Alaskan_Son

Wasn't able to find the time to explain all the nuances in great detail but hopefully this helps...

Sounds to me like you want to see the footers and not the walls? If so, just try putting those walls onto their own layer and just turn that layer off.

Just one additional little thing to think about here... One big thing that comes into play here is face count. Graham mentioned turning off layers but its really whats on those layers that's important. For example, you can draw 4 walls, a couple windows, a door, and a roof to create a small house and end up with around 2,000 faces. You can also very quickly and easily find a Viking cooktop with 20,000 faces. That means you can have a cooktop that takes 10 times as long to rebuild as an entire house or that you can leave 10 times as much house turned on by just turning off the cooktop. This same general premise holds true throughout the model. There are many items with lots of faces that can really slow things down. Those are the types of things whose layers should be turned off if we don't need them and it absolutely does make a HUGE difference sometimes. For those that doubt the effectiveness of tuning off layers you can very easily test this too. Drop one of the aforementioned Viking appliances into one of your plans and use multiple copy to create a good handful of copies (100 or so maybe). Now create a 3D view. It will likely take a notable amount of time to build that view. Now turn off the Fixtures, Interior layer in your camera view set and create the 3D view again.

I SAID elevation view but what I should have said and what I MEANT was wall framing detail. Try that and see if that works for you.

There might be other ways I'm not thinking of, but one way you can do that manually is by first rotating a stud in plan view and then rotating that stud in elevation view so that its a top plate. Then you can use Join and Lap Ends to trim a stud followed by multiple copy. Post that plan and I'll see if I can't make you a quick video showing you how.

The material type just needs to be defined as framing in the material definition dbx.

Usually yes, but not in that particular case. In that case, the siding needed to continue through to that point in order to correctly blend into an adjacent attic wall. There were other ways to make it happen without the siding continuing through, but the other possibilities resulted in extraneous lines on the exterior, drywall gaps on the interior, incorrect framing, and/or siding gaps on the exterior and I think there were other problems as well but it's been a while and I don't remember all of it. I do see problems like that quite frequently. Basically as soon as we start to have irregular, non box-shaped rooms we start to have the problems Johnny is talking about. Sometimes it's not the room shape either...Sometimes its an irregular roof connection or a situation where a roof starts higher or lower than the adjacent walls, or a situation where a wall shape lands somewhere outside a plain rectangle and a gable wall, or perhaps some combination of the above. Point is that as Johnny says, Chief can handle the majority of wall connections/intersections just fine. There are those situations though that Chief basically cannot handle very well at all. Enter The Workaround...

As Chop says, those lines are usually the result of a slightly incorrect wall setting. It might be one of the wall structure settings, a wall alignment issue, one of the wall's roof settings, etc. Very difficult to hazard a guess without seeing the plan. I usually fix these situations in one of 4 ways though... Fix the wall setting. This can be difficult to track down sometimes. You have to figure out both the offending wall(s) and the offending setting(s). Sometimes Chief just has a glitch under certain circumstances and with certain connections and in those cases I have to move along to some workarounds... Reshape the wall polyline(s) in elevation. Often times the extra lines are the result of Chief overlapping wall polylines. In those cases I figure out how the walls are overlapping, I create a CAD Detail From View in order to copy and paste a snap point, and then I reshape the appropriate wall(s) so that they are no longer overlapping. I use a Wall Material Region or Custom Backsplash (depending on the situation). You can often times fix the problem by selecting one of the 2 aforementioned tools, clicking once on the offending wall and just adding a thin material region to mask the problem lines. My last resort is to draw a polyline solid to mask the problem. There are a number of ways to go about this but I usually use a CAD Detail From View, trace things, and then Copy/Paste Hold Position my polyline(s) from that back to the elevation view and convert to polyline solid. Sometimes you can also start with the material region, convert that to a plain polyline, and then convert that to a polyline solid. I usually use boolean operations to speed up the above processes as well. The basic idea though is similar to the material region idea...just create a thin wall covering to mask the problem lines.

Mark's idea is a very good solution but I would argue that you probably SHOULD have something unique in your schedule that distinguishes the difference between those 2 windows or else your schedule isn't fully doing it's job. That's just my opinion though. Now, having said that, Chief does have one major flaw in this particular area. It does not seem to recognize differences in 3D views even when a 3D view column is added to the schedule. I've had problems with this myself in the past. For example, I could have a left hand casement and a right hand casement that are otherwise identical. If I opt not to include hinge information in any of my columns but rather chose to use a 3D elevation view to get the information across instead...I get 2 of the same window instead of 2 different windows. This should not be so.

I haven't used 3D viewer so I'm not familiar with all the nuances when it comes to layer display options but just a basic understanding of Chief tells me that you should at least be able to get what you're after by creating a 3D framing view, converting the whole model to a symbol, placing that symbol into a plan by itself, and then exporting that model.

%scale% is most useful once you print. Once printed (to paper or PDF) it will correctly report either: Your Drawing Scale if you place it directly into layout (this is almost always 1" = 1") Your Layout View Scale if placed into plan view (1/4" = 1' or whatever scale you're using). This is what most people are typically after. You can get the same thing by using the %box_scale% macro but this requires using the actual layout box label which is not always ideal.

