DBCooper

Is your stair against a wall? As far as I can tell, they only do something when the stair is against a wall.

It looks like they removed the checkbox to "add an arrow" from the text dialogs on purpose because it is listed in the latest update notes: https://cloud.chiefarchitect.com/1/pdf/documentation/chief-architect-x18-update-notes.pdf Personally, I won't miss it because I think it was more work to add an arrow using the checkbox ever since they added the diamond handle. I think you should give it a try but if it is really something you are going to miss then you should report it to Chief. I kind of doubt they will bring it back but if enough people complain you never know.

Is the callout size set to "automatic"? If not, then the callout will be whatever size you set it to (regardless of whatever the text size is set to). If it is set to automatic, then it will get the size from the text. When you open the callout and go to the "main text style", is it set to "use layer"? If not, then it can be set to use a particular text style or even a custom text size. If it is set to "use layer", then what layer is the callout on and what text style is the layer set to use? Basically, the size of the callout is usually controlled by the text style of the layer the callout is on. If you still can't figure it out, then you might need to post your plan.

In normal situations, I think the room with the taller ceiling will always determine the wall height. The most obvious reason why this doesn't work is when you have already manually edited the wall height. You can open up the wall dialog and then check the option for "default wall height" and all should be good again. I think there are more complex cases where this may work different but you would probably have to post the plan to get more help.

Because there is nothing in it. There's nothing in it in X17 either so it has nothing to do with X18.

In all versions of Chief that I can remember, you can control this using layers: In X18, you can also turn it off for individual rooms, or for certain room types, in the room dialog on the label panel.

Yeah, I would call that a bug. You should probably report this to Chief.

Not your link Doug. Estee's link.

Is that a deck with auto built deck framing? If so, maybe X18 is having a problem with something related to the deck room that X17 didn't have a problem with. I recommend posting the x17 plan so that someone can check it out. Either that or just report it to Chief tech Support because anything that works in X17 that doesn't work in X18 is what I would consider a bug.

@EsteeChief The link to the movie file in your post above doesn't work. That's not a big deal though because a movie probably won't help anymore than your pictures already do. I recommend posting a plan file so that someone can poke around in it to see what is going on and if they can figure out how to make it work. In order to get your plan small enough to post, you should probably make a copy of it and delete everything that doesn't have anything to do with the problem. You will also need to save it as a compressed archive file, like a zip file. I don't know how to do this on a mac but on a windows machine all you need to do is right-click on the plan file and use the "compress to zip" tool.

My guess is that it has something to do with how you edited either the sink or the hole for the sink. Maybe you resized one and not the other? Not really sure why it would work differently when it is against the wall but it probably has to do with the auto counter overhang. When a cabinet is against a wall you won't get any overhang on the back side. The extra amount must be affecting the hole since the sink looks like it is pushed against the back of the cabinet.. At any rate, this is all just guess work. If you want better answers, you should probably post the plan. You could probably just post a plan with a single room and just that cabinet to make it easier for people to play with.

Do you have automatic rebuild turned on for the wall framing? If not then you need to rebuild the wall framing manually. Try selecting the wall and use the "build framing" edit button. If you have auto rebuild on, or you have tried manually building the wall framing, and it still doesn't show then you might have messed up the wall definition. Make sure the "main layer" of the wall type is set to be framing and all of the other layers are not. The only other obvious thing is to make sure the wall framing layer is turned on. If none of that helps, then you should probably post the plan.

You guys are too funny. I just re-looked over the what's new in X18 list and there wasn't a whole lot in there related to rendering so it certainly doesn't seem like Chief is making it their main focus. Of course, there wasn't a whole lot in there related to stairs either but that really wasn't the topic of this thread was it? https://cloud.chiefarchitect.com/1/pdf/marketing/x18-new-features.pdf

Drawing an interior wall shouldn't really change the overall length of any exterior walls. You may be picking up dimensions to the interior walls though and depending on how your dimensions are setup this may be adding the odd values. You might want to post a picture of what you are seeing or even better, the plan you are seeing it in.

The point of my picture was to show you all of the new tools you will get when you click on the "edit label tool". I just assumed *most* people could find the "edit label tool" without a picture of it. Silly me.

You should be able to do this using the "room type defaults". First, create a copy of the room label text style and set it to be bold and underlined. Now you can go into your room type defaults and setup the label for the room types you want to use the new text style. You could also setup your room type defaults so that certain rooms would go onto different layers and then setup the text style in the layers the way you want.

