Alaskan_Son

In addition the questions Mark posted above, I would also inquire as to what exactly you mean when you say... Is it your own time adjusting settings that takes so long or is it the time it takes Chief to render the scene? If it’s things you are doing, what are the things that take you so much time? PBR is tricky in that lighting is basically handled in aggregate and relative to other lights in the scene meaning you can get the same exact view with the sunlight set at 4 lumens as you can with the sunlight set at 400,000 lumens. It’s easy to run around chasing your tail. My suggestion is to just hire someone (not me) to coach you through it at the start. You may get there eventually on your own and by gleaning tips from the forum with MANY MANY hours of practice, but but but...if your time is valuable, I suggest you contact @Renerabbitt to see if he can squeeze you in for a training session or 2. There are just far too many nuances. Shoot, read through some of the threads here on the forum and you’ll quickly see that even guys that seem to know what they’re doing can spend a ridiculous amount of time futzing around and experimenting with settings. You can spend hours reading through all the tips coming from different directions and many times the methods conflict with each other due to some of the various nuances (particularly the lighting thing I mentioned above). At the end of the day, there are a handful of universal rules you’ll want to follow but in large part, you really need to work within your own specific system, and learning a system from a specific coach who knows what they’re doing is a good way to do that. Just my 2 cents.

Open the Layout Box Specification dialog and uncheck Color Fill.

Let's slow it down and back it up a bit. You have 2 different files right? You have a Plan file and you have a Layout file. Those 2 different files each have their own color toggles. Color can be toggled separately in each of the 2 files. Not only can color be toggled separately in each of the 2 files, but in your Plan file you can also toggle color separately for each and every Saved Plan View and each and every camera. In your Plan files, you can toggle color on for your 2 floor plan views and toggle color off for your elevation views. In your Layout file, you can just leave color toggled on. Because your elevation views have color toggled off to start with, there will be no color to display in layout.

Nice job Alan!!

Exactly the right thing to do.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were doing the first time around. I thought you were having problems with a plant image when you were really having problems with a material that you were applying to a 3D plant. I just read too quick and wasn't comprehending your problem properly.

Turn color off in you plan view or camera view. Toggling color on in layout can only toggle colors on if the view (from the plan file) has color on in the first place.

To be perfectly clear, Point to Point Dimensions will recognize and snap to footings running parallel to the wall, they just won't snap to or recognize the perpendicular footing lines that extend BEYOND the wall.

If you do not check Save In Plan, the PDF box will always load from the source file when you open the plan. If the pages in the source file were rotated, then the pages in Chief will be rotated as well. Is this possibly whats happening?

I think so. Yes. Read the post again. It clearly communicated that he couldn't get dimensions to snap to footings at all and that switching to a CAD Detail was the only solution. Steve even went on to further highlight this notion in a followup post when he said... Bottom line though is this: Do footings have snaps? Yes Is a CAD Detail the only way we can dimension them? No Do Locate settings have any effect on the current behavior? No We can drag nodes after the fact as has been mentioned, we can use Point To Point Dimensions as has been mentioned (to effectively replace End to End Dimensions), and Locate settings have no effect on either of these operations. The only thing we can't do is use a running type dimension string like Manual Dimensions.

Default Settings>Cabinets>General Cabinet

It seems like you moved the goalpost a little. In your original post you said.... What you show in the video is what I get on my Windows machine as well. Footings do have snaps, and you don’t need to use a CAD Detail to dimension them. You just have to drag out new segments or move nodes after initial placement is all. I think you should send in a suggestion that footings be added to the Locate settings if this is something you really need.

Not possible using the room definition as others have stated. The room definition stops at the bottom of wall/top of footing and none of the room settings will affect anything lower than that. Very easy to model manually though.

For me it depends ENTIRELY on what I’m doing and I suggest people do what works best for their specific applications and workflow. Just a few examples: If I’m needing to monitor and edit the schedule a lot while drawing—especially when working on a single screen, then the schedule goes right there in the plan view. This is commonly the case for me when I’m setting up a schedule for a very specific purpose and I need to make sure everything is just right (I do this with cabinet schedules a lot). I also do this with note schedules quite a bit, particularly if my note schedule is serving as a checklist of sorts. The schedule doesn’t always stay permanently in the plan view, but sometime it does. There are certain things I find a lot easier to select and edit through the schedule rather than selecting them in the plan. I don’t however want to keep moving over to my CAD Detail or to the Project Browser. So, if it’s something I’m pretty involved with, I’ll put those schedules in the plan view. Again, this is something I do a lot when drawing up custom cabinetry plans. I also use this methodology with note schedules quite a bit. If I’m drawing up a specialized detail or a niche set of plans and want the schedule to occupy some part of the actual floor plan, then I find it better to just put those schedules in the plan view. This is way I can size and position them exactly to fit in the available space. Doing this in layout requires a lot of unnecessary back and forth. Schedules that I don’t particularly need to monitor or work with, or that don’t need to be overland onto my plan view make sense to leave in a CAD Detail for sure. Whether or not schedules go into separate CAD Details is mostly just personal preference. Chief gives us access to the various schedules using the Project Browser, so if quick access is the goal, the extra CAD Details aren’t necessary. The main benefits to separate CAD Details in my mind are that you don’t have to worry about schedules encroaching into each others’ space and the view is automatically cropped when sending to Layout. On the other hand, multiple schedules in a single CAD Detail can make it a lot easier to look at the whole picture in one place. This is particularly true of schedules that are related to each other or otherwise interconnected in some way like windows/doors, plumbing/mechanical/electrical fixtures, interior/exterior furniture, framing/roof planes, etc.

Set the line style to invisible and just place the little segments manually.

I never claimed that. That’s not what we’re talking about though. The conversation has kinda shifted bit. That was the whole point of my second to last post. I believe Steve was originally saying he couldn’t snap to footings AT ALL. I was just saying snap settings shouldn’t have anything to do with that and that there must be something else going on.

That just sounds really weird. I have no problem snapping to the footing and don’t need to futz around with snap settings to do it either.

I’m curious...what happens if you modify those files to replace the transparency with a “green screen” of sorts so you could just use Chief’s transparency slider instead. It might not do anything. I’m not sure. I’m away from my computer now and can’t remember whether or not Chief’s symbols use images with or without transparency of their own.

Bob, I would strongly suggest you learn to use the reference Display.

Have you tried hitting F5, F12, and/or clicking Rebuild 3D? I find sometimes that these types of issues are cleared up by a Rebuild/Refresh.

I don't know how you got to this point, but you've drawn your floor plans in totally different locations. In fact, you've even drawn your second floor plan twice....

I forget to consider that setting sometimes for things like this because I have mine set (in Preferences) to Color Off is Grayscale (yours is set to Color Off is Black and White). You may want to consider changing that setting if you prefer to see Grayscale in your drawings.

Its not too difficult to figure out using some of the various aforementioned methods as well as a few others, however I think its worth noting that we used to have a tool back in X11 that made this super fast and easy and I would really like to see it put back in. Specifically, we had the Change Roof Pitch or Height dialog. Here I was pulling my hair out over the last year or so on several project wondering why I couldn't get the tool to work anymore. I finally decided to go back and test it out, and sure enough, it look like it was just removed completely.

Change the line style, weight, and color as desired for the various layers. Same way you control line display for plan views.