Alaskan_Son

Nice job Steve. Not sure the quality of your videos is good for my self esteem, but thanks for sharing

The thing new users typical miss is that you have to select the edge that you want to join to another edge. Next click Join Roof Planes, and lastly, pick the edge that you want to join to.

2 problems jump out... 1. You have soffits set to be 6" thick. This may or may not be correct. 2. You have gable sub fascia that is the exact same height as the gable fascia. The subfascia should prolee be smaller than the fascia.

Hi Ed, What you probably did was select the ROOM and not the wall. Next time, click to select the room and then either hit tab or click the Select Next tool to get to the wall. You can tell which object is selected by looking down in the lower left hand corner of your screen.

Sorry, I think tech support was mistaken. You control the skylight material defaults in the Roof Defaults. I think this is just one instance where Chief probably shouldn't even have the Use Default option available since this location is the lowest level setting. In other words, I would put it like this... You found the default setting. Chief just probably needs to remove the option to Use Default for that particular item.

I use Snagit.

...now turn off the Rooms, Interior Dimensions Layer as Eric showed.

You could make that door from scratch in a New York minute. I’m away from my computer so I can’t check, but I think I made one just like that for @Rosco2017. Maybe check with him.

Not at all good sir : )

A lot of great options in Chief. Material lists, schedules, macros, polylines, etc. ...and many ways to very quickly manipulate the results with spreadsheets. There is no specific running total tool though.

Ya, that works, but for me it's actually even slower than my 16 click process even though it CAN take less clicks. And it actually only takes less clicks if your stairs don't require opening up and changing settings again afterward (which is one of the main reason to want to save and re-use your work). Seems like it should be a lot easier.

Here's a quick challenge. I have a set of stairs drawn in this plan. Assume they took forever to get properly positioned and sized but that you want to disconnect the upper section so that you can do something a little differently... Stair test.plan What's the quickest (if any) method you can find to simply disconnect the one section. The fastest method I know of requires no less than 16 clicks to start with the section you see on the left and arrive at the result you see on the right.

I will go ahead and assume you always use landings for your winders.

This only applies to stairs connected to landings, NOT stairs connected to other stairs.

By the way, to answer the OP's question... If you want to temporarily keep the section disconnected, you can toggle Connect CAD Segments OFF and then when you're ready, toggle that setting back on, and click on the end edit handle of one of your stair sections a couple times.

Hmmm...I'm intrigued by your response. I only know of one very tricky/convoluted way, and the way you've just described isn't it.

So what you're saying as that you would like Chief to automatically label every ceiling height in the plan when running an Auto Story Pole dimension? If so, I'm kinda curious...how are you going to clarify the potential confusion on your own plans? Would it not be just as efficient and probably eliminate errors if you were to just continue manually pulling off the additional markers? I don't know, just throwing a thought out there. I imagined having Auto Story Pole do what you're describing on a plan with a lot of ceiling heights and I'm not thinking I would personally like a bunch of "Rough Ceiling - 1st Floor" dimensions to sort through.

Agreed. That's how it SHOULD be, but not all surveyors are great surveyors, not all of their helpers are great helpers, and they may or may not be the best draftsmen either.

Might sound like a newbie question here, but any of yuze guys know of a way to force Chief to break stairs back apart once they've been connected?

Not sure if you realize this or not, but you can manually drag out a new marker on that same dimension string.

Don’t have time to get into it right now, but there are 2 or 3 easier/cleaner/more qualifying approaches too.

Yes.

This isn't entirely true. Railings will use the wall definition to auto build walls above and/or below the room.

Railings and invisible walls don't display using the wall line and fill style definitions (presumably because they aren't using those layers anymore). To get a single line around decks, I just change the wall width to .01" You may need to manually set one or more of your rail widths instead of using Full Wall Width if you go this route.

This looks like a totally different issue than the one most of us are familiar with. I would definitely send that into tech-support. I would love to take a look at it though if you could post a simple plan.