Alaskan_Son

You're welcome guys. That wall type is actually one of my most oft used little tricks in Chief. It's one of the items I've added to my toolbar even. Just create the wall type, add it to your user catalog, add a Place Library Object button to your toolbar, and then assign your new wall type and a decent icon. My icon just looks like a line and I placed the button up by my wall tools.

Sorry, I don't have a Mac so I can't answer with authority on the subject, but I believe with a Mac, you just delete the program file from your Applications folder.

For what? For a washing machine? A door symbol, a light fixture that the clients are about to spend $10,000 on? The entire model? A 1,000 sq. ft., builder grade starter home, a 20,000 sq. foot luxury townhome? A carport? A landscape design? TOTALLY depends. If I’m drawing up a $10,000 fixture for a tiny bathroom remodel where accuracy is an absolute must, 1,000,000 faces might be acceptable. If I’m drawing up a 4,000 sq. ft. 8-plex for the local slum lord then shoot...1/4 of that might be too much.

They do that whenever there is a structural change between rooms. To address this problem I recommend one of 2 things... 1. Change the default setup for your room divider to make it .01" thick (either in the general tab or in the wall definition itself). 2. Make yourself your own custom room divider wall type that is a single layer Insulation/Air Gap...that is also .01" thick. I use this type of wall more often than I use the true 0" thick room divider. Its far more useful for all sorts of things. The 0" room divider still has its place though.

Really not sure what your goal here is, but you can always temporarily change your material definitions, get the views you want, and then change them back. Just select your finish materials one by one and on the General tab of the Define Material dbx, change the Material Type to "Gap". When you're finished getting the views you need, change them back. You can also optionally just create copies of the materials to speed up the changing back and forth process.

I'm really not sure, but it looks to me like you have 2 potential issues...your graphics card and your memory...both of which are at or below the absolute minimum required to run Chief. Your video card is at the absolute minimum except for the Open GL version which is actually below the minimum. Your memory is also at the absolute minimum as well. Just to give you an idea of what we're talking about here, I have 16 GB installed on my system and at any given moment I'm typically using 5GB of that memory without doing much of anything at all. I don't even have Chief open and my system is using 33% or 5.3GB of that available memory...and all you have is 4GB. Bear in mind we're talking about minimums here. You're not anywhere even remotely close to the recommended specs for running Chief. If you do this for a living, I would really suggest you look at a new system.

I personally think most non-organic/free-form shapes are actually pretty easy to model in Chief once you're familiar with available tools and methods. As Graham said though, it would help to see an example of what you're trying to accomplish. It would also help to know a little more specifically what you're currently having a problem with. In addition, it would be good to know how you plan on using the object(s) in your design.

I really dislike that saying. By all means...ask the question, but that doesn't necessarily mean its a good question. It might very well be dumb. Anyone who claims that there are no dumb questions must have never had someone ask for an answer you just gave them...usually because they were too lazy to listen or comprehend. Those questions ARE dumb. Anyway, If its dumb, so be it. You're better off asking a dumb question than not asking at all. On a side note though, these questions we're talking about don't quite qualify as dumb but they're very poorly presented. We're not doing anyone any favors by not pointing it out. A little off subject, but I'm curious Michael, how do you handle your wall angles and text?

Either Uncheck "Use Default Formatting" or remove the extra inch marks you added to your label.

Absolutely agree. Please don't take any of this the wrong way either Krissy. Mick's only trying to help ("tough love" if you will). You're just unlikely to get out any more than what you put in, and if your last 2 queries are the best you can do, then I would suggest you should probably just give up now. BUT, if you can take the constructive criticism and give us a bit more to work with than maybe...just maybe...you'll get the answers you're looking for.

Amen brutha.

By the way, this can also be done in Chief without using the watermark feature at all, and in such a way that gives you far more control and flexibility but it requires converting your text to polylines which is most effectively done in another app (one of the only things I use Sketchup for anymore)...

Same thing I have suggested to users as well. Only thing I would do differently is skip the screen capture step. Instead, just export picture directly from Chief with a transparent background...

Alan, I could be misunderstanding but what you need to do is UNCHECK Rotate with plan. It should work in layout too. Anyway, give it a shot and see if that helps at all.

Absolutely significant. Try going to File>Print>Drawing Sheet Setup. I'd venture to guess your Drawing Margins are out of whack.

BTW Richard, as a workaround for now (in case you haven't discovered it already), you can just get into the habit of placing 3 Wall hatches in these situations...one for one side of the niche, one for the opposite side of the niche, and one for the niche area. An obvious pain of course, but at least its something.

That's bizarre. I hadn't seen that one yet. I hope you've reported that?

I would personally do it completely from scratch and forget the muntins . Muntins are okay but are a bit limiting and less realistic than other equally quick options. Plus, you're going to need to create your separate glass pieces anyway. It's only a couple extra steps with boolean operations to model the lead caming.

The light works if you toggle the sunlight off. Sorry, that's all I have time to offer right now. Not a solution I know, but at least its something.

You should only need TWO different wall types or use the Hatch Wall tool and 2 different hatch patterns. Off angle walls would be trickier though and would require a custom hatch pattern.

...or Build>Image>Create Billboard Image This will give you a picture whose size is very easy to manipulate and position.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves about Chief's auto floor framing and I don't believe there's any way of controlling it. If somebody could show me otherwise, I would be stoked. I think the 2 best options are manually deleting after framing or temporarily changing interior walls to invisible, framing, and then changing walls back.

I personally wouldn't consider the X9 behaviour "critical functionality". Actually, it was rather unusual and awkward IMO. Only the dumbest of objects actually work that way anywhere else in Chief, and as Joe pointed out, this was the inevitable cost of the added ability to reshape layout boxes (something everybody seemed to insist was ridiculous that we couldn't already do). This seems to be one of the cases where everybody wants something but nobody gives any consideration as to what the cost might be. Anyway, I hardly ever used the "feature" myself...only occasionally to reshape a 3D view so I guess I may not be as sensitive to your plight. On a side note, have you considered adding Rotate/Resize About Current Point (RRACP), Place Point, and Delete Temporary Points to your list of hotkeys or easily accessible tools? You might even consider adding the latter 2 as regular hotkeys and just leave RRACP toggled on all the time. In the absence of any temporary points, RRACP just behaves like the default behaviour. I don't know, just a few ideas I thought I'd throw out there as it sounds like you're using that opposing-corner-anchored scaling functionality quite a bit.

3D>Edit Active Camera>Backdrop