You can do what Perry says, but the one you're using should work as well. As you say, it will change while you are zooming in and out, but it will print correctly.

..but first and most obviously...make sure you have actually refreshed the views. Unless they are set to Always Update, you need to manually update them. Just click on the Update Layout View icon or go to Tools>Layout>Update Layout Views and select the appropriate option.

You can drag/drop or paste the aforementioned characters in Rich Text boxes but not standard text boxes and not via Ruby. There are probably registry hacks that will allow direct entry of unicode characters but outside of that I think copy/paste or drag/drop are your best options. You can use Windows Character Map, Word, or a number of other apps as the go between. For what its worth, Chief is far from the only app that has issues with unicode support. It's a common problem in all sorts of apps. I have personally taken to just modifying fonts to add the characters I need. This approach has a few minor downsides but works well for me.

This isn't a problem with the spray can but rather a fundamental misunderstanding of the way Chief works. I don't have time to get into it right now and I think I may have already spelled it out in quite a bit of detail in another thread a while back but it's important to realize that walls are unique and the material can be changed in several different ways. All of which have their benefits and drawbacks. Here are a few of the ways just off the top... Using the Room material settings Using the Wall material settings Using the Wall Type material settings Using the spray can Using wall coverings Using material regions In addition to the ways you can change the materials, you can also check "Use Default". Specifically, when you use the spray can you are basically telling Chief you want this wall surface (or portion thereof) to be unique and so the materials will no longer be changed with changes to the wall definition. This is not a bug or a flaw but rather a feature and is fully intended. If you want the wall to obey changes to the wall type again, all you have to do is open the wall, click on the material tab, click on the surface you want to change, and check "Use Default".

I totally agree that it could be WAY faster and that it is something we should be able to do with a single click. .

I'm with you Scott and I completely agree, but I must ask... Have you not tried any of the methods that myself and probably others have posted elsewhere? You can use your normal layout views to access those combinations, you can set up a layout page with all those combinations preset in little layout box "buttons", and you can even set up a similar layout box system right in your plan...which is what I have personally started doing. With as much as you talk about muddling through this particular part of the process I just can't help but think you're still doing it the hard way.

It sounds like you're doing the wrong thing. I'm not 100% certain about X5 but as I recall it worked the same way... Click on the material tab, select your exterior surface, click to select a material and down near the bottom you should see a checkbox for "Use Default". It may not work in X5 but hopefully it does.

I actually don't agree that the spray can is a last resort. I believe it only ever causes problems in 2 ways... 1. "Blend" is toggled on. This is easy to address by just toggling it off though and can be pretty easily fixed after the fact too by toggling it off and repainting wall. 2. A person sprays a wall or portion thereof for any given room thereby changing it from "Use Default" or changing the material in the dbx to "No Change". This isn't actually a problem at all unless you don't understand what's happening. The fact is that the spray can is a perfectly valid method and in my opinion it's usually the most efficient method. Actually, in the case of changing just a SECTION of a single wall for within one room, I believe it is the ONLY method. At the end of the day it's not about right or wrong with that tool it's just about understanding what you're doing and how it works.

Try these 2 things. Either select that wall and change the material to Use Default...or use the material eyedropper/spray can (make sure "Blend Colors With Materials" is toggled OFF).

This is exactly what I am guessing is going on in this particular situation too. Now, having said that (and completely disregarding the reference layer set thing)…I have also personally noticed a lot of problems with layer sets "changing on me" since X9. Like Mark I have simply fixed it and went back to work and I haven't reported anything yet because I haven't found anything repeatable or reportable. I've been assuming it has something to do with the change in my personal workflow and not a Chief problem but I haven't pinpointed it exactly so I'm still not sure. I do know that I have often returned to my floor plan only to find all my studs showing when the wall framing layer was previously turned off... and other similar things like that. I can say this though… If you are the type of person that has a lot of windows/views open at the same time it is very easy to have the wrong view (and therefore wrong layer set) active when you attempt to make any given layer display option change. I've caught myself making that mistake and it's anyone's guess how many times I've made that mistake without catching it.

It sounds to me like you are overthinking this a bit. Exterior doors automatically have different trim on both sides because it is assumed that this will be the case nearly 100% of the time as it is in the real world. For interior doors, this option must be manually selected as it is assumed interior doors will have the same trim material on each side the majority of the time.. We were given the option to have separate trim materials for ANY situation where we might want different trim materials on each side. The problem you've described above with balconies has to do with your room definitions. Specifically, your room type (whether it's considered an interior room, an exterior room, or a hybrid room will decided whether or not your door is in interior or exterior door. Search the Help files for Room Types and Functions and do a little reading on that subject.

I'm just guessing, but I'm relatively certain you're probably trying to open a file that was saved in X9.

Hey Dermot, I think most of us that do anything more than occasional work with macros find it far easier to use the Expanded Value field to search through object attributes which is why Joe is recommending his modified Object Properties macro. I use a modified version as well. Actually, anytime I open a plan that has the OOB macro in it, one of the very first things I usually do is at least modify that macro to work as an owner context. I would really recommend you guys add an exception to the OOB macro so that it works in both contexts. Super easy to do and far more effective. Just my 2 cents.

You're missing the step of creating a CUSTOM COUNTERTOP (like Jerry said). Open Help and search Custom Countertop.