OldBarnDesign

We are Sketchup to Chief converts here... we moved to Chief in May and are still converting all our plans from SU to Chief. It's been an undertaking... primarily because we are having to learn Chief, establish templates, and rework the entire look and feel of our plans. The first plan took me 140+ hours. I'm in the middle of our second plan and will probably get it done in ~30 hours. I couldn't imagine there being an easy way without the Chief engineers coming up with an importer. As somebody mentioned, Sketchup geometry isn't "smart" geometry by default. Chief geometry, outside of the CAD primitives, are parametrically driven. You give it a set of parameters (e.g. wall thickness, height, length, etc) and Chief creates the geometry automatically. Sketchup has some smart components and people write Ruby scripts to make them smart, but it's a far cry from what Chief can do. Best of luck!

Thanks Cooper, This could work because we have a network drive we both can access.Do you know if moving the User Library will break existing plans that make use of those assets? I guess I could run an experiment to find out,

Thanks Maxie, that CAD manager is me! LOL. Right now it's just a two person outfit, me and my wife. We are both Chief users, but I'm the tech guy - I have 20+ years of software development under my belt which puts me in charge of keeping all our projects under revision control and managing all the library assets. Just trying to figure out the best way to do it with Chief. I also noticed your "Texas Hill Country" location! Where are you now? Wimberley? Buda? Fredericksberg? Hamilton is a cute small town, once home of "Brushy" Bill Roberts, who claimed to be Billy The Kid! My wife designed (she's the one with the actual architecture degrees) and we built our home on Lake Granbury. We live on one of the canals and are in the middle of building out lake wall/dock so we can get a boat. We moved to the lake to enjoy the water, looking forward to enjoying it!

Thanks Rabbit, Right now I'm exporting my entire library and sharing it with my wife. Are you advocating that I export one symbol at at time as new symbols are added, then added them to her User library individually? The problem with exporting my entire library is that when I import it on her computer, I have to launch Chief on her computer, then go delete the old library then import the new one. Not hard, just a manual process.

Does anybody have experience sharing a User Catalog among multiple users, say like in an office, if you have that catalog on a shared network drive? I know it's possible to export and import catalogs, but I'd like to make an addition to a User Catalog and it be seen by another user without having to export/import. At worst they would have to restart Chief to see any additions. Thanks! Cody

I think I found it. Under the Vector View options I needed to uncheck "Apply Shading Contrast."

I imagine somebody has seen this and it's a noob operator error... When creating wall elevations using a color vector view, I get a different color for the same material depending on the view. The variation seems orientation dependent as all "north/south" facing walls have one shade, and all "east/west" walls have a different shade. That would seem to indicate that it's a lighting thing but even when I turn off lighting in the camera views I still get the issue. With the images below, the cabinets in the top picture seem have a blue tint to them compared to the white cabinets on the right. Same material. And of course, you can easily see the difference in wall color. I'll keep playing around and searching for a solution but figured there it's something dumb I'm missing. Thanks! Cody

Thank you!

I've been wanting to do something similar, but I have not been able to figure out how to do a square footage table exactly how you've specified where you delineate between porch/garage/living square footages. The best I can do thus far is to use the Custom Schedule Tool and generate a square footage table per room. That's pretty easy to do. Creating Custom Schedules (chiefarchitect.com)

Hi Tony, just curious how you offset the window labels from the window itself? For me the labels always appear on top of the window? Thanks!

Thanks y'all, found it. Your suggestions helped. I renamed the Farmhouse plan and then was able to see that I accidentally sent a square footage schedule from the Farmhouse plan to the other project's layout file.

Thanks for the replies, y'all are great. Here is a screenshot... so if I start Chief fresh and open the MOGL-House.layout file, it realizes it needs both the MOGL-House.plan file AND the unwanted .plan - Live Oak Farmhouse.plan. It finds and resolves just fine, and actually opens both referenced files it depends on and shows them in the project browser. What I want to figure out which thing in my layout it's using from that Live Oak Farmhouse.plan. One idea I guess would be to temporarily move the Live Oak plan to somewhere else so that it doesn't find it and see where the empty boxes are?

Hey all, My layout file is referencing an additional .plan file in a different project. I'm not sure what I did. I know how to determine which plan it's referencing, I just don't know what element it's needed from that other file. Is there a way to figure that out so I can decouple it? Thanks!

Thanks for pointing out that little check button. Actually, the problem was that it WAS checked. If I uncheck it then I can modify the texture just on that surface and was able to fix it. I would have never guessed "Global Symbol Mapping" = "Same texture coordinates," then I went and RTFM'ed that option and there it is... I swear I search and try to find the answer before asking a question here, and sometimes it just sits under your nose. Thanks again for the quick help! Cody

Hi folks, wondering if there is a better way to fix this texture alignment issue below. Two different surfaces, same material, the textures don't align. I know that you can horizontally and vertically shift the texture in the material definition but that shifts the texture on all surfaces not just the problem surface. Brute force fix would be to copy the material and horizontally shift the copy until it aligns, but I would hope there is a better way. You would think you could just shift the texture on the problem surface, because I would imagine from a computer graphics perspective, this is just a texture coordinates issue. Thanks, Cody

Thanks again all, BTW Rabbit I found your YT channel a few weeks back before I realized you were on the forum. I enjoy your content. I picked up CA in June and have been drinking from the firehose since. Cody

Apologies, my brain missed the "Rebuild surfaces" part of your post. Kind of important I'm blaming the Texas heat and not my reading.

Thanks! That indeed did the trick! And then you rebuild the dimension remains. Nice!

I just answered one of my questions regarding the elevation saying in 10 1/8' rather than 10' 1 1/8". I reread it and realized it's a display format thing not a measurement thing. Man that was sneaky, my framers would miss that. I changed the settings for how the units are displayed and now it matches. My main question is still outstanding.

Hey Everyone, I have a question about auto story pole elevations when it comes to finding the top of a knee wall plate. In an exterior elevation, CA doesn't seem to find the top of the plate when I create a roof on top of an automatically generated knee wall. I made a brief video to explain what I'm looking for. Thanks in advance! Cody StoryPole.mp4

Thanks for this! I forgot that I didn't get back to you, but this worked! Cody

Thanks everyone!

Hey fellow Chief users, What audio/video capture software are you all using to record the videos and your audio explanations when helping users? Thanks! Cody

I retreated back to build 24.1.0.46 and everything seems to be fine now, so something with the new release, at least for me.