Alaskan_Son

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.

We can't access that label per se, but chances are that whatever you're trying to accomplish is entirely possible using another method.

It sounds like you may be over complicating things. There should be no reason to change any directory. Not sure what exactly you’re doing, but I can get Ruby to read any relevant file on my system with the safe level turned up to max.

You’re gonna have to elaborate.

Not too shabby. Here's my take...

Open the roof plane and check No Special Snapping

This is simply not true. Plenty of long time Chief users are not efficient at all. Why? They don't do things like this... Or this... Or this...

Have you verified that Chief is using the correct video card?

Just one man's opinion here, but I would stop using Live View if I was you and switch to Plot Lines. There are multiple reasons for this including but not limited to: -You have much more robust control over how the various edge and pattern lines are displayed -The lines are crisper and more consistent -The Edit Layout Lines tool becomes available -The views look like they WILL look while you're working on them. In my opinion, the standard views in the example above don't actually look as nice as vector views either. They feel a little less professional to me. Just my 2 cents.

Yup. The guys above are right. It's a one way street. Best bet is to import into Chief and use the imported model as a guide.

I think the baseline concept gets misunderstood by even some of the most advanced users. In a nutshell, the baseline is nothing more than the main pivot point and control for the roof plane. Consider a perfectly round roof plane. What are you going to use to determine where it pivots, or the line that is used to determine the roofing material orientation? That's the purpose of the baseline. The baseline can be at any angle in plan view, at any angle with regard to the roof plane it produces, and can be adjusted to an off angle in 3D even, but it provides for the single constant pivot point required in order to maintain any sort of logical control over how the roof is generated. The baseline is TYPICALLY located over the exterior of the wall's main layer but it certainly isn't always located there. If for example you have 2 different roof pitches and you want the overhang to remain constant, Chief will automatically move the baseline to accommodate during an auto-build. Yes, you could also adjust the baseline height instead, but Chief will automatically move the baseline in order to maintain a constant baseline height...this behaviour helps make the Make Roof Baseline Polylines tool possible.

I suspect you're not really taking full (or any) advantage of your Saved Plan Views? Not sure why you would be averse to turning off all the unnecessary layers in your reference set otherwise. You can use different references sets for different plan views, and you can also use different layer sets as your reference set. Just set up a plan view that uses a special reference layer set with only those stairs turned on.

Tech support IS there to deal with technical issues. What they’re NOT there for is to provide training. That’s what the Tutorial Guide, Reference Manual, Help files, tutorial videos, Knowledge Base, forum, and training department are there for. I’m not at my computer to check by I can tell you with almost 100% certainty that you’re not having a technical issue with the software...you’re likely just not using it correctly (i.e. you’re not following the instructions). Use the stair tool correctly, in the correct view, on the correct floor, and apply the correct settings, and your stairs should work just fine. Did you read through the Tutorial Guide or Reference Manual? Or, at the very least, did you watch any of the appropriate videos or read any of the appropriate knowledge base articles? If so, and if you followed the directions correctly, I’d be curious to know where you got the info. from to see what was wrong with it.

I would STRONGLY suggest that you get into the habit of using the Reference Manual and/or using the Help files. Here's what you would have found... I have highlighted the area the describes the behaviour you're seeing, but read the whole page to find out which tool might work better for you.

I think you've stumbled on one of the only scenarios where that setting doesn't appear to make sense. The fact is that in the absence of a stile between the doors or a manually placed separation, Chief seems to default to a 1/64" gap between double doors. You might want 1/16" with your frameless full overlay, but would you want 3/8" with a 3/8" reveal or would you want a traditional face frame to have a huge gap between the doors? I suppose we could have a setting to control that reveal, but I'm about as picky as they come and I don't think I would ever personally care enough about that to warrant requesting anything different.

Glenn, We're not talking about "selected". We're talking about "highlighted"...so that you know which baseline belongs to which roof plane. Try changing your roof baseline color to something like yellow and the select a roof plane.