Alaskan_Son

I very briefly touched on my own personal practices here...

Not sure announcing your seat of the pants style and then asking people to donate their own valuable time to help you learn how to solve your problems is the best approach. With all due respect, you should consider doing a little less learning by the seat of your pants and get some training, watch some tutorials, go through the user guide, or at the very least...read through the Help files. You're going to be running into problems ALL THE TIME until you do.

Quick tip... If you're going to use the solid method, you can make your life a lot easier by starting with a BOX. Draw it in plan view, then rotate it in elevation to match your roof pitch, and then LASTLY...rotate it in plan view to match your valley. You can then offset as necessary and use boolean operations to trim it. Oh ya, and P.S. I believe "cricket" is an incorrect term for that situation. A cricket or saddle is a roof designed to direct water shed around an obstruction like a chimney, a wall, or another roof plane.

Scott, I MIGHT be able come up with something that would do what you want but to be perfectly frank, it wouldn't be easy to set up, to learn, or to maintain and I don't think it would be worth the time, the money, or the effort. I really think your best bet is to just manually add that info to your layout box whenever you set it up and to change it whenever you change anything. That's my 2 cents.

Yes. You CAN do this in Chief via several different routes... Build>Image - Launch Help (F1) and search "Image" and read up on it. 3D Backdrop - Launch Help and search "Backdrop" Images applied as materials to other various objects instead of, or in combination with the above. Launch Help, search "Materials" and read up on creating and defining materials. There are really a lot of possibilities. You have to explore them for yourself though.

There are a few ways to do this. I don't have time to go through them in much detail right now, but try this one... Draw the overframe rafters using a truss base and trusses. Just edit them as necessary in your truss detail to get the proper cuts and to delete the unnecessary parts. For your 2x12 ledgers, I think the easiest thing might be to create 2 more roof planes made of just a single layer of material. You won't be able to get the compound miters on your rafters and you'll have to fool with the material, layer, and display settings for your "ledger planes" but all in all, it shouldn't be that hard to do.

Molding being curved in 2 planes is doable but is not for the feint of heart and it's really only worth the time and effort to complete in Chief IMO if you have a definable arc as one of the 2 planes. In your example, I can get pretty close... ...except that the side profile of your hood cover isn't a true arc but rather a line and tangent arc or an ellipse of sorts... The hood cover in the picture you posted would have actually been easier as it appears to be closer to a simple arc. For the record, even the more complex curvature is probably doable but totally not worth the effort IMO. If you need to do that type of modelling you're probably better off using another program to complete the task...or hiring someone to do it for you. NOTE: I don't have time to go through all the intricacies of the process right now but if you want to get the general idea I think you can probably extrapolate it from steps posted in this thread...

Apple seems to offer users and programs a lot less control over certain things than other operating systems do in order to maintain a more consistent and stable experience. I guess maybe the size of those icons is one of them.

I noticed it was a Mac but its a little surprising to hear that the 2 systems don't have all the same options available (inside Chief that is).

You seem to be missing quite a few options in that Preferences dbx. Are you sure you're running X8? Here's what I have in X8...

I'm not sure exactly WHAT is different, but it definitely looks like something is a little different on their system. Notice the font and arrows being used for their dropdown menus and tabs... I'm not 100% sure, but the only way I know of changing things like that is via registry tweaks, and if they're the type of people who play with the Windows registry there's n telling what else might be different on their system or with their installed fonts. Again, I'm just throwing ideas out there. That being said, the lack of tab spacing control in Rich Text boxes is a long time and ongoing issue that could use some attention one way or another.

I saw that too, but I think that's just the text that happens to be selected. They have both sizes in that text box. Here's what I get when I first open the plan... And what I get after I check Auto Width... I suspect it might be related to either: A. A different operating system (Mac perhaps?) B. A slightly different version of the Arial Narrow font that they have installed on their system. Maybe try having them send you the font they're using and see if using that one makes a difference. I have 2 versions of Arial Narrow on my system. The second appears on the surface to be a carbon copy but the overall results are actually quite different. I don't know...just throwing some ideas out there.

Mike (and any others experiencing the same frustrations), try this... Open your Print Layout dialog and under Preview uncheck Update Automatically... I think it's the constant update that really slows things down for most people. If you need to see the preview go ahead and click update. Much like live views sent to layout, I think the automatic update is probably better left turned off for most situations. Just update when you feel the need.

