Alaskan_Son

I find that sometimes asking is the thing that triggers the requirement. I typically just provide the electronic signature and wait for them to ask for something else.

You're welcome. It's not actually something you can reasonably do inside Chief. I use other software for that.

I thought at first a 1x6 at 12" OC was the same as a simple 6" hatch, but then it occurred to me that its just a little different. Anyway, you can hire me to make custom patterns at any time, but you can have this first one on the house. Nothing fancy and it's a relatively small and simple sampling , but it should do what you need... 1x6x12 B&B.calibz

Agree 110%

Sometimes its even the little things. Dragging out a marquee for example ramps my GPU usage up to 40%.

1.) Open Standard Camera View = 13 seconds. 2.) Drag Wall Surface up = 18 seconds. 3.) Undo Drag Wall Surface up = 15 seconds. 4.) Build Roof Planes = 28 seconds.

Try taking a front elevation view of the BBQ model and do a CAD Detail From View and you'll see how much memory can come into play too.

Try switching to line drawing rendering technique and spinning the model around a bit. My GPU reaches as high as 80% usage.

20 seconds at 4.6 GHz

Try it again. This time make sure all layers are displayed and unlocked, and use the CAD Block trick I mentioned above... ...to downsize the whole thing before trying to further inspect and clean it all up.

A few quick tips for importing and inspecting problematic DWG and DXF files... It can be a very good idea to switch to a layer set where all layers are displayed and unlocked. Sometimes the layers are imported otherwise. If layers are locked or hidden, you'll be chasing your tail. Select All and Fill Window are your friend. This will help you to get a feel for where everything is. However... Chief has a difficult time dealing with VERY LARGE and VERY SMALL things so Fill Window won't always work and also, Fill Window only works to a certain extent before it needs to be reset. If you're having issues, try to de-select, Select All again, and then Fill Window again. If this still doesn't work then your selection is probably too large for Chief to deal with...usually because there are some objects in the file that are super big or drawn way out in space. To help deal with this... Select All, Block that selection, and then open that CAD Block. Inspect the size of that CAD Block, check Retain Aspect Ratio, and then downsize it (maybe by something like .001). Try to Select All and then Fill window again. As soon as Select All and Fill Window are obviously working and manageable, inspect the extents of that selection by zooming in. You'll almost always find your desired information in one of the 4 outside corners (almost always in the upper right or lower left in my experience). Once you find what you're looking for, you should be able to inspect the other extents and delete unnecessary/rogue objects. You may find that you need to explode CAD blocks to make all the above more manageable. One easy way to explode all the CAD blocks is to select one and then use the Match Properties tool by using Object Type to select all the rest. If you can't seem to select any of the CAD blocks to start with (perhaps because they're too large), then just create one for yourself from scratch and then select that as your starting point for using the Match Properties tool. You may or may not need to repeat the exploding CAD Blocks step to explode nested CAD blocks. Throughout this whole process, remember that Select All and Fill Window are your friend. You may need to use them multiple times while cleaning things up. Once you have things down to a manageable point, size the plan back up by the inverse of what you downsized it by(1/.001 or x1,000) using Select All and Transform/Replicate. Inspect for proper scale and adjust as necessary. It may be that you discover you just imported the plan at the wrong scale. If this is the case, you may or may not want to re-import at the correct scale. Hope that helps some of you.

Its all in a CAD Detail

Yep. There are a few things in Chief that are like this. Stairs are even trickier to size down below the seeming minimum.

First things first, it's important to understand the hierarchy... Floor and Ceiling Platform Defaults are the king default. Every other Default checkbox while in your default settings can refer back to this setting Floor Level Defaults can refer to the Floor and Ceiling Platform Defaults or they can be set independently. This can be useful when you have multiple floors that are using the same floor structure and one or more that are using a unique floor structure. Room Type Defaults can refer to the Floor Level Defaults or they can be set independently. This is the reason we can have a Patio room type that will always produce a 4" slab. This is also useful because it is the reason why any other room type can be set to obey the floor structure as set for the current floor (which may obviously vary from one floor to the next). Rooms themselves can refer to the Room Type Defaults or they can be set independently in plan. The benefits of this should go without saying (i.e. we need to be able to set any given room differently than the rest). I would argue that there is no logical default setting to get rid of. Once you fully understand the chain of command, I think you'll probably conclude as I have that every level of control makes a lot of sense and if you use the defaults properly, it can make for very quick and efficient modeling and more specifically...future changes to that model.

Don't forget that if you want to share the layout file as well, Backup Entire Project from the layout file will do the same thing except that the resulting zip folder will include not only the layout file, but any and all referenced plan files, referenced PDF files, etc.

I didn't see the exact numbers you're referring to, but those walls have been manipulated in 3D...some along the top, some along the bottom, and some along both. That basically throws all bets right out the window. The fireplace room definition also doesn't match the others which could be affecting some things like this... One side is measuring the basement slab and the other side is measuring the fireplace foundation room slab.

Polyline Distribution Path with a CAD Block assigned...

You'll probably want to create another hardware symbol for those instances that need to be mounted to the panel. The symbol just needs to have a negative Y Origin Offset... Quick Example plan with before and after of both the cabinet and the hardware... Example plan.plan

It's snapping to your wall surface rather than your backsplash like the others. WHY its doing that, I'm not sure and don't have time to test, but simply adjust the Distance From Wall or origin offset if you want to fix it for now.

Its gonna happen on everybody’s system because of the fill you used on that polyline. Chief is having to draw an absolutely bonkers number of vector lines (somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 million lines).

Super commonly I just do this kind of stuff using manually placed components, multiple copy, and then one of the Align/Distribute tools. There are a lot of productivity tools in Chief that make very quick work of manually modeling a lot of scenarios rather than having to force an automated tool to do what you want. The automated tools are great and can make quicker work of making changes, but they also only get you so far, sometimes take longer to coerce, and often only end up with an end result that's kinda right. I just prefer to skip the guesswork and experimenting a lot of the time, just do what I KNOW will work, and end up with an end result that IS right.

I hadn't been speaking to the performance degradation issue, only to the fact that there are some reasons Chief doesn't just convert the PDF to an image. They're really not the same (Imported PDF's and Picture files) and have some different capabilities...multiple pages being one of them.

Actually no. I'm referring to the fact that multi-page PDF's are imported with all pages. When we import a PDF, we're not importing a snapshot, but rather the whole document. In other words, we can display any page that we wish at any time. The whole entire file is imported and can optionally be stored with the plan.

The plan view shape can be manipulated but not the shape in elevation. For that I typically just use primitives.

Multi page capability for starters maybe?