DBCooper

That's not a very easy question to answer because making your own symbols can either be very easy or very hard depending on what type of symbol you are trying to build. In simplest terms, a symbol is just a collection of 3D surfaces that will show in a camera view, a collection of 2D cad that will display in a plan view, and some other settings that help control how it works in Chief. The 2D cad may or may not represent the 3D surfaces. Think about an electrical switch. What you see in plan view has very little to do with what the 3D surfaces look like in a camera view. So editing the cad block for a symbol, or replacing it with a different cad block, won't really have any affect on what it looks like in a camera view. To build your own symbols with the 3D surfaces you want, you can use any tool or combination of tools in Chief that creates 3D surfaces. Poly solids, moldings, and other shapes can be very helpful. One of my favorite tools that a lot of people don't think about is cabinets. Cabinets can really be considered a building block tool and many things can be created using cabinet components as a starting point. Here is a tech article that has some good general info (and it includes links to some other related articles): https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00761/modeling-custom-3d-objects.html There is also a lot of good info on the symbols forum (which is also a good place to go for how to and free stuff): https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/forum/9-symbols-and-content/ Be careful though because trying to design the perfect symbol can really be a massive time sink. Don't underestimate how valuable an existing symbol that is "close enough" really is.

There is no good way to explode a symbol in Chief. You can manually delete surfaces in a camera view and then create a new symbol out of what you have left (and what ever else you have added) but if you are trying to remove a bunch of surfaces this will be a big pain. You would be better off only exporting out the components you want to keep from 20-20 and then bringing them in to Chief separately. In my opinion (which is probably worth every penny you paid for it), you should not try to do your design in 20-20 and then use Chief for your renderings. You would be far better off using Chief for all of your design work, working drawings, and presentation views/walkthroughs and then only use 20-20 for what it is actually good at (pricing/ordering). You could actually do everything in Chief but you might have to jump through some more hoops to do your pricing (and convince the manager that this is the best way to go). There are a number of people I have seen on the forums that moved to Chief from 20-20 that might have some better advice about how to make the transition easier. I believe that there are some that only use 20-20 for pricing and some that don't use it at all anymore. You might want to post a new question geared more towards how you can use 20-20 and Chief together.

Assuming that you are using "text styles" (instead of custom text) everywhere, then you should be able to change most of them all at once. Just go into your text style defaults and then you can group select all of the text styles to change the font in one step. Then do the same for all of your rich text defaults (since they can't use text styles).

You could try zipping the plan, posting it somewhere online like dropbox, or strip things out of the plan until it is small enough to post.

You can also put polylines into a schedule. So you could generate polylines for the rooms you want to show and generate a schedule that shows the areas. You can even combine the polylines as needed to just show garage space, patio space, and living areas.

You have control over how living area is calculated. You can have it go to the outside of wall surfaces or the main layer (framing) in your general plan defaults. You can also change which rooms are included in the room dialog. You can use the "make living area polyline" tool to generate a poly showing the area you want and turn on the label showing the area. See if this support article helps: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00424/changing-how-square-footage-is-calculated.html

Dimensions can't be scaled in Chief. They are always drawn at actual scale so on a layout they will be in paper coordinates instead of plan coordinates. If you want the ability to scale them, then you should put in a feature request but my guess is that they probably won't make this a high priority. My recommendation is that you forget about what autocad can do and learn how to do it the Chief way. In the long run, I think you will find it is actually much more efficient. In Chief, you should put all of your dimensions in your plan. If you want some to appear in some views, but not others, you can control this through layers and layer sets. You can also control this using your dimension defaults and can save all of your active defaults for any view you want so this can become fairly automatic. In your bathroom case, you could set up a saved bathroom view with bathroom dimension defaults that will go on a bathroom dimension layer. Once this is setup, ideally in your template plan, then all of this can be very easy to use. More info about using dimensions can be found in these training videos: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/playlists/92/dimensions.html I also highly recommend this video series that covers saved plan views and active defaults: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/playlists/100/saved-plan-views-layers-annotations.html Good luck and welcome to Chief.

This may all depend on how you created the molding. If your crown molding is done through the room dialog, you may have a wall that is marked as not having a molding. You may also have a room divider or other wall and you may have one room without the crown molding. If your crown molding is done through a cabinet soffit, a soffit can span multiple rooms and the moldings can get messed up when this happens. I have sometimes used a countertop instead of a soffit to solve problems like this. As Chris pointed out, you can also convert a room molding into a molding polyline and then modify the shape or turn on/off the molding on any edges you need to. It would be nice if we could also do this for cabinet/soffit/counter moldings.

These might help you get started: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00284/using-the-reflect-about-object-tool.html https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00012/duplicating-a-floor-plan-on-another-level.html https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-02917/rotating-a-structure-or-plan-view.html

If you are using a back clipped cross section, is your back clip past the wall? I have seen problems if my back clip was right on the wall. Do you have a large terrain model? Is your plan far away from the origin? I have seen problems from these as well. Other than that, I would post the plan.