Ya, most of these are different subjects entirely with no easy answers. Arrows could definitely use a lot more control though as you've pointed out... It can be extremely difficult to get an arrow to connect to the correct object in some circumstances. Sometimes the only solution is to drag the object out into an open area, connect the arrow, and then drag it back into position, and even then... If we explode a CAD block in that view, the arrow may disconnect on us and jump to something else or even nothing at all. Very irritating. With regard to arrows that have no macros associated with them...I'm just talking about arrows that point to specific objects or locations. Maybe they're pointing to a wall, the corner of a building, a cabinet, a countertop, a fixture, etc. If we are noting something about that object, it makes sense for the arrow to move with the object. I mean that's what arrows are generally for right...to point to specific things? Besides that, I also use the automated connectivity behavior of arrows not to point to things per se but simply because they move with the object. This can be helpful for setting up customized dimensioning tools (usually with macros that are NOT referencing anything). And arrows can also be used on molding polylines so that they automatically resize when the connected object(s) are resized. With regard to the idea of smart arrows that only connect to valid objects. That sounds like it could be a cool option but would it really be all that helpful? I mean, don't most of your macros include exceptions that would make them valid in most all situations anyway? I would support this suggestion, but I think in all reality it wouldn't prove to be all that helpful. For me personally, I've had the most problems with connections to polylines and those connection issues aren't a result of arrows connecting to invalid objects but on the contrary...connecting to other perfectly valid polylines and therefore returning incorrect values. As you know it would really just be a huge help if the connections were simply stable...smart might just be a bonus.

This gets complained about often enough that people should be making suggestions for a "Disconnect Arrow" toggle or something similar. I don't agree that the behaviour should be limited to macros though. There are plenty of situations where its valuable to have the arrow move with the object it's referencing.

Are you talking about the Wall Type name or the actual Label? Those are 2 entirely different things. The wall type name is first assigned when you create the wall type. The label on the other hand is specific to individual walls. You would need to edit the individual wall label before adding it to your library. When adding a wall type to the library it will carry any label information with it. You can also change the labels for your various wall defaults in default settings but as far as I know, there is no other way to change a wall label based on the wall type. Hopefully that was at least as clear as mud.

Also it would help to know what you're talking about. It sounds like you're using stem walls on purpose but want to get rid of the stemwalls? I'm sure it makes sense to you like Bob said, but I for one am just not following.

Check out the Match Properties tool. Note that you can also activate a tool for any group of items (the window tool for example) and then hold down shift and marquis select any area(s) of the plan and only that particular object type will be selected.

Looked at your settings, and I think your main problem is that your line weights are EXTREMELY small. Almost every layer in your plan has a line weight setting of 1 with a few items have a line weight of 2 and just a couple with line weights of 3 and 4. OTOH, if you look at your layout, the items that seem to be printing just fine all have line weights of between 10 and 35. Now with regard to your line weight settings. Changing them to 1 = 1/10 mm might have been enough to fix your problem but it looks like you only changed that setting in the plan. Those settings needed to be changed in layout. Your settings are still at 1 = 1/100 mm in the layout file. So...increase your line weights or change the line weight setting in layout to something higher. 1 = 1/10 mm should probably do it but you could probably even go to 1 = 1/5 mm....or even larger. Note that if you decide to adjust your line weight scale rather than the line weights themselves that you'll probably want to adjust the line weights for your layout items to more closely match the line weights you're using in the plan. If you want my opinion though, go through and change all your line weights and leave the scale at 1 = 1/100 mm. You're not giving yourself much control by using such a large line weight scale. You basically only end up with 4 or 5 possible line weight settings.... 0 = can barely see it. Probably not useful for much of anything. 1 = normal 2= medium/bold 3= extra bold 4= too big for anything except maybe a border. Don't get me wrong, that's a perfectly valid method, but go with a smaller scale if you want more variation and control. That's just my 2 cents though. Take it for what it's worth. Hope that helps.

Here's my take on this subject... The leader lines moving around is simply a result of the intended behaviour of arrows...to "stick" to whatever you attach them to. If you don't like that behaviour, it would probably be a good idea to post a suggestion...maybe a "Disconnect Arrow" toggle (or something along those lines). The reason many of us suggest against notations in layout is not a result of the jumping leader lines but rather because we think it's bad practice anyway. Notations placed in layout are not actually associated with or connected to the model in any way; move the layout box, delete the layout box, move something in the model, change the model, etc...and your notations are all wrong now. You then need to go back and proof check all the various views and change things as necessary. When those notes are right in the plan, you can see what's going on as you make changes and can adjust accordingly (if the adjustments aren't automatic). Keeping those notes in the model is just where they belong IMO. Again, not because of the leader line issues, but because you want to keep them with items you are actually notating. Don't get me wrong. I place notes like that in layout sometimes myself...just not very often.

Still looks like a color/grayscale issue to me. Try posting the plan and layout files and you'll probably get a better answer.

Plenty of ways to do this. In addition to the suggestions above, you can also just use your reference display.

This is only a workaround solution here Johnny, but once you have the topography finalized, you can... Switch to your All Off set and turn on only the terrain Create a CAD Detail From View Group select all the text by either activating a text tool and shift selecting or by using Match Properties and either cut or copy all that text to your clipboard Go back to your plan view and turn off the automatic contour labels Paste/Hold Position that text into your plan view and then move it all to a unique layer in case you need to group select and modify later. You now have labels that can be moved around and resized as necessary. Again, this is just a workaround and you would have to delete the labels and repeat the process if you change the terrain, but at least it gives you a reasonably quick way to have customizable contour labels.

It sounds like you didn't read the whole post.