DBCooper

Like Mick said, you can use Chief on either a mac or pc or both (just not at the same time). Make sure whatever computer you buy will meet the system requirements: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html Chief also has a blog article with some tips for buying a new computer: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/blog/computer-for-design-and-gaming/

Did you make the "open below" room by changing the room type to open below or did you place a hole in the floor/ceiling? Might also want to check either the floor below or floor above. Again, if you want anything other than a semi-random guess, you should post the plan.

Couple of things... First, there is an option for mulled units called "treat as door" that will make the unit act more like a door. Second, if you want to show either door open in a camera view, you just need to use the tab key to select it. This allows you to have one or both open and you can even have them open different amounts. Still might be nice if we had the ability to set the width of each component for a double door, just like we can for window components.

You could go through the "open symbol" dialog and change an outlet from being "wall mounted" to being "floor mounted". You could also put it on a fake wall and mark the wall as invisible. But why not just use electrical schedule with the actual outlets that are in the plan?

You have a symbol in your plan, K-10493 (possibly a kohler toilet?), that has more than 65,535 vertices. 3DS export doesn't like this. My guess is that it doesn't show up when you open the 3DS file in another program but maybe it shows up and is missing pieces. One way you may be able to fix it is to replace the symbol with a generic one that has less surfaces. I suppose you could also break the symbol up into two or more separate symbols but this would be a little bit more involved.

One way to find things like this is to turn off all layers and then turn on each layer one at a time. Since ceiling/platform holes will normally be put on your cad default layer, I would start with just turning on that layer to see if you can find it. The other thing you can do is post your plan (or a link to it) on this forum. One of the more experiences users will probably be able to find it pretty quickly. And if you are lucky, they will tell you how they did so that you will learn a trick or two.

Have you tried %description%?

You need to use "open symbol" instead of "open object". Seems really silly that we have both of these dialogs and we should just have one. It's also easy to find in help by searching for "flush mounted".

In X14, all you need to do is copy this into your door label: %width.to_s("'-\"")% x %height.to_s("'-\"")% I got this from calling tech support and talking to someone that really knows how this stuff works.

Ok, TT. I imagine it's really hard to find clubs short enough for those little green arms of yours. You can turn off normal auto fillers and/or the corner join fillers. Not sure what else you want but sounds like you might want to make a feature suggestion. And while we are speaking of feature requests, I think what would be really useful for cases like this is if we could just go ahead and edit the shape of a cabinet just like a polyline.

I have found that when cabinets are joined front corner to front corner that they work best when you make sure the corners are lined up perfectly. The program seems to allow them to join even when you are sloppy though (like t-time said, any time they are within 3" or so). Reasons why they might not join would be things like they are not the same type of cabinet, using architectural blocks, not oriented the same way, and who knows how many other things might cause this. You can also turn off the ability to corner join in the general cabinet defaults but since they are joined on one side but not the other, this doesn't seem like the case. You should either post the plan or send it to Chief if you want a better answer. BTW, even if you get the cabinets to join at the corners, there will still be holes in the tops and bottoms that might show up in camera views. For some reason, the program does not fill these spaces even though it looks like it should from a plan view. If you need to show a solid top, you might have to go ahead and use a poly-solid to cover these holes.

First, just to be perfectly clear, I would not do it this way. I would build the dishwasher in one cabinet and then put a drawer bank cabinet next to it. Easy peasy. That said, it is easier to put a dishwasher and drawer bank into a single cabinet than what Adam is showing above. You don't need to mess around with the symbol at all. All you need to do is to split the whole front face by clicking on the top level "vertical layout parent" and use the "split vertical" button. This will give you two side-by-side dishwashers and then you can replace one of them with a drawer and then modify the face as needed. It will even look reasonably correct in plan view.

Personally, I always liked the desktop viewer. It's much simpler to explain how to use to someone who is not familiar with cad software than the trial version and it doesn't have any of the limitations that the mobile viewer has. It does require that the person has a computer that is capable of running X14 though. These really aren't that bad and pretty much any desktop computer that is only 4-5 years old should run it just fine. Here is the link to the desktop viewer (I don't know why you have to fill out a form to get it since you don't have to do this for the mobile viewer): https://www.chiefarchitect.com/resources/viewerrequest.php

You can't. You could export a plan from revit using a cad format, like dxf/dwg, and then import that into Chief but it still won't be a Chief model. You could either bring it in as 2D cad that you could then trace over or as a 3D symbol that you could view.

Couple of thoughts... It's pretty hard to see what is going on in those pictures because they are so dark. Maybe my eyes are just getting old and tired? If you want Chief to look into this problem, you probably need to report it to them. If you want someone on the forums to look into it, then you should post the plan.

As far as I know, you can't dimension to internal cabinet shelves. You can do a view to cad detail or you could add some cad lines, but that won't be "live". You can dimension to cabinet openings though. Just give your cabinet 3 openings (including the one at the bottom) and then you can dimension to them. You won't be able to adjust the depth of the separations between the openings like you can with shelves but this probably doesn't matter for any elevation views. The picture below is an actual elevation view with live dimensions.

Another thing you can do is download the actual plan and layout (not the pdf) and take a look at how stuff was built. This won't necessarily help you with the things that are just images on the layout but for anything that is an actual view you can then open it up. There is also a blog post with a whole bunch of how to info here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/blog/austin-webinar-series

I think most RV's and tiny houses would be fairly straight forward. An airstream might be a bit more challenging because of all the curved surfaces. (And by a "bit more challenging" I really mean a major pain because we all know how much Chief likes curves in more than one dimension). Do some searches on the forums because I remember someone a while back had a pretty good model of a tiny home that was actually on top of a trailer frame that he got from somewhere.

Wall framing doesn't rebuild automatically unless you turn on auto wall framing. With auto wall framing off, every time you modify a wall then you will need to manually rebuild the framing. If your framing is not building correctly, then you have probably made a mistake in the wall definition. Your walls may not be building correctly for the same reason or maybe you have messed up the wall connections. In any case, you will probably get better answers if you post a plan.

I think you are overestimating the cost of PBR. Even Home Designer Architectural has PBR and Chief sells it for only $250.

I think it depends on the country (or language?). I don't think there is a universal metric standard.

It's usually better to post actual pictures instead of pdf's. Is that a manual bay or an auto one? I just tried something similar with an auto bay and it worked fine. You probably want to post your plan or contact tech support.

Or maybe you could use a "polyline distribution path"?

Under the current system: 1 year cost = $3295 2 year cost = $3295 + $595 = $3890 3 year cost = $3295 + $595 + $595 = $4485 4 year cost = $3295 + $595 + $595 + $595 = $5080 Under the new system: 1 year cost = $1995 2 year cost = $1995 + $1995 = $3990 3 year cost = $1995 + $1995 + $1995 = $5985 4 year cost = $1995 + $1995 + $1995 + $1995 = $7980 This of course assumes that the prices won't change in the future (but I suspect they will since that is what prices do). So the new system is less expensive at first but more expensive over time. That's probably a good argument for keeping your SSA current. I wonder if they will let us buy multiple years of SSA at today's price?

Make sure that both "include in schedule" and "show schedule callout" is also checked on the schedule panel of the arch block dialog.