DBCooper

That looks like a video card/driver issue. I would start with this tech article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00106/troubleshooting-3d-camera-view-display-problems-in-chief-architect.html If that doesn't help, then I would call support on Monday. BTW, it looks like you are using Home Designer. There is a separate forum for HD users here: https://hometalk.chiefarchitect.com/

I always find it best to play with lighting and materials in a simple test plan. Once the plan has a lot of stuff in it, it gets really hard to tell what effect the settings have by themselves. The light direction controls which way the light is pointing if you were to look at it from the top down. In the picture below, the light on the left has a -30 degrees angle, the one in the middle is 0, and the one on the right has a +30 degree angle. The tilt angle is the same for all of them. All of the boxes are directly in front of the lights but you will notice how the two on the sides are only partially in the light area. One reason you might not be seeing shadows is if your lights are not pointing where you think they are. I will let others with more knowledge comment about the other questions. My guess is that they will want you to post a plan to play around with it though.

You can also offset the casing from the niche.

Wall niches can have a custom molding added as a casing.

If you only reset the "wall top heights" and "wall bottom heights" it won't change any of your floor or ceiling heights. Basically, it will only reset your walls back to default heights when you have manually moved the wall top/bottom up/down (which is something you usually don't need to do to change your ceiling heights).

To post a plan on the forum, you can either zip it (ie: make it a compressed archive file) or remove things that are not needed so that the plan is small enough to post. The other thing a lot of people do is put it online somewhere like dropbox and just post a link here. To contact tech support, you need to go here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/

Seems to work for me, at least I could not see any difference between a dwg with depth cue on and one with it off. Have you tried sending the engineer the dwg with depth cue turned off? I'm not sure why the engineer would need it turned on. If you want more help, then you will probably want to post the plan you are using or send it to tech support.

See if this tech article helps: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00467/troubleshooting-missing-toolbars.html

Looks like a video card or driver issue that is similar to this problem: https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/topic/39627-chief-architect-x15-standard-view-walls-not-showing/

You might want to check out this tech article: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-02772/troubleshooting-library-download-issues.html If that doesn't help, then I would call tech support on monday.

A similar question came up recently: https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/topic/39476-where-to-set-the-line-weight-of-a-multi-selection-box/

That picture is very small but I think you can get what you want pretty easy with these settings: Door style - glass panel Panel frame width - uncheck uniform, set right width to some large value Garage vertical panels - 5, check all glass

"1,1" just means that the note is the first note listed in two different schedules. If you opened up the second schedule and changed the "schedule number start" to something like 3, then it would be "1,3" instead.

I often like to use watercolor or PBR views with line drawings on top of them. Here is a tech article that might give you some more ideas: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01142/creating-an-image-for-use-in-a-brochure-flyer-or-website.html

BTW, if you ever find a molding you want to use, and it is not oriented the way you want, you can always right-click on it in the library and use the "place molding profile" tool to pace it into a plan or cad detail. Once it is in the plan you can rotate it or reflect it (or whatever else you want) and then save it back into your user library.

Did you use the "rotate plan view" tool? I have seen cases where this will mess up things like text and labels.

2) as TT has explained, you can control the casing for each side of interior doors by checking "separate trim and materials". In some cases though, you might want to keep the casing but allow it go into the wall. You can go into your "general plan defaults" and turn on "ignore casing when resizing" for these cases.

Solid railings have to be drawn next to the stairs, not on top of them.

You can also just choose "edit source material" in the "create copy of material" dialog.

You might also need to rename the column. It can look pretty silly when "3D Elevation" is vertical making a very large column header row.

Been bitten by that one myself. The "rooms" layer is another one that will get you.

You can't have one material with two different properties. You need to have two different materials if you want them to look different. You can either make a copy in the library or make a copy in the plan (but then it won't be available to use in other plans). As for the lamp, it all depends on how the symbol was set up to begin with. If the light bulb was assigned a different material than the cover by the symbol designer then you will be able to apply different materials in Chief. If not, then it's a stupid symbol and I wouldn't use it. You could modify the symbol in order to do this but it would be somewhat of a pain to do in Chief depending on how many surfaces you need to edit.

You can rent X15 at $199/month whenever you need it instead of renting it for a whole year. You could even rent HD Pro at $59/month. Just be aware that the Pro version won't be able to do everything that Premier can so you might open your plan and find some things are locked.

You should be able to make one yourself pretty easy. Just need to make sure your panel material is separate from your frame material. You should only have to build one and when the door is doubled it should just work. You probably don't need to make the hardware as part of the door symbol either. MarkMC posted something a while back on how to make door symbols here: https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/topic/36470-custom-door-maker-plan/

...and here is a video too if you want. https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/261/offsetting-deck-railings.html?playlist=94