VisualDandD

It will only take 180 hours of work to pay for the chief license to do the side work though.....Oh wait...have to buy a PC too. Ok.....so about 300 hours of work @ $15/hr to pay for the license. Sounds like a bargain to me. Where do I sign up?

Shadows could be EASY. Just draw a cad box and put a transparent fill on them. Should take very little time. Heck, before chief did it way back, I just used to shadow my own elevations in photoshop. This was one I did a looong time back. (probably chief 9.5 I think) No auto roof function used here....

These are even quicker....(you could turn off trees). I have a reflection "painting" I use for my windows...but this is nothing other than a watercolor ortho with line overlay and shadows.

Just do an ortho view with shadows and 'technical illustration". Play with settings...etc. Not exactly what you are trying to do (I did not take time to paint windows black...but took me 5 min) An ortho with shadows combined with an elevation. If I took a little more time, I could make it nicer.

Just a quick question... Have you taken the time to try to just watch any of the instructional videos on chief, or just read a few pages of the manual. I dont mean to be rude...but the question that you are asking is one of the most basic functions in cheif. If you dont know how to do this I am assuming you are not familiar with the product at all. Take at least a little time and put some effort to lean a little. Heck, you could go on youtube and search for drawing roofs chief architect even.....Or pay for online training. While it is true that "there are no dumb questions" there are questions that show someone desires to put fourth zero effort to lean even the simple tasks. Just my opinion...and there are several ways to do what you....in auto function, it is quite easy and as long as your offsets are large enough, Chief will draw them in (when you define the walls as a gable. Manually....it is quite simple. Draw in the roof plans, break the current roof plane in several places to allow the valleys to connect when you manually "join" them.

I have a surface pro with the I5 and 4gb ram. I do have chief installed, but I could never see trying to actually do productive work on it. It is nice to have to be able to open and manipulate files....pull a section if someone has a question...etc. As a reference, I have a great workstation which is optimized for my Chief. 3 monitors (2-24" 1920x1080 and one 27" 2560x1440) I am running a I9 4790k overclocked at 4.4 with 32gb ram and a gtx 970 graphics card. I also have a gaming mouse with all configured hot buttons and a logitech g13 gamepad with all the buttons configured for drawing. I have 3 ssid drives and 2 2-tb drives with full continuous backup as well as file history. If I HAD to, I could draw on a surface. But I would never want to.

You guys got me thinking of different concepts and I came up with this. This was exported out of chief and modeled in Lumion with effects.

Not sure exactly what you are looking for....but something like this where you can see door and window openings?

To make cleaning up the floor plans really easy I just realized you can toggle off patterns" in the ortho view (and any other layers you dont want to show) and it will generate without pattern lines in the new CAD detail you create!

I just tried something and it may work for you. Go to "orthographic overview" Click 3D>view direction>top view. Now you get a nice overview (you may have to turn off flooring patterns...etc). NOW here is what I did not know actually worked in this view. You can now click: CAD>cad detail from view. You now have that perfectly to scale in cad and can annotate/label/pattern in plan view. Let me know if that works. I am familiar with RCP's but dont use them for my smaller projects. Hope it helps!!!

Yes I am not sure you are understanding 100%. I figured out that if I want to achieve what I am looking to do, I have to go back after and change attic walls definitions to "no room definition".....which then take away the "attic" definition. OR I can go in and edit each "room" in the "structure>>>>floor structure" tab. I am suggesting it would be nice to define a room defined as "attic" to not by default have the same size floor system as main floor and not have decking. (it seems you are in agreement). I never paid attention to the extra "platforms" as they were hidden in attic and I was not attempting to use the material take-off feature. Thanks for your help!

I get where you are coming from, but the model is correct.....it is just the fact that when I define a closed space as "attic" which I need to do especially when it is spanning across multiple ceiling heights below (you can break them up with invis walls and define correct ceiling and floor heights to cooperate with the steps in the ceilings below), it automatically "decks" attic floors. I have adopted drawing in my "attics" as I have elevated plates there anyway....(again...chief would auto frame the walls if I dont...they would just be undefined). If I check "no room definition" I solve the desire of chief to build a platform under it....BUT it screws all the changes in elevation up that are happening below. Make sense?.... If you get where I am coming from, how would you achieve these conditions?

When doing several varying ceiling heights though out the plan as well as elevated plates above ceiling joists it really makes the process more straight-forward (and even possible in some instances where otherwise it wont cooperate). If I dont put the walls there, chief will auto place them (if I select) but they have to go there. My only option would be to change some of the wall definitions to not close in the rooms....but that would make the varying ceiling height issue more challenging as I discussed before. I am just wanting to define an "attic" room as not having decking. Dont think it is that nuts of an idea.... Just like when you have clear span joists over a garage and the attics created are not decked as standard (unless you are going to attempt to put storage in them). Seems like we should have the option in an attic room to provide decking or not by default

Hi all. As I mentioned in an earlier thread, I have been undertaking using chief to generate material take-offs. At this point, it is baby steps to verify how it is calculating numbers. I discovered something today I never much paid attention to. When I draw a 2 story house (where some is finished and some is attic), I generally close the whole plan in with walls at the perimeter (this creates "rooms"). I define attic rooms as such and use the platform that is created as my bearing heights for rafters. ( I often set ceiling ht in these rooms to very low numbers.... as low as 1/2" to 24-36" on elevated plate rooms. The fact that chief puts a "platform" under any room you enclose is OK. My plans are generally steep roof pitches which have to have elevated plates anyway. (for both insulation and eve clearance above windows). OK...so that is the back story.... So when I was looking at material calcs, chief puts plywood subfloor in all my attics by default. I realized this when my sheet count on the 2nd floor was WAY off. So I thought....no problem, I can just define it in default room types. Problem....there is no "default" setting for "attic" rooms. (or am I missing something?) So besides going in and manually editing the floor finish (deleting subfloor) is there a way to have the attics automatically generate without the attached subfloor?.....if not there should be a "radio" button where you can uncheck subfloor in attic spaces. (instead of having to edit the "floor structure" tab) Am I just missing something..... Drawing in manual ceiling joists does not seem to change this.....

