Alaskan_Son

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.

Try to open the offending text boxes and simply click OK.

I would be happy to help you with this. Heading into a training session now but I’ll reach out once I’m done.

Totally agree with this one. In fact I’ve taken to just drawing my garage slabs manually in some cases so that this details correctly for the various views.

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.