Alaskan_Son

Klingon? Just kidding. I blurred that out before I posted the pic. Have no idea whose truck that is. I just don't like including any personal info. when posting online.

There are a lot of options in this regard Lane. You can control what is reported in the material list by adjusting the Components of any given object, by changing what Categories are being reported (either before or after ML is generated), by changing which Layers are being used, and by changing which Floor(s) are being used among other things. You can use various Material List generation methods such as the Materials List Polyline to further limit what is being reported. You can use Schedules instead. Again, these have lots of control over what exactly is being reported and how it is being reported. You can copy and paste from both schedules and materials lists to an spreadsheet for further manipulation. Too many details to get into in a quick post, but if you'd like to set up a on-on-one session to walk through it all, just shoot me over an email to alaskansons@gmail.com and we can discuss further..

A few quick notes: Your plan view is printing at zero line weights on my end just fine. Not sure what you're doing differently. Using Live Views has no benefit in my personal opinion for vector view elevations and sections. I'm a little curious why you think its better. Maybe I'm missing something. Live views essentially just result in images though. (i.e. you see exactly what your camera view is seeing) and then printed results are pixelated like with any other image. Plot lines on the other hand result in very crisp and fully controllable lines. Not sure what happened with your CAD Detail but its sounds to me like you had some settings wrong. If I produce a CAD Detail From View using one of your 2 elevation cameras I get a print with super thin zero line weights. How are you printing? To paper or to PDF? And if to PDF first, what PDF printer are you using?

Thanks for the input BT. I can't say your method sounds any better though.

Here's a quick recent example... Plot plan (with live Plan Footprint)... Start of a landscaping plan with driveway... Reposition the Plan Footprint on the lot... Not too cool. Whether or not various parts and pieces are drawn twice (can vary from one instance to the next) things have to get synced up somehow. I manage, but I feel like there might be a more effective method of dealing with this that I'm not thinking of.

The Plan Footprint CAD Detail is really quite a handy feature in Chief. It can help make drawing up site plans quite efficient. Having said that, it also has a couple problems. Most notably, and the subject of my query this evening... We can draw lot lines, setbacks, roads, power lines, etc., we can position it all according to any North direction that we wish, and we can position/rotate the house on the lot totally unencumbered. Here's the problem though. Some of the things we naturally want to put into that CAD Detail such as roads, sidewalks, and driveways also need to exist in the plan view sometimes for 3D views and possibly landscaping plans among other things. My question is how do you guys manage the 2 different views and those potentially duplicated objects? Those things are truly a PITA to sync up if the house gets moved on the lot. What i do now requires creating one or more CAD Details from view, turning layers on and off, cutting and pasting one or more temporary lines between views, drawing angular dimensions, placing temporary points, group selecting and rotating various objects using Current Point, and then group selecting and moving objects using Pt. to Pt. move. We can obviously just draw it all in plan to avoid those particular issues and I'm fully aware of that and capable of doing so, so please try to avoid responding if that is all you have to offer. I'm just trying to find out if anyone who actually uses Plan Footprint CAD Details has developed a more effective method of syncing their plan and CAD Detail in such a way that moving/rotating the house on the lot is only a minor inconvenience. Right now I consider it to be a moderate to major inconvenience. It's not always a problem, but when it is, it really is.

Ya, I totally get it. I don't mind paying for quality in the slightest. The expenses associated with hiring a qualified and competent architect or engineer are totally expected. I would just prefer to find somebody local. If they use Chief that's definitely a bonus. With regard to price though, I'm not looking for the cheapest but I also don't want to someone that's overpriced either. I just want someone that comes well referred and that will treat me fairly.

By the way, we may not necessarily even need an architect. It may just be that we could use an engineer willing to do a little hand holding. I don't feel like this is something I couldn't properly design and draw up from a practical standpoint, I'm just not very familiar with the various commercial code requirements that might come into play, and the fact that we're building over an easement/utilidor is uncharted territory for us.

