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Posts posted by DBCooper
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Check your active dimension defaults. Make sure your manual dimensions are set to locate the walls and the correct sides of the walls.
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Are you going to actually make cabinets with curved backs? If not, then just place straight back cabinets and use a custom curved counter to hide the gaps. If so, then you can make a curved back cabinet by making a curved front cabinet with the opposite curve and butt it up against the other one. You can then remove the face that is against a wall.
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As for the molding polyline, I think all you need to do is select the "same line type" handle that is just off the end of the molding line and drag it back to the wall (easiest while in a plan view). This should add a new line segment that is connected to the first and should miter at the corner.
All of this kind of begs the question though, why use 3D solids to design an entertainment center and not just use a cabinet? There are some good reasons why you might need to use solids but your picture looks like something the cabinet tools could handle.
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Units. If you are exporting pixels and you increase the resolution, you will just get a smaller picture and it won't look any better.
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This can be a problem whenever you have lights in an open below room. If you want the lights to attach to the ceiling automatically, you need to put them on the second floor and then they will only show up on the second floor.
If you did not have a vaulted ceiling, you could just place your lights on the first floor and manually raise the height so that they are on the ceiling. Since you have a vaulted ceiling and you want them to sit flush, you probably want to put them on the second floor. There are ways to manually make a custom rotated light fixture but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.
So the problem becomes how to get them to show up on the first floor plan and not on the second floor plan. There are a few different ways to do this.
To get the lights to now show up on the second floor, you can put them on their own layer and turn them off on the second floor but this means that your second floor needs to use a different layer set than the first floor. You can also hide them using a cad mask (a solid filled polyline). It sounds like you tried this but had problems with the draw order and I think all you need to do is use the "draw order" tools and bring the mask to the "front" drawing group.
To get the lights to show up on the first floor, you could just place the cad blocks for them on the first floor but this means you will have to move them around anytime you move a light on the second floor. You could also use the "reference display" tools to draw the lights from the second floor on the first floor. You would also need to put them on a their own layer and use a different layer set so you could just draw these lights.
This can also be a problem with other objects in open below rooms so these techniques can help you solve those as well.
A different way to solve this would be to use a single floor and make a "shelf" ceiling for the loft area. I think this solution only works well when you don't want a railing around the loft area. Here is a tech article that might help:
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File type also matters because some file formats are "lossy" (such as jpg) and some are not compressed (like bmp). I prefer to use png unless the people that you are sending them to request a specific format.
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Just to clarify, you can't import a revit model as a smart Chief model that you could then modify. You can import a 2D drawing using a DWG/DXF format that you could then trace over or you could import a 3D model using a format that revit can export that you could view but that's about it.
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Sounds like a bug to me. Post your plan or report it to Chief.
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My guess is that 90% of your problems are because you expect Chief to work like Revit. Chief is different. Although I think it is "easy to use", it is also pretty "hard to master". Give yourself lots of time to get over the learning curve. Try to forget everything you thought you knew about cad software and start from the beginning with the training videos: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/ There are also a bunch of other training resources available, including personal tutors.
Here are some thoughts and suggestions that might help you for now though.
- Temporary dimensions don't always work the same in plan views as they do in elevation views. They have been "evolving" over the last couple of versions and I think they are getting more powerful but I still don't think they have all of the glitches worked out. When you run into problems you should report them to Chief, either as a bug report or as a feature request depending on the type of problem you are having.
- Group selecting windows in an elevation view won't give you the distance from the next object like they do in plan view. This is exactly the kind of thing you should ask Chief to add. For now, I would probably just position them in a plan view.
- Temporary dimensions will normally be different depending on which side of an object you select. I don't think this works when group selecting though. Would be nice if we had the same ability or even a different way of controlling this. This also is the kind of thing you should ask Chief to add.
- I think the normal size of the temporary dimensions is going to be the same size as a manual dimension in whatever view you are working in. This means that if your temporary dimensions are too big, then your manual dimensions are probably going to be too big as well. That can also be a problem with the arrows. The defaults can be setup a lot of different ways but chances are your temporary dimensions are getting the text size from the text style that the layer is using. The arrows are going to be controlled by your current dimension defaults.
- Temporary dimensions can automatically shrink to try and fit better on the screen. Normally, this isn't really a problem since they are not going to be printed. If they are getting too small to read on the screen, you can change the "minimum display size" for them in your preferences.
