HumbleChief

Gee, I am a happy camper right now

 

Have 7 loaded - using it to design a strucutre and had made a mistake on adjusting the foundation wall. Since I had designed multiple rooms in the basement (foundation) and had turned off AutoFoundation to create a Safe Room under the front porch, I foolishly realized my error on the foundation and turned on AutoFoundation to re-create the walls that I had messed up.

 

Like majic - I now have a nice pristine foundation, no rooms, no Safe Room, nothing. AND I had saved after the AutoFoundation reconstruct as I was discussing with the client so now I have lost several hours of work.

 

Very nice Chief. Your program is a real design aid.

 

Lesson - DON'T EVER USE AUTOFOUNDATION if you do anything in or around the foundation... Use it only once and don't make any errors after that or you will pay a terrible price. And oh - there is NO WAY to tell it how to create things like Safe Rooms (a small need in areas that have tornados) so your on your your own after the one shot. Save me 10 minutes to cost me hours later...

 

Great feature there - your program team wins over your customers... If I ran my business that way I would not be here.

 

Yes - I do not understand how Chief works because I do not work that way. I would not delete everything in the foundation (basement) but then I am sensitive to things more than your team is.

 

BTW - I was looking around to see how to create a Safe Room in the forums and unless someone calls them by some other name (a concrete porch or ???), I guess such a thing is a rarity to Chief users. My builders would not understand asking for an enclosed concrete room.

 

Ralph

Ralph,

I think if that 'safe room' had been defined as a room with a floor height that corresponded to the height you wanted for the room, auto build foundation would have recreated the foundation around that room.

And PLEASE do no think I'm apologizing for Chief's many land mines and pitfalls. I've been caught out so so many times it's crazy but another approach to your dilemma might be to post what you want to accomplish and get some help here.

Safe rooms are underground correct? It seems like an underground 'room' could be created quite easily but I haven't really tried.

Maybe this will help.

http://www.screencast.com/t/2NHcdWo96AB

It does but if you double-click it, it will actually split the line at that point.

...or create edit points and use the 'Edit Line Parts' tool.

Todd,

 - try turning on "ALL LAYERS"...

and make sure All Layers are on in the All Layers Layer Set.

Start by setting your 'floor' defaults to what you'd like. Defaults/floor/Edit - make sure you're on the floor you want to set the default for.

Then sometimes you just need to muscle through each floor/room to get it right. I've been stumped many many times by a similar thing. Just this morning all my rooms were -6" instead of 0" for some mysterious reason. Checked defaults and still had to change each room back one at a time.

Todd pony wall heights are changed here.

Is there a way to auto-cut roofs at intersections?  For example, if I have two gable roofs whose peaks are perpendicular to each other, is there a way to "cut" the two roof planes at their intersection, thus forming a valley?  This seems like it should be trivial, but I've found finding the exact location where two intersect is not that simple, and takes a bit of trial-and-error of moving the "buried" corner around so it follows the valley line in the rendered image.  Plus, my design has several such intersections, so if it can auto-cut them that would save me several hours of tweaking the plane lines.

 

I would just let it go and have the one roof buried under the other, but I suspect it's going to affect my material list calculations.

 

Thanks in advance.

There is no way to 'auto cut roof at intersection" but it's a great suggestion and one I have advocated in the past. Currently you must manually cut each roof where they meet and form valleys but once you do then the join roof tool will do the job. Should not take several hours - perhaps several minutes.

Will this help?

Not messing with you. 2 different tools.

http://www.screencast.com/t/1Cb67ecpSUB7

Yeah it's closed. Click the 'New Chief talk Now Available" Button. Oh wait but you already know that or you wouldn't be here. Hmmm What's up Antoine?

http://www.homedesignersoftware.com/support/article/KB-00683/

Larry, here is a little time saver I do.

http://screencast.com/t/yIkcndAsPZrL

Thanks very much for the tip Perry - really is appreciated.

Most of the time it is something I didn't do right that is the cause of my grief ... 

This is probably true but darn I wish I could trace the culprit brain spazz down. Anyway onwards and upwards to bigger and better things.

Must admit I've never used the texture toggle but I'll try later today and see if I have a problem.

Thanks Jay,

My defaults are set to unspecified room name. If that changed to a porch or a garage then that's another thing that mysteriously overtook that plan.

Thanks for the advice Bill.

I got it figured out and truly mean it when I say I do not know what I did. Just thrashed through each and every room with each and every structure tab till it worked. Even though I set the defaults for the second floor as wood framed joists I ended up with monolithic slab floors and the defaults were all over the place. I think I just started clicking defaults for everything in every room until I beat it into submission.

User error? Probably but this one just went wonky at a certain stage and was hard to retrieve.

Again thanks for the reply and advice.

If you're getting tired of these please let me know.

http://www.screencast.com/t/7CvFFU5Y3m7T

Stoner? Love it.

I would draw p-solids in elevation view and adjust/space to taste.

Thanks Larry,

I've been following your thread on the structure tab of the room DBX.  It's frustrating to run into the limitations of what Chief is able to do without some kind of work around.  This is a similar situation where I just want to generate a railing over a roof, and there is just no easy way.

 

It reminds me of the Joke:  How do you get an elephant out of a Safeway shopping cart?

 

The answer is you take the S out of Safe, and the F out of Way.

 

But after you think about it you come to the conclusion that,  "There is no "F" in Way".

 

I think using Chief is sometimes like trying to get that elephant out of the cart.

Funny, and frustrating at the same time.

Depends Jay,

In the San Diego area new houses are almost all monolithic slabs poured at the same time as the footing. Older houses can be stem walls with crawl spaces and wood joist floor framing, like the remodel in the plan. The stem wall foundations give me the most problems when modeling in Chief.

Larry - I may be running up against this myself in a plan I am working on.  Still doing

pretty pictures at the moment but may be moving on to the more technical drawings

shortly.  If I find anything I'll let you know.  Thanks for the heads up though.  Now at

least I won't feel like it is only me........

Dennis, I almost always bail on the structure dbx and simply draw in the needed section details but always thought there must be a away to get the model right - all the time. Apparently there isn't but the help is always enlightening.

Thanks Perry, I think the exercise in futility is good in a lot of ways. At least I get to cuss at the 'hell box' on a beautiful Sunday morning.

A little more for those who might be helped by such wandering thoughts and musings.

http://www.screencast.com/t/UOmw8LqB

Thanks always for the great help. I did get the slab to lower just as your dbx showed Glenn, but then the framing and sill plate were all wonky.

It seems that now the outside stem wall height is following the new slab height and the sill plate is gone and raising/lowering itself along with the slab height.

http://www.screencast.com/t/NArZUQvEL

Nice Bill.

I still call it the hell box but I bet others can find another name for it. Thought I would spend some time and try and figure the Structure dbx since it always stumps me. But alas it stumped me again. Still, after almost 15 years, simply no good reason (for me) to use it to create an accurate model. Here's my pathetic attempt and the plan in case anyone wants to play. I'm sure it's very very easy but my brain will not let the simplicity in.

http://www.screencast.com/t/YQAVj4BE6BvT

structre dbx.plan