Alaskan_Son

Not a fan of the crossbox, but completely agree with the premise of your suggestion. The wall shouldn’t disappear entirely like it does. Rather confusing actually...especially considering some builders actually DO leave that section of wall out on purpose. I’m thinking the best solution would be to just give us an optional fill for cutouts.

3D>Edit Active Camera>Backdrop

Hire Michael to do it for you : ) Although, it would take me a fair amount of time too. A few additional methods I might throw out there for you to consider though... Using zero depth wall niches with casing assigned (shape tab and Radial setting to get the slope and bend) Drawing moldings on a flat surface and then bending afterward using various advanced symbol manipulation tricks or another program Using 3D molding polylines (yeah, don't use this method)

Of course not. I wasn't actually disagreeing with anything YOU said. It's mostly statements like "...you should be charging no less than $50 an hour" that I was referring to. It really depends on how good you are at what you do. I've had several people over the years ask me what I charge so they can charge the same thing and its almost invariably someone who was just getting into the field. I've always taken a small measure of offense at their notion that they could/should immediately charge what I do even though they're half as fast, and not nearly as experienced. Bottom line is that you we can all obviously make a decision as to what we think we're worth and we can get an idea of what the "going rate" is, but the reality is that there is an exceedingly broad range when it comes to value and what we should be charging. If you charge $50 an hour and take 2 days to produce a medium quality rendering and Jintu produces an absolutely stunning rendering of the same project in 4 hours and charges $600 who is the better deal? And when a customer sees the price/quality difference who is going to get the next job?

...and some of us don't even have the skills to do what we do : ) Seriously. This is one of the reasons I always cringe a little when I hear or read people make broad statements like "you should be charging more" when they have no idea whether or not the person is actually worth that. You know and I know that there are "professionals" here that could be charging $15.00 an hour and might be way overpriced and there are others who could be charging $100.00 an hour and might be the true bargain.

Good thought, but I would take a closer look at that one. I think you'll find that you still need to use the Edit Wall Layer Intersection tool. I typically work in vector view specifically so that I see whats really going on and catch those issues right away.

Thanks for chiming in Rene, I don't think either of those are really going to help though. I've concluded that it's just an issue on a very fundamental level that can't be avoided with the current tool set. Thanks again though : )

It can totally be done with a normal wall too...

Use the Edit Wall Layer Intersection tool.

I think you about covered it. Origin first and then clipping. If those aren't options for some reason or don't fix the problem then the worst case is to increase material thickness or paint underlying material...very last resort though.

I'm guessing the issue is actually a problem caused by the house being drawn too far from the drawing origin.

No. Sorry, I don’t specifically remember what it was.

You're really missing out on some pretty major things if you had to check both those boxes...especially if you don't know exactly why you had to check both those boxes.

You could have also skipped 10 years and "saved" like $3,000-$4,000 but you would have also missed out on every upgrade during that time, on priority technical support during that time, and on all the bonus libraries during that time among other things.

I'd bet you're not using a Vector View. You can only only create a CAD Detail From View from a Vector View.

I can definitely help you get this done. I sent you a PM with my personal email address.

Hey Chris, Sent you a PM. I'd be glad to help you out on this.

...or just careless. Particularly if those macros are writing or overwriting files.

Yes. Rotate Plan View along with a few additional annotation object defaults.

I'm curious why you asked the question then? I see this happen all the time. You guys ask us for tips and clarification, we give answers, that leads to more questions, we give more answers, and come to find out you have no real intention of actually seriously learning or using it...just playing around. A little inconsiderate if you ask me, and a big reason why I've become a bit burned out donating my time here. I don't care if you don't want to invest in hiring someone to help you, that's totally your prerogative. I'm just suggesting that its the best way of making real progress. If you decide to go it "on your own", then at least have the decency of not wasting people's time if your questions aren't sincere. It can take a lot of time and energy to answer questions sometimes.

As with Brown Tiger's approach, I'm not sure this is any easier. Different? Yes. More efficient for you? I'm assuming yes. Slower? I think yes, but that is obviously debatable. But easier? I don't think so. Same exact challenges. I'm thinking that there is nothing that I'm missing. It's just going to be a pain to sync things back up if the house gets moved late in the game and that there aren't any additional measures we could take to alleviate that. Again, I can obviously do it all the plan like many people do and there would be no syncing, but IMO that is just a lot slower and less intuitive for many cases.

