TeaTime

There's been other posts on this sort of topic, and you'll get a few different options from different people here, since there are several techniques that are personally preferred and or are fairly situational. You can simply create the pool house with a floor -12' from the plan's origins and keep the two structures together. This makes planning Terrain and keeping dimensions all consistent, etc. But if there's significant differences in plan Defaults, it can be helpful to draw them in separate plans. The seemingly unpopular feature that I personally like it the ability to draw two entirely different plans, then use Reference Display to join them together. There are Offsets with the reference display that allow you to shift the referenced plan, rotate it, even change its elevation. It's not a perfect tool, though, the biggest downside is that you have to set it on every view necessary. Another technique some might suggest is still creating two separate plans, but then for 3D Views you can convert one structure into a 3D Symbol and just plop it into the other plan.

Wow! I'd guess that model has something off to the side that's causing it to behave like this. Maybe some origin marker or something. I'd say the model needs fixing, because that'll fix both of these issues. I don't think there's any way to force the Preview to behave differently. But aside from that the Bounding Box should be editable on the Advanced Sizing panel, you'll likely have to put in a lot of negative values. It'll help to have the Show Bounding Box preview option on.

Yeah. I totally get that. Interesting issue I can't say I've encountered before. I pulled your Beams away and the original Framing dimension followed it like I'd expect, but when drawing new angular dimensions I see two things happening: 1) I can still draw a dimension to the "center" of where the beam WAS - which appears to be the railing above, even though it's not displayed AND the dimension defaults are set not to even locate walls. and 2) as long as they're away from those hidden railings, a new angular dimension does attach to the sides as expected. Kind of a pain but you can pull those beams out, dimension them, them center-align them back into position. Also, are you aware that those railings on Floor 1 that these dimensions are snapping to are uh, for lack of a better term, subterranean?

Well, for what it's worth, it looks like you already have a dimension there working how you want it to, on the Dimensions, Framing - Floor layer.

I've played with this a bit in the past and as I recall I wasn't entirely satisfied with the results. glancing again at the object properties for Walls, they certainly have a simple %length% value to pull, and they do have area, but it's more complex, like upper-layers.0.area - which means if you're dealing with pony walls then you're in for a headache if you're not familiar with Ruby and writing your own text macros. That and I seem to recall the way that macro calculates Area is a little different than how the Materials List does. My honest answer is just to make adjustments to the plan so that the Materials List calculates correctly for you. Keep in mind that you can tell the Materials List what to calculate by way of Layer Set, so you can quickly omit things like Attic Walls. I know it's not the answer you're looking for but there's something to be said for having an accurate model that generates an accurate list of materials. Of course, that being said Materials Lists are still often exported and tweaked externally anyway.

I don't know that it does. How so? Can you post screenshots? And how exactly are you building this roof plane? Auto roofs? Manually drawn? Slapping on a simple roof plane should be relatively simple and low-impact, so I'm not sure you'll get a good answer without knowing more specifics.

I don't know why you'd want a landing, why not just Build New Floor? As long as Roof planes are not set to auto rebuild, you'll just get a new floor structure and a new Floor 2 to use. The only difference with an A-Frame type structure is your side walls don't need to exist, so just mark them invisible and move them in so you don't get floor platform sticking out of your roof planes.

Sounds like an issue for tech support. They do have an article with information on manually installing libraries if it fails, you might check it out and see if you can delete and reinstall them. https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-02899/manually-installing-core-catalogs-for-chief-architect-premier.html That will only cover the Core catalogs though.

Wall Elevations only show whats strictly in that room, looks like that bay window isn't being treated as IN that room. Check out the Wall Elevation option to Ignore Railings and Invisible Walls.

FYI/FWIW, they have transparent backgrounds, you'll see it better if you change color themes in Chief, or if you go Dark Mode, half your icons disappear (lots of Chief icons are simple black lines/pictures).

MacOS doesn't work the way Windows does, programs don't install into a folder structure that you browse around. Instead they're just self-contained programs. If you go to your Applications list and find Chief Architect, you should be able to Right-click or Option-click there's an option to access its contents. Once in there, it'll be similar, you should see a resources\buttons folder.

Well, I would assume you'd know better than most! I stand humbly corrected. I must have been conflating the relatively new Layout label "Use Callout" option which uses %box_scale%. Maybe time for another cup o' tea...

I stand corrected!! It's just a weird issue with that dialog being too tall (this^ is X15) (*I just happened to have X13 open from another post) Just shrink that window as short as it can go and you should be good.

Oh, they're not greyed out, the controls are shifted. Try them, I bet they work fine. Not sure if that's an X13 issue, I don't recall having that problem. Might check program updates.

As @DBCoopersaid before, yes %scale% will adjust as you zoom, but it will print what the printed scale is. Just ignore that it looks wrong on the Layout, once its printed it should be right. %box_scale% will always report the scale of the layout box itself, but I think that was a recent addition, I don't think X13 has that.

Libraries don't get removed when the program is uninstalled, so it'll just pick them up automatically like that. Ok, starting off simple: you're saying the Move check box is greyed out, so you're unable to use any of the Deltas? Or, by chance, did you just not check Move first?

Why that there's a Shadow Board molding. Not sure if there's a specific tutorial but they're basic molding profiles like any others.

I don't believe that affects Dimensions though, only normal text like labels and such. I think Dimensions always face "down" and "right". I'm curious why the view is rotated that direction? All text is Upside Down with respect to the title block.

Probably the quickest/easiest: Edit Area/All Floors, Copy/Paste.

Huh. I honestly hadn't poked at it that hard. But out of curiosity, here's that same layout drawn from different starting points And sure enough the last-placed, highest in the order, comes in separated.

But only sometimes! It's a tricky little devil.

Absolutely, you present an excellent guide and I commend you for it! But, some would argue that that's no proper cabinet. Maybe some day we'll get fully editable cabinet boxes. O' to dream!

Let us always remember: what's unnecessary to one may be a godsend to another. We don't all use the software the same way.

What kind of object are you trying to affect? What kind of view are you in? As Dr Evil once said: "Need the info!"

"Chief Architect x12" -- If this is still accurate, then disregard this If you are in fact on X15, then this is what Chris is referring to: (and also please update your signature so we can assume correctly in the future )