The only cases that I have seen where switches were made into a "new" gang was for cases where they did the goofy auto gang in the old version. You could really only tell if it was auto ganging in the old version by looking at the switches in a camera view and see them all merged together. It sounds like you didn't really care about that but that you care that they are now closer together in plan views. You could open the new gangs, turn off the wall plate display, and then adjust the plan view spacing to your liking. The easiest solution would still be to just select them all and explode them. This just seems like a bug to me. Most other Chief things, like mulled units and architectural blocks, will reverse when you reverse the plan. The new electrical gangs don't seem to do this. Not sure if Chief did this on purpose or if it was just an oversight on their part, but in either case, I would send it in to them.

Yes but now you can customize a hot key for "display label" which means you can use it to turn labels off and then back on again without ever having to open up the dialog. And even better, the hotkey will work for any object that has a label where I think the delete key only worked with room labels. Another problem I ran into with using the delete key to hide a room label is that you also lost all of your custom changes.

Yeah, it's probably either a saved cad detail or cross section that was already annotated. It could always be something else like just a cad block, picture or pdf but I don't think the program generated it automatically. You can often tell what kind of view it is by the tab at the top of the window. The small graphic will tell you what type of view it is and the name of the view should also give you a clue. You can also open up the project browser and the program will use a different graphic for any saved views that are opened. If you still can't figure it out, then you should post the plan.

They probably won't do anything unless you ask them to: https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/forum/8-suggestions/

If they were in a gang in the old version, why wouldn't you want them to be in a gang in the new version? What's so annoying about the new gangs? I'm not really sure there is a way of stopping the program from doing this other than going back into the old version (any version before X17) and either moving them apart or putting them into an architectural block. At that point I think you are better off just grabbing them and exploding them. If you use the "marquee select similar" tool, you can grab them all and explode all of them at once.

All of what I say below is for Chief Architect and I assume that Home Designer basically works the same but there are probably going to be some differences. So if you want a gable roof over that bump out, you either have to build it using the manual roof tools or you have to rebuild the automatic roofs. If you rebuild the automatic roofs, then any manual changes you have made will be lost so you might have to redo them. If you want to build that gable manually, then you will have to learn how to use the manual roof tools. There is a bit of a learning curve for building roofs manually but there should be lots of training videos that will help. Personally, I like to work with the automatic roof planes turned on as long as I can and I only turn them off when I absolutely need to. I don't know what you needed to change to turn off the automatic roofs but my guess is that you might not need to do this. The automatic roofs used to be rather basic many years ago so it was pretty common for people to turn them off and just do things manually. These days they can handle most common situations so I can avoid manual changes in many of my plans. So assuming the changes you made manually were pretty easy, I would recommend that you just rebuild the roof using the automatic tools to get the new gable. Then you could either do the manual changes again or see if you can figure out how to make the automatic roof do what you need.

Do you have "auto rebuild" turned on for your roofs? You should be able to find it in the "build roof" dialog. If auto rebuild is off, changing the settings in the wall dialog won't actually change your roofs until you rebuild them. Same as moving a wall or pretty much anything else that might affect your roofs. If you do have auto rebuild turned on, then it should work so you might want to post your plan so that someone can check it out. There are some more obscure settings that may or may not affect your situation, such as having made roof baseline polylines or the minimum alcove size. BTW, HD Pro 2013 is pretty old at this point so there probably are not going to be a lot of people that still have it. Some of the advice you get may not work for you. Also, there is a separate forum for Home Designer and you might find someone still using an old version there: https://hometalk.chiefarchitect.com/

I don't think you can so you might want to send Chief a bug/request. You could always use something other than a room box, such as a polyline with a fill and label. You could even fillet the corners to give you a similar look to the old boxes. I don't think there is an easy way to add in the box dimensions though (unless one of the macro experts knows how). None of this will be as easy or automatic as it was before though. Actually, if you want a much more automatic "hack", you could use a wall cabinet. I choose a wall cabinet because I didn't want a countertop and then I could set the corners to be rounded. The automatic label can then be the room name (just typed in manually) followed by the size using %width.to_s("'-\"")% x %depth.to_s("'-\"")%. Setup a fill style and voila, you have something that looks like an old room box. If you actually want to build the walls using the room boxes, then this won't be very useful.

You can control whether or not the living are is calculated based on wall surfaces or main layer in the "general plan defaults". You can control which rooms are included or not in the room dialog. Other than that, you can select the outside of a building (aka the "exterior room") and then use the "make living area polyline" to generate the area used so that you can then edit it to go wherever you like. You can find more info here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00424/understanding-how-the-square-footage-or-living-area-is-calculated.html