I still have one of these....but I am not sure what to plug it into

Ha......I have quite a bit of framing experience as well as contracting. I can do 'rule of thumb' take-offs all day long. I also have Planswift which eliminates the "by hand" part and I could just import PDF's in and use it. BUT....I cant help but want to extract the info out of Chief. I KNOW it is there and can do it. I am just looking at real world efficient ways to do it. With about 20 years direct field experience, I think I can find that balance. Chief is not far from being usable.... just am looking for better methods to make up for some of the shortcomings. Thanks! Never saw that. Thank you for taking the time to post the link!!!

The truth (that the op should be aware of) is I could copy any of his designs on his site and have a working model of his house in less than an hour. (and mine would probably not have the strange wall break he is experiencing)...sorry...could not resist the last part How hard it is to snap a jpg, resize with transform/ replicate and trace over it?.... The roofs....well since I came up from old V 6 or 7, I draw most of mine manually anyway. I could probably get one to the point of being recognizable in 30 min since the design examples I saw are pretty straight forward and not very complex. (not putting down the designs in any way....they just dont appear to be complex. Heck, I have many many simple plans I have drawn too...so dont take that as a dig). In the end, I may have been a little harsh...but the idea that someone is going to "steal" his design is just silly.

Hey all. I have played with chiefs materials function and more or less.....it has seemed more a pain than it was worth. Recently I posted a thread where we made a macro that calculated rafter length and rounded to next 24" incriment and gave that value (much like you would do a manual t/o but even more accurate). Well I have decided to use chiefs functions to try to help me do even better framing take-offs. I think I have rafters and ceiling joists figured out. Part of my plan is to only do small sections of framing at a time so I can tell if I am getting "garbage" back. I also double check it with my label macros...etc. Next I am concuring wall framing. I have experimented with setting "structural material reporting" but am confused at why on "mixed reporting" I get the line "fir stud STOCK" which does not seem right and almost like a redundant value. I get this same thing with "cut list" but in that case "fir stud stock" seems to be cripples and possibly jack material. I wish there were better ways to track where chief it putting certain materials so you could make sense of a take off. BOY...in an ideal world, you could click on a line of the material take-off and it would highlight those materials in the plan (either floor plan or even better 3d framing views). It is just hard to put too much confidence in the numbers you are getting, especially as the project grows in size. Anyone have any good tips they use.... Here are a few recent take-off sheets I have done with a mix of manual and auto calcs.

Well, I have been using Chief for 15-16 years, and there are times I cant figure out what is happening in a plan from a picture. It takes opening the DBX's, sorting out floor definitions, looking for anomalies like missed wall connections, or automatic wall that somehow get connected to a manual one and you have odd room definitions with 'no locate' walls mixing in. Or you can have default floor values different than ones in plan and they are mixing on floor below.....or you can have 2 rooms with 2 differeing ceiling heights below.....or... Well.....yea you are right....you can tell all that just from a picture. Srs dude....no one wants your designs. And no one wants to spend the better part of their day speculating at what might be wrong with your plan from a picture. However there are a lot of GREAT people on here who will take time out of their busy days to try to help out others if you make it easy on them by posting the plan. Otherwise you are asking them to waste even more time and start a q&a session of all the possible things it could be. No thank you. And funny.....you think people want your plans. You insult the people who are actually trying to help you. THAT is my frustration coming out.

This was quick and dirty.... I just grabbed the plan where I did it and did a quick render. I did not try to tweek the controls much as I did not do the final render in Chief the 1st time. This is how the raytrace came, but I am sure you could improve the effect with some tweaking.

I did most of my rendering in limion buying created it in chief. (Used same trick in limion) Have to see If I can dig it up

I created a triangular moulding that's set mostly transparent. It is about 12" wide Leg only 1" tall. Sits on clg above crown. I make plae yellow/gold and set high emmssive. The taper simulates the light fade enough to fake it for the most. Used a few times.

I had this happen recently on a plan. (Never before experienced it like this in any other versions). I spent a few minutes tracking it down and did not want to spend more time, so I deleted the wall and re-drew it. Problem went away.

Quick and dirty example of how I do it. Like I say in the vid. I get all my roofs right first, and this is the last part I do.

Those type roof are often done with just simple 'kickouts' rather than full radius. In fact, I have never seen them done radius-ed at the end, except for an asian inspired design. Something to think about, but I use similar details often and it is just a lower pitch by scabbing 2x6 on the rafters at the end. Even from the pic you posted, I cant see that that are a true radius. I would put dollars to donuts that it is just kicked out tails especially given the style of the home. From a field standpoint.....it is MUCH MUCH easier to construct as well. Just a thought.