Here is a tech article that might help: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00516/sharing-a-plan-file-with-a-home-designer-user.html

See what happens if you remove the backdrop. Maybe it is affecting the overall scene lighting. Also, it helps to know what rendering technique you are using (pbr, standard, pbr with RTRT, CPU raytrace, ...). There is a training video with some good info here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/10205/3d-rendering-tips-and-tricks.html?playlist=102 There is also a blog article with some good tips and tricks here: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/blog/rendering-tips-and-tricks/

"OIP" looks like it might be pretty easy, "OIP (1)" looks like it will be a little more challenging (if you want to match the ornate details), and "download" looks pretty tough (but I still think this is possible, just a lot of work). There are a number of things you can do directly through the window dialog, such as setting up the shape and lites to be what you want and then adjusting the casings to match what you want. Get to know how all of the casing, lintel, and sill tools work and what you can do with custom profiles. The next thing you can do is to attach symbols to the outside of the window using the "treatments" section in the window dialog. You will find some examples of things you can attach in the "millwork" library. When all else fails, you might have to create your own custom symbols for the millwork you need and just place it in the plan up against the wall. The other thing you can do is search for some of these millwork symbol online. If you are planning on purchasing some of these things, then there is a possibility that the manufacturer already has 3d models that you can download and import into the program. All of what I have said above is pretty generic info. If you want more specific info, then you need to ask more specific questions. On a side note, you should probably not mark your own post as the "solution", not unless you add enough information that someone else can figure out what the solution actually is.

I think David means that you need to select the view (or layout box) that you want to relink and then look for the relink button on the edit toolbar.

Here are some more things that might help: If you marquee select in base cabinet mode, you will only select base cabinets. If you marquee select in wall cabinet mode, you will only select wall cabinets. If you marquee select in full height cabinet mode, you will select all of the full height, base, and wall cabinets. You can change the main door and drawer style for all of them at the same time. If you have already applied a custom door style to an individual face item, then these will not update. If I want to select all of the wall and full height cabinets to change the crown molding, I will marquee select the wall cabinets first and then add in the full height ones by shift clicking on them (because usually I don't have very many). When painting a door style from the library, you can also use the scoping tools to apply that same door style to just a single face item (component), the whole cabinet (object), all of the cabinets in the same room, all of the cabinets on the same floor, or all of the cabinets in the plan. It will only change the doors that match the original one that you clicked on though. You can also use these scoping tools when paining hardware from the library.

Have you tried just placing the end panel as a free-standing object? Basically, any library door style can be placed in a plan as free-standing object. Just place, resize, and then position it where you want. If you want/need more customization, then I would create one using a cabinet. The problem with using a partition is that it can only be a simple slab. If you used a 3/4" deep wall cabinet, you could customize the front to be whatever you want.

That's a clever trick. I tried creating a circle/box around the light and the text to control the center and then changing the line style to invisible but this doesn't work because the electrical object always overrides the line styles in the cad block . The other thing you could do though is completely remove the text from the cad block and then just use the electrical label instead. You would probably need to do this for all electrical objects though and that might be a bit of work to setup. What we really need is to control the insertion point like we can for normal cad blocks.

In your first picture, you are showing us what your window defaults are set to. My guess is that the window you are showing in your camera view is not set to match your defaults. BTW, only the casing sizes can be set to "use default" which makes them "dynamic defaults". The casing profile is not dynamic. This means that when you change your window defaults, any windows that are already in the plan can have their casing sizes update automatically but the profile won't. If you want to make the window in your plan match your defaults, you could just delete it and place a new one. You could also open it up and modify it manually. There are a number of other ways to do this but since you are new, I won't confuse you by going into them all.

How do you want it? You could try the driveway tool. It has the advantage of following your terrain without as much fussing as something like a poly solid. Assuming that you want something more decorative, you could try using multiple-connected driveway segments with different materials. A picture of what you are trying to model would help people make better suggestions.

I like to make door symbols using cabinets. See this thread for some examples:

Actually, it would be even easier if you posted the plan and layout with the problem.

I opened your plan. I turned off the reference display. I clicked in the middle of the open below room (but not on the room label). The status bar showed that I selected a "ceiling platform hole" so I deleted it. When I did, I got the message again. So I clicked in the room again and this time I got a "hole in floor" according to the status bar. I deleted that and the message went away. As far as I can tell, you don't need the holes that were causing the error messages. I assume that you made them at some time, maybe before you made the room "open below". I don't know if there is any way for the program to create them automatically and I have never seen that happen. Cute house, BTW, but I think that driveway is going to be a bit rough.

As far as I know, the room label will always show room dimensions to surfaces, not to framing.

Chief doesn't really do horizontal cross sections the way I think you are trying to. You can create a top down overview and then use the cross section slider to cut the model on a horizontal plane but you won't be able to add details like dimensions and annotations to it. All you can do is create a picture out of it and it may not actually look like what you want. You might be better off just using floor plans. For example, you can create a floor plan and use a layer set to simply turn off everything that is above the 18" cutting plane to get your view. It would help if you posted a (clear) picture of the view you are trying to create. It may or may not be possible to create this automatically depending on what details you are trying to show. As for the callouts on the elevations, it's pretty easy to add these in manually.

Like Gene said, you have to make your own hole. They also have a tech article about this: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-01203/creating-a-custom-sink-hole.html