DBCooper

Is that a backdrop or are you just using an image? It looks like an image that has been squished to mess up the aspect ratio. Not sure that this would be affected by camera clipping though. Maybe layout box clipping? At this point, I am just throwing out ideas. Probably best to post the plan.

Like Steve said, but I don't think the newels and rails will actually display in the reference unless the "show details" option is used. You might want to turn off the xor option too since it might make things look a little funny. Also, if you need to dimension to your newel posts, then you can manually add wall breaks. The program should put a newel right at the break. If you don't want your railings to keep merging and then losing your newel positions/dimensions, you can either change a setting (like layer) for one of the railings or go into your "general wall defaults" and turn off "auto merge walls".

Darn, Tea Time beat me to it. I guess I need to type faster. One other thing though, in X15 (but probably not back in X12), there is a general cabinet default that let's you change the threshold for automatic double doors. OOB, it is set to 24" but you can change it to whatever you want. So if you never wanted any 30" cabinets with double doors, you could change this default.

Vertically or horizontally? Doesn't really matter since they are both easy. If you have two doors vertically, and you only want one, just grab the top of the full height cabinet in a camera view and lower past the upper door. This will remove the upper doors. Then just raise it back up and you should only have one. If you have a double door and you want a single, open the cabinet dialog, click on the door, then change the "item type" from "door -auto right" to "door right" or "door left".

Wow, I suppose I should have tried it first. Apparently, this has nothing to do with templates. If you change the setting and save the plan, it's reset back to 11" when you open the plan back up. Sure seems like a bug to me. I went ahead and filed a bug report so hopefully, this is something that they can fix.

When you hover over the "create billboard image" tool, you should be able to hit F1 key to bring up help. As far as I know, the only difference between billboards and images is that images always face the camera and billboards don't. The scenery catalog in the core libraries just contains "materials", not "billboards". I think all you want is the texture file that is being used. If you copy one of these to your user catalog and open it up, you can see where the texture file is coming from. It's hiding inside of a zip file. If you want to use this same texture in a billboard, I don't know if you can use it if it's in a zip file, so you might need to manually extract that texture first. BTW, I'm not sure if there are any advantages using a billboard. Personally, I always just paint the material onto a surface because I think it is less work and easier to edit.

Layer sets control most of what is displayed. Each view on a layout can use a different layer set. You just need to make sure that if you want your views to show different things that they are using different layer sets. Saved Plan Views are just a better way of setting up and controlling all of your view settings in the plan rather than on the layout pages.

As far as I know, there is no way to import the general cabinet defaults. I'm not really sure why but it doesn't seem like a big deal because there are only a few settings. Even if you could import these settings, I don't see how this would be very helpful in your case. You want new plans to have a different default shelf spacing, right? Then just change it in your default template plan and be done with it. If you are working on a plan that was already started, you could change it there too but I still think it is easier to just change a single setting rather than go through and import settings. In fact, you might want to setup all of things that you don't want to do every time you start a new plan in your template because this could save you lots of work. Here is a tech article that might help: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00463/creating-and-using-a-plan-template.html

Not sure exactly what you are doing, but if all you did was import a dwg then it is just cad and you can select it and move it around however you want. If you are trying to reference a separate plan file using the reference display in X15, you can set the x, y, z offsets as well as the angle.

In X15, you can choose whether or not the window size includes the frame or not. I don't think that will help you, but maybe you want something similar for the casing? If so, you might want to send in a feature request then.

It took me a minute to figure out what was different from your electrical notes and your construction notes, but eventually I got it. The problem is the text style that is being used when the program is drawing the notes in the schedule on the cad detail. You can solve that by doing one of these: - Open up all of your electrical notes and change the text style to "use text style" and then "1/4 text style". Currently, you have them set to use the layer for the text style. - Or, open up the layers dialog for the cad detail, and change the "text, electrical" layer from "1 text style" to "1/4 text style". Either one of these should fix the problem, but the first one will match the construction schedule and the second one is less work.