In my experience, Rich Text inserts at the top center, and regular Text depends on the Alignment setting...Left (top left), right (top right), center (top center), justified (varies). No way to change it that I know of. I just type what I want and then move it. Honestly not sure how much time should be invested right now in changing the behaviour either. Sometimes I want my text centered underneath something, sometimes I want it centered above something, sometimes I want it centered ON something, sometimes I want to use one of the corners of the entire text box for placement, and sometimes I want to use just the first line of text for the alignment. That's a toughy...just move the thing or utilize a myriad of settings and defaults.

A lot of Sketchup's add-ons look pretty cool (and some of them actually are pretty cool) and a lot of them are free, but but BUT... Plan on spending a lot time and money anyway. Many add-ons aren't free, many features and uses require purchasing the Pro version, and you have to find, download, install, study, and learn the quirks of each and every add-on...in addition to learning the ins and outs of Sketchup as well. You're essentially buying your software one tool at a time from a super broad range of different companies. And it's super easy to spend half the day playing with an add-on that you may ultimately use once or decide to never use at all. Better to do that or spend the extra 15 minutes to just model in Chief? Anyway, here's how I look at it...spend time and money trying to learn and stay up to date with 2 programs and be kinda mediocre with both of them, or try to truly master the one and just piddle around with the others when you find time. P.S. I'm not necessarily recommending against using Sketchup or saying that it isn't a valuable tool. I use it myself from time to time and there are certainly things it excels at. I just feel that when you really get down to the nitty gritty of it, Sketchup is nowhere near as simple, free, or even as cheap as it seems on the surface.

The trifecta!!! Hmmmm...not much of a salesman there Perry Seriously though, I'll keep her in mind if I can't find someone else. Thanks : )

I'm looking for an architect licensed and willing to do work for a potential upcoming project in Anchorage, AK. This particular project is a pretty basic addition. We're adding a garage between the 2 structures in this picture... There was a very rickety garage there already but it was questionable at best. That gap between the 2 buildings is a utility easement and recently the Municipality had to make some utility upgrades so the old garage had to be torn down. There's now a load bearing utilidor underground so we should be good to go for building a new structure. The commercial requirements and considerations are just a little outside my wheelhouse so I'm thinking I'm going to need to hire a suitable professional to help us out with this one. Anyway, it would be sweet if there was an architect here in Alaska using Chief that could help us with it. Let me know if you're out there. Thanks : )

I can't answer for Greg, but I'd say a pretty dern close to accurate chair could be modeled in Chief in about an hour or so, and a more generic version like what Greg posted could be done in half that time in Chief. It just comes down to knowing the tools and formulating a good plan of attack. Just bear in mind that the more detailed and accurate a symbol becomes, the more surfaces it has, and the slower your model becomes. Good to use rectangular profiles instead of round whenever possible, and flat surfaces instead of curved where you can get away with it.

Probably hundreds of thousands...or millions even. There are something like 17 million faces being generated by just those grass symbols, and they actually look kinds crappy to me. Sure the grass itself looks realistic, but added together and tiled like they are kinda defeats the purpose IMO. If a person wants realistic grass and can't get what they want using bump/normal maps then they should be using a different software for their rendering.

He was referring to the concrete steps at the bottom. They appear too shallow to be landings, therefore they're technically still considered part of the same run of stairs. That means you have a massive variance from one tread depth to the next right there.

You can use a second overlapped roof plane to allow for 2 different materials, but that has some challenges of it's own. Best just to use a manually drawn return IMO, uncheck no special snapping, and make sure the return is actually shaped appropriately (to alleviate the gap in the soffit).

The devil is definitely in the details so it’s always hard to compare one project to the next but 10 hours on a new home might be excessive for some super simple plan sets while 200 hours might be blazingly fast for some ultra complex remodel plans. Based on the screenshots youve you’ve shown in conjunction with your description, I’m in agreement with some of the guys above...that really doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. Is it the fastest it could be done? Probably not, but I seriously doubt you’re taking any longer than average for comparable scope and quality (which seems to be quite high by the way—good job : ).

