plannedRITE

This is extremely frustrating news and I can't understand why this is seen as a good option. I feel that common sense would dictate that in a move like this (a MASSIVE price hike) should go hand in hand with an announcement that benefits the consumer. I see almost no benefit anywhere that this will benefit the users. This appears to be a negative for everyone except for Chief's pockets. The only glimmer of hope is that the extra revenue will allow better/more engineers to be hired to sort out issues faster, implement requests faster, and just make a better software that doesn't run so poorly. Where is the benefit to consumers? Why are we just being slapped with a huge price tag or forced to buy multiple licenses now while praying that you don't pray on legacy users and bump our SSA fees to match the subscription fees down the road? My business will not be affected much by this but we are blessed enough to stay busy. New users and users only doing a few plans a year are going to be turned off by this. I'm also shocked at the timing, the market is cooling down so why would this happen now? If I slowed down enough to have to stop paying for SSA I'd probably start looking at other offerings instead of coming back to a big subscription middle finger from CA when I'm ready to pick things back up. I understand that the profit margins may be slim and slimming. But the most foolish POSSIBLE way to pad the pockets is to just slap everyone with a new, higher fee and not offer anything additional to the consumer to make it worth it. Why would this be the announcement and not "Look at these incredible features coming with X15 that will cost our company more but will seriously benefit the user! And due to how great this update is we are changing our pricing model to be XYZ." That I could understand. I'm venting and more frustrated than I probably should be but I just can't understand why this would be a good idea.

The original post seems to be talking about ceiling heights but the flooring/foundation issue that you're talking about acts similarly. You need to know how the foundation will be built first. "Floor supplied by the foundation room below" will be for slab on grade build so don't turn it off unless you're floor framing. But you can still change the floor height just fine with slab on grade, you just need to separate the rooms with a foundation wall. I've found that it often helps to change the pour number for the lower floor too. If there isn't a foundation wall separating the rooms it'll of course drop the floor throughout the building since there's just the one slab not broken up by stem walls. Here's staggered floor and ceiling heights in these pics. Works fine for the most part. There are definitely issues with foundations, I fight with them often, but this usually isn't an issue.

I had issues until I started clipping the views. Clip the sides and elevation of the cross section and/or elevation windows and bring them in as close as you can to the building. I now only have issues on homes with REALLY large footprints (happens on one project I have over 200' wide) where clipping doesn't help. You can also switch to live view from plot lines, though I dislike it as much as anyone else. Still annoying that it's an issue at all but this does help. This second pic is the 200'+wide one, still has the color issues but it's somewhat minimal.

I haven't found a good way to do this quite yet without using solids. I'd prefer to not use them since it shows extra lines in vector views that I have to edit out of my layouts but I'm not sure if there is another way. This is pretty common in our designs, or layouts similar to this, so any input on something that I've overlooked would be great! I'd like to show the upper portion of the doorway/framed out header, have the stem wall cut down but still keep a raised stem under the adjacent wall, and not have the pony wall be cut by a doorway. 3 methods that I've used: 1. I generally use a doorway and throw in a solid at the pony wall cut but do end up with lines in the vector view around the solid. 2. Turning the wall invisible removes the framed out header so a solid needs to be used plus it causes other layers to poke through the side of the wall that can't be edited out. 3. Using a open railing with post to beam also gives the wall layer issue and doesn't let the stem wall be cut down to match the lower slab height. I'll attach a few pics and an example plan. Thanks Pony Wall_Doorway.zip

How has your experience been? I updated yesterday and I'm still freezing up for a few seconds while it autosaves. Darn.

I'm wondering if there is a way to set a room type to report to a schedule(s) prior to drawing the room. That way it could be setup with in the template and you would just have to draw rooms, assign their room type, and they will automatically report to the schedule. Just cuts out that extra step of telling each room to report to the schedule as you set its room type once drawn. I'm guessing that there isn't or it would show the Schedule option in the room type DBX in defaults.

Good tip Michael! So, looking for a way to maybe automate this even further, is there a way to have room types set to report to schedules before the room is created? A default setting for a .plan template?

Yep. Use an ortho view. In the plan view, line up the camera straight to the home, set it's height to like 10' from floor with no tilt, and bring in the FOV to whatever you need (this one is a 45). Built terrain and place an elevation line in front and behind the home at 0 and place one behind your camera at like -10' to make the terrain slope down toward the camera. Add in your driveway as a sidewalk so that it slopes with the terrain. Add in some vegetation and whatnot, pick a backdrop, and turn on the watercolor view. Adjust to your liking. Pretty darn close to what you're looking for:

Oh interesting, thank you. Since the notes didn't specifically callout that they had addressed the autosave issues I didn't think much about it. I had updated but I'll turn auto save back on. Fingers crossed, not all of my guys are diligent with manually saving!

Yes! I have had some of the most ridiculous roof issues with X14. It could absolutely be caused by odd things that I am doing but I do not remember having this many odd bugs in prior versions. Lots of gutter and shadow board oddities in X14 as I use them to try to mimic local designs as I always have.

Depends on your client base and services. For my business it's a necessity as we lean heavily on our models as a marketing tool. We get plenty of new clients that had a friend refer them because of how much they loved being able to see the build in the planning phase. Standard renders are still fine any client but a good PBR just sets you apart. Like Mark said, YMMV.