Here are a couple of other tricks that might help: 1. If you turn on the layer for cabinet module lines, then you will get the lines between cabinet boxes. You will also get a bunch of other lines though, like the ones that will show you how the face frame is built. Maybe you want all the lines and maybe you don't. 2. If you only want the lines between boxes, then you can make every other cabinet a different material and you will get the lines. The material doesn't actually need to look any different. Just make a copy of the material you are using with a different name (like material_2) and paint it on every other cabinet. The picture below shows both methods (I just noticed that I forgot to paint the toekick on the middle cabinet with the same material as the cabinet).

It all depends on how you split the cabinet face. If you want the doors on the right side to be a different height than both the doors on the left, you need to split the front face vertically first. Your doors are all in the same horizontal group which means they all have to be the same height.

Glenn, you are the man! Just don't forget to convert the curve to a poly because it seems to do bad things.

You can tell if a view is a "live view" or a "plot line view" (or even if it is something else like a cad detail) by selecting it in layout and using "open object". You can also switch it from a live view to plot lines without having to resend it.

You could create a separate cabinet schedule for each room and then change the "schedule number prefix" to whatever letter you want. As far as changing the order in the schedule, you can just drag schedule rows up and down to sort the schedule how you want. There are also some training videos and support articles about schedules. You mighty want to start with these if you haven't looked at them yet: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/2422/schedules-overview.html

Very strange indeed. Both framing and slabs can only go into a cad block which is only supposed to be a 2d object. The slab will show up in a camera view though and the framing won't. Seems very inconsistent, so probably worth reporting to Chief. Would be nice if anything that showed up in a camera view would also be able to go into an architectural block.

Since framing can't go into architectural blocks and 3D solids can't go into cad blocks, I don't think you can do what you are saying you did. My guess is that you are making a cad block out of framing pieces. For some crazy reason Chief treats framing like cad instead of like architectural objects. They won't show up in a camera view unless you explode them. Chief has worked this way as far back as I can remember.

If you need an arbitrary shape, you can use the poly subtraction and intersection tools. 1. draw the polyline that cuts through the roof plane where you want it cut and then make it contain half of the roof plane. 2. select the roof plane and then subtract out the polyline. retain the original. 3. select the original roof plane and then intersect it with the polyline. you can now delete the original. You should have two separate roof planes that are cut by the poly shape you drew.

Do I think Chief should improve their terrain tools? Absolutely. I'm 100% in favor of that. But again, how does that help GMcGee's solve his problems?

Just as an FYI, Chief actually has a tech article explaining how to do exactly what you want: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00007/importing-and-applying-a-custom-picture-to-a-frame-computer-or-tv-screen.html

@Michael_GiaSo I gave you one of the down votes because, first, you are completely wrong because there is no problem modeling what he wants in Chief, and second, which is probably even more important, your post does nothing to actually help GMcGee solve his problems.

So the reason that you are having problems at the edges is because you still have two different elevations at the same point. Your elevation region is one height and the ends of your elevation lines are at a different height and they are right on the edge of the elevation region. Try Chopsaw's suggestion of pulling the elevation lines back from the region. Then the terrain can adjust from one elevation to the next one more smoothly.

An elevation region says that everything in that region is the same elevation. An elevation line says that everything along that line is the same elevation. Since your lines go through your region, the program can't create terrain at both heights and will give you strange results. If you convert the elevation region into a flat region, you will get better results. Probably still not ideal though because it won't do a great job with the cut and fill. To get better results, you will have to add/remove elevation data to taper off the edges how you would like them (as suggested by Chopsaw).

I don't think deck framing rebuilds with any of the other framing. You could try rebuilding the deck framing manually. Just select the deck room and look for the deck framing button. Not sure why it wouldn't rebuild automatically though. May want to report to Chief.