventual ridge in the foreground never met the ridge in the background? A search for "coplanar" in support only returns one result that I did not find helpful. Same height roofs, etc., no results. Seems I saw a video once about this.

SCHCanada2, Howdy neighbor. I am in Montana. You understood perfectly and gave me a path to try. Actually two solutions. Thank you, Mark

New upgrade to X15 had a great upgrade to floor trusses. Now I can lose my 3.5" wide joist place holders to keep my Material Lists accurate. What I could use to compliment this is the same truss on the rake. I design a lot of homes with at least some portion vaulted and the only way to make the top of windows match the pitch on the interior and exterior is to have the roof and the ceiling be the same pitch as well. For my final plans I call out parallel cord trusses. Basically this is a floor truss pitch up to match the rake. Does anyone know if Chief is capable of such a maneuver? Thanks to the Group, Mark

Thanks Chris. Joey, This roof is a cricket, so it is built on the downside of the Garage roof plane sloping to the wall of an upper story. I do not know how to make "2" work in this situation. Know any tricks? Mark

I need to project a roof across another to see where the cricket will need to be created. Following along with Scott's video, "Locating Roof Intersections" on YouTube, just prior to the one minute mark, he heads to a location that is not there in my new X15 Beta of CA. How do I locate a roof projection in X15? Did they change something? Mark

The video is now uploaded.

I will post again when it is ready. I don't know why it shared the link again. Sorry for any confusion, but I find no way to delete now. Mark

Currently, 3:42PM MST, the upload is at 37%. I switched to T-mobile internet to save a buck. It is too slow for the work I do. It streams fine, but uploads are really slow. I suspect it will be ready about 4:00PM.