- When all else fails, just draw a manual dimension and when you are done with it you can delete it. You can also keep it around and put it on a layer to manage your own "working" dimensions.
- There are lots of other tools that can sometimes work better then the temporary dimensions. For example, align/distribute, transform/replicate, multiple copy, point-to-point move, etc. Sometimes there is a much better way to move things than just using temporary dimensions. When working with the sizes of objects, and not just the positions, it can sometimes be easier to just use the dialog.
- I see you have angle snaps turned off. This can lead to all kinds of problems when you have things on strange angles. Do yourself a favor and keep them turned on. You can change the angle increments in your general plan defaults if you don't like the default 15 degrees.
Hopefully, this info helps. Keep asking questions as you run into problems. People on this forum are almost always around to help.
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First, it's better to put pictures directly into your posts instead of making people download a pdf. Second, your picture is too small to be able to see many details.
There are at least two ways to model a window like that. One way is to make a double hung window and then set the "component size" so that the lower portion is bigger than the upper portion. The other way is to model two separate windows stacked on top of each other and then block them into a mulled unit. In the picture below, the window on left is using the component size and the window on the right is a mulled unit. I would use the technique that matches the real world one the closest.
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You can turn it off for the whole roof plane in the dialog "roof size" table under "structure". I don't know if there is anyway to turn it off for just one side.
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You can use any door panel symbol you want and then just raise the bottom (by setting the bottom offset) and lower the top (by setting the panel height) so that the panel is smaller than the opening. I couldn't find a door panel that looked like your picture but it should be pretty easy to make one using poly solids or whatever.
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Instead of deleting your post, you could always add the answer for the next person that runs into this.
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On that note, camera callouts don't have all the same controls that normal callouts have. Would be nice if they did though.
@LukeMathew12 I am going to assume that you are just a clanker. If not, then I apologize for the mistake but it really doesn't make sense to make a post where you just repeat what has already been said.
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I am guessing that you were using X10 or maybe Version 10 since there was no C10 that I know of. In either case, the older the plan, the more problems you will see when you bring it into the latest version. At some point, it might be less frustrating to just draw it over using all of the new defaults.
It is possible to change your wall type so that you can extend the siding down to cover the floor trusses (look under layer properties in the wall type dialog) but normally you should not need to do this. Not sure what would cause this problem in an old plan though.
Might be best to post your plan so someone can poke around in it.
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The text used by the callout is controlled by the text style used by the layer it is on.
Go into the kitchen and bath view, select the camera. Look at the ALDO (active layer display options). It will tell you what layer the camera is using and what text style the layer is using. Do the same thing in the working plan view. If they are using different text styles, then the text will look different. If you want them to look the same, you will need to set them to use the same text style.
It looks like you have turned off "automatic" for the callout size as well. You might want to turn that back on because it looks pretty silly with the callout text outside of the callout.
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Are you actually using the last update to X16 (26.3.0)? I just took a look at the old update notes and it looks like they thought they fixed this. Seems a bit unfair to come back a year and a half later and complain about it now.
You might want to see what it looks like in X17 and if you are still seeing the problems then you should probably report them to Chief (instead of just a forum rant). I don't think there is much hope they are going to release any more updates to X16 but I would think that X17 updates are still possible since they just released one a couple of weeks ago.
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Yes, that is definitely a tech support issue.
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The arrowhead fill looks fine with line weights turned off. Can't see the fill with the line weights turned on because the lines are too thick.
Even though the polyline is marked as having a line weight of 0, I think the arrow cad block is overriding the polyline settings for some reason. I didn't have much time to see if I could find a solution but maybe someone else can.
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Try "tools->checks->referenced plans". In theory, it should show you all of your external references.
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What does the error message say?
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They also have a video, not sure if it covers all of the same stuff as the tech article since it is only 2 minutes long:
https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/248/creating-templates-from-existing-plans.html
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Your new "bold" arrowhead just looks like a thick line. Unless it is a closed polyline, with an open area inside of it, you can't use a fill style. If it is a proper polyline that can have a fill, you might want to post your plan so someone can play with the settings.

Chief 9.0 install on windows 7 professional
in General Q & A
Posted
See if any of this helps you:
https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/topic/9952-chief-architect-10-on-windows-7-windows-81-windows-10/