If you're being serious, then you're going about this wrong. That's a terrible place to start trying to learn how to use macros in my opinion. I'd say the majority of people who take a stab at macros make little to no progress or ultimately fail because they take a poor approach...figuring it out on their own or trying to pick up one little tip at a time. If you have 2 or 3 years and hundreds of hours to invest reinventing the wheel, by all means, go right ahead, otherwise, I strongly suggest you consider just investing in some one-on-one time with someone to show you the ropes. Its really painful for me to watch some people try to learn one little tip at a time, spend hours experimenting, run into a road block, ask for another tip, spend a few more hours, run into another roadblock, pick up another tip...and I'm thinking to myself...I could have helped you sort those particular issues out in about 15 minutes. And the thing is that there are forks in the road at every turn. You have to learn how to use macros in Chief, you have to learn at least a little about Ruby, and most importantly, you have to learn how the 2 work together. That's where the real challenge lies. You can master Chief and you can master Ruby and you might still be completely lost when it comes to writing macros in Chief.

Not sure I can totally agree with that. Let me try to clarify a bit... In principal we only need to draw things once--lot lines in the CAD Detail and roads, driveways, and landscaping in the plan view. There are a few scenarios to consider though... Plans change like in the scenario I spelled out in my previous post. I had drawn all the roads and the driveway in the plot plan until a landscaping plan was added to the mix later. That meant I needed to move at least the driveway over to the plan view. I went ahead and moved the lot lines and road as well though since that is also information needed to draw up a good landscaping plan. This resulted in an unintended duplication of some items. I could have just deleted the road from the plot plan had I wanted to, but the lot lines had to be drawn twice if I wanted in the plan view and wanted to stick with the CAD Detail method. Accurately drawn driveways are dependent on accurately drawn roads and accurately located structures right? This means you need to sync up something right from the get go. Doesn't necessarily mean things need to be drawn twice in a strict sense of the idea, but information has to be moved from the plot plan to the plan view somehow, or it needs to be drawn initially in the plan view and then move to the CAD Detail. This leads to the aforementioned syncing issues. Accurately drawn roads are dependent on the lot lines. No 2 ways about this. This means that if you want the road in your plan view that the lot information has to be synced between views somehow. Assuming its an easy lot and with liberal accuracy tolerances for the plan view, there's still the issue of what happens when the house gets moved on the lot later in the game. If you have all your driveway and road information in the plan view then all that gets moved along with the house similar to what I showed in my example above. Again, you might not need to actually draw the lot again, but you have to get that information over to the plan view somehow if you want to properly reposition your roads and driveway. IMO its just as easy to copy and paste the lot info. and leave it in both plan. It makes for an easier way to sync the views back up. Anyway, at the end of the day, I STILL think the Plan Footprint CAD Detail can be a faster and more intuitive method of drawing up site plans...even with the syncing issue. There's definitely a tipping point there somewhere though. It kinda depends on the complexity of the project and on what sort of pages need to be produced. If I need to draw up an accurate terrain? I can't say the CAD Detail method would have any benefit. If I just have to draw up a quick site plan? CAD Detail hands down.

To put it simply? Because it's faster and more intuitive to draw it as a Plan Footprint CAD Detail. Just to make sure we're on the same page too...the Plan Footprint IS live. It's only some of the various components that are drawn with CAD. Also, just so we're clear, I don't always use the CAD Detail method. It kinda depends on the circumstances. In the example above, it was way faster and easier to use the CAD Detail method...at least at the outset of the project. Let me paint a picture of how that went with this one... The house was already drawn. I was just hired to clean/button up a few things with the model and to produce a custom layout with a few pages (foundation plan, floor plan, and 4 elevations). That was it; however, I was then asked if I could also draw up a quick site plan using an aerial view of the property along with survey information and was asked to place the house at a specified orientation to the street and to match the median distance from the road as well as at a median spacing when compared the the adjacent properties. No problem... Create a Plan Footprint CAD Detail Input lot lines Draw setbacks Import, scale, and position aerial view Draw roads Draw rough outline of adjacent houses (this step wasn't completely necessary--I just find it useful) Take various measurements of existing houses Rotate and position house--DONE... ...until I was asked later to set up a page for a landscape plan that wasn't originally contemplated. I wasn't personally going to draw the landscaping plan, I just needed to set it up so my client could do the drawings himself. This wasn't really a huge deal. I just needed to copy and paste some CAD work from the Plot Plan CAD Detail over to the plan view so he had some road, driveway, and lot information to work with... ...then they decided to move the house which results in the issue I showed above. Again, not a huge deal, and they decided to hire a landscaping architect to draw up those pages separately now, so it's really not a problem. It just got me to thinking a little about refining my methodology to help reduce extra work in the future. This is something we kinda have to do either way. Typically it's easier with the CAD Detail method but not always. In the example I posted above, I was drawing to match the orientation of the existing plat/survey that we were referencing. The main plat was drawn with North pointing straight up (as usual in my experience) but this particular zoomed in portion was drawn with North pointing directly to the left,except that the bearings quickly proved the North Arrow on the drawing to be incorrect.

Can't speak to the rest of your response right now, but one quick note about this one. It's a very quick and easy process to update one or all views when using plot lines. I think the perceived inconvenience of the extra (click(s) and the short downtime while the views update, is far outweighed by the benefits.