DBCooper

3D is easy. If you just put the 6 switches next to each other, they should auto gang. Plan view default is a little busy though. Not sure what you want it to look like but you could always put the switches on a different layer, hide them, and put a cad block showing whatever you want to show.

That nahimic service is a known issue: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/known-incompatibilities.html Don't be surprised if it comes back sometime if you update your OS or graphics card.

Just noticed this but did not see an announcement yet. https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/updates.html Update notes are here: https://cloud.chiefarchitect.com/1/pdf/documentation/chief-architect-x15-update-notes.pdf

Usually "reset toolbars" in your preferences should work. If not, see if this tech article helps: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00467/troubleshooting-missing-toolbars.html

There is a setting in your "3d view defaults" called "camera bumps off walls". I think this also controls whether or not cameras will go up stairs. You might want to see if turning this off also solves your problem.

I don't think there is an easy way to do that. You could probably do it by placing the doors into the plan as free standing objects. You might be able to do it by adding the door info you want in the schedule to the cabinet as custom field info on the OIP. I don't know if there is a way to make this semi-auto by using macros. Might not worth the trouble though. All of the door and drawer info shows up in the materials list though. You could maybe setup a material list view that just shows the cabinet door info, export it to a spreadsheet to edit, and then bring it back in as a text table. It won't update automatically though. Also, I'm guessing this was an accident, but it is probably not good to mark your original question as the "solution". Not unless you are going to explain to people how you solved the problem.

Try a reboot? Give us more info?

Boy that Tea Time always beats me by seconds! Good thing this isn't a competition.

I played around with this a bit and it seems like backdrops don't really work that well with elevation views. It looks like they are getting stretched to fit the original box size based on what is in the view and I couldn't find a way to update it. You might want to report this to Chief to see what they say. You might want to make your own "backdrop" by just using the image as a material on a surface that sits behind the house. Maybe someone else has better ideas?

Oh, the irony. I think Chief was actually hesitant to put in the ability to override dimensions, even though people had begged for it forever, just because they were afraid of having "inaccurate" dimensions on plans. I have yet to see any inaccurate dimensions (other than some funky rounding issues as mentioned above) but I have seen lots of inaccurate plans!

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.