As everyone else has said, Print to PDF and setup a good watermark. I have one plastered all over but faint enough to not make it annoying to read the plans. I haven't had any complaints. Our first (rough) drafts to clients usually have the watermarked PDF, a link to the 3d viewer model, and a couple of screenshots of a quick PBR. Similarly, I have a few "sample"/"example" plans for clients that ask to see what our work may entail that are watermarked with most details, notes, and dimensions removed. Get accustomed to always using that watermark button when printing off any pdfs for clients unless it's a final set that they've paid for.

Good point! Looks like it's leaving that one last line in elevation views, no biggie. So now is there a way for the lower wall to show on the plan view in just that section? It seems that Chief treats this split like a pony wall but for the entire wall length. Works great for elevations/3D but in the plan view I'm not seeing a way to show the interior wall layers for the portion cut by the roof but exterior for the rest of the wall. Seems to be one or the other?

I just took a second to actually look at this, still no bueno since by making that wall continuous it made that interior shared wall have the same exterior surface as the exterior walls. It needs to be a different wall type, which is why it was broken up and shown as a different wall in the draft I uploaded. I do know that that's causing the problem so I'm trying to figure out how to make it work. The closest I've been able to get is by unselecting the attic wall classification for that upper wall though it still leaves a line and messes with the other perpendicular walls a bit.

Better! Thank you. I shouldn't have skipped that truss base here. I fight with truss bases too much since most of my roof layouts are a bit complicated so I usually avoid them. Yep, the line is still there in elevation views but it's not a big deal to edit out that line in the layout file after.

Here's something I've occasionally fought with. Taking this attached plan for example, there are 2 different ceiling heights giving a lower and taller roof. In between these 2 sections is a shared wall but the portion above the lower roof never seems to display properly in 3d and/or elevation views. I've tried a handful of different options but no matter what I seem to do there is an odd issue in a random view. I break up the wall to make the shared wall a different wall type than the exterior walls (drywall at each side instead of stucco). This, of course, changes the wall seen above the lower roof from outside into the drywall wall too. So that attic wall is changed back to the exterior wall type. Anyways, I've tried many options to easily fix this so I won't keep listing everything I've done wrong. What could I be missing here? I tried to trim this simple plan down to fit but it's still a hair too large. Google drive link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p8JZyxygt-D7q3N9t2im8GF0RGoWBcJp/view?usp=sharing

What Rene said, OBS. It's excellent.

Michael - I know that this is an INCREDIBLY old post and I may be overthinking this. I'm just looking to automate schedules for elevations and have stumbled upon the issue that you talked about here. Did you ever find a solution to this? The idea is to use notes or notes & arrows to grab object information from exterior walls/roof surfaces/fixtures/etc. and have it quickly report to a custom schedule. I tried just having those different points report the info via their own labels but it doesn't seem to quite work for my con docs. Quick example pic below, it obviously works with the wall itself reporting to the schedule but the note schedule is what I'd like to see work.

You are the man! I didn't know that you could pull a leader line from it, that's exactly what I was looking for. The arrow isn't entirely necessary. Did you just add the arrow and then flip the line around? Looks like Chief treats it as a separate entity from the note.

Thanks Joe I should have been clearer. The detail callouts in that screenshot are fine (I like your "Round Arrowhead" tip though it isn't an option straight from the callout so it would be drawing that arrow from the callout). With how my details are done it's easiest to manually type those int he callout tool. The other notes, the bubbles around the edges with the arrows, are the ones that I'm referring to. It would be great for that symbol to be useable via the Note tool instead of Callouts so that it can report to a schedule. Hopefully that makes sense.

I may be approaching this from the wrong angle or overthinking this. I prefer my note callouts on condoc elevations/cross sections to look like this: However to do this I've had to use callouts and manually type up a schedule. I'd obviously like to just drop them in and rename them while they fill out a schedule like the note tool allows. I like to keep the note bubbles from cluttering up the elevation views. Is there a way to do this without too much additional manual work? I really like notes->schedules and their simplicity. Thanks

I just tested it, no luck. I'm now curious to see if this is possible too. The shading/backdrop intensity in PBR seems to force some shade of grey.

I don't quite understand what issue you're having, I see that the second picture has roof a bit odd with a seemingly off centered ridge. Depending on the roof construction, it's generally best to draw the roof planes first and then uncheck flat ceiling in the room(s) below. Then add in manual ceiling planes at the pitch and heights that you need. If you haven't already, make sure to go through the Chief training videos. They are generally excellent and should get you where you need to be. Ceilings - https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/69/ceiling-basics.html?playlist=96 Manual roofs - https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/25/drawing-roofs-manually.html?playlist=95 Good luck

Sure, there's a chance that could work but I don't have the time to update another template. However, I turned off auto save and the occasional freezing is gone. So there is absolutely an issue with the autosave feature, as suspected by some other users. X14 continues to be slower than 12 or 13 for me but thankfully it doesn't keep freezing up now.

Data Folder under Documents in Windows. I made a copy of a default template, renamed it as my template, and adjusted it. I scrapped my old template that was carried through old versions of Chief to try to eliminate issues.