I'd love to help you get this figured out, but it's a more complex issue than I care to attempt covering in a quick forum post. Not too complicated to carry out, just a little involved to explain...especially considering there are a lot of forks in the road and differing needs from one user to the next. Please free free to contact me about setting up a private one-on-one session so I can walk through the various details with you, but the short of the matter is that your resulting DWG file depends entirely on the settings you export with. With a little guidance and some input from your draftsman, I'd say you should be able to export exactly what he needs in order to avoid completely redrawing. It just requires exporting with the correct layer set, layer settings, and export settings. There is no "right" way to do it either. The required settings can totally vary from one user/situation to the next.

Your problem is that you have an attic room defined over the top of that area. When you change the ceiling height in one room below, Chief thinks that it needs to push the whole floor system up to accommodate the attic floor system...and therefore moves the entire ceiling up. Not sure why you have it there, but one way or another, all you need to do is break that attic room definition and you should be good to go.

Thats nice of you Glenn. For anyone who could use the help, just shoot me an email over to alaskansons@gmail.com and we’ll figure out a time that works. I may not respond till after the holidays but the session will go to the first person I hear from.

Okay okay. You guys are right, I didn’t lay down any “rules” per se. I shouldn’t have used that word in my follow-up post. I should have said that I felt Micks wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of the “challenge”. I guess I was envisioning that a qualifying solution required leaving my plan intact, just using wall/roof settings, and leaving auto turned on. To be honest, I guess I did assume invisible walls would be necessary though and that those were okay (which is why I said that was forgivable). You guys are right though. I didn’t actually spell it out. That’s on me. The whole point of the challenge though as I think everyone understood was to highlight why manual roofs can be far easier for even some of the simplest roofs. Anyway, Glenn’s solution (while still not perfect) was more in keeping with the challenge since it didn’t require tweaking my plan or turning off auto roofs so I’d have to give him the win, but if you feel I’m wrong Mick, I’d be more than happy to give you an hour of my time. Technically you did use auto roofs. Just shoot me an email and we’ll set something up. I’m giving Glenn the win though and calling the challenge closed. If we don’t speak again soon, I hope you guys all have a wonderful Christmas :-)

MANY MANY MANY methods but here are just a few (specifically using the warehouse plan method): Simply crop your layout box Use separate CAD Details (Project Browser) in the warehouse plan. One detail per CAD Detail. This way you can send one detail at a time. Use multiple floors in your warehouse plan Using multiple layer sets in your warehouse plan (one layer set per CAD Detail with all details on unique layers)

I give you an A for effort, but I'm afraid your example isn't following the spirit of the rules and it still has problems. For one thing, it required extra room definitions in that deck area that I don't want for various reasons (this one is forgivable in this particular example but wouldn't be in others). Second, if you turn auto rebuild back on you'll see that a small extra roof plane is being generated in that back right corner of the house. Third, it requires an extra wall INSIDE the house as well as a couple modified exterior wall sections and a modified room definition (something that may not even be possible in some plans without totally screwing up the model). And fourth, it requires turning auto roofs off and cleaning up the plans. The first infraction can be looked past, but I'd say the last 3 can't. If you have to fundamentally change the plan by adding walls and changing room definitions, and then turn auto off and clean up walls, extra roof planes, and room definitions, I don't think that really qualifies as just using auto roofs. What do you think? Also, I'm curious...how long did that actually take you from the time you opened my plan to the time you arrived at your end result? I don't mean how long it would take to repeat, I'm talking about how long it took to figure out and fully configure the first time.

You have to give Ruby the entire file path.

This is very good advice. The roof doesn't even have to be "complex" to justify a manual roof either. Here's a quick example with a single rectangular roof plane. 1 hour of free consultation or training to the first person who can do this with the auto roof tools...and an additional hour if you can do it in under 5 minutes (probably twice as long as it took me to draw this entire plan)... Plan.plan Shoot, I doubt anyone would be able to do it in under an hour with the auto roof tools, in fact, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if no one was able to do it period.