Alaskan_Son

How are you with Photo Shop? You can always edit that image to increase the size of the leaves and/or change their color.

Ah, I see.

3 things to consider: You can always select those tiny little 1/2" wide rooms and adjust the Structure settings for them. In order to get your walls to adjust properly, you'll need to open a bunch of them and check Default Wall Bottom Height. Once you adjusted some of them you turned off the Auto behavior so they'll stay too tall even after you make the proper floor height changes till you fix that. You can set those furring walls to Furred Wall in their Structure settings which should alleviate the need for that extra room.

With an Open Below room there is no floor platform. You should see in my example plan above that if you turn Auto Framing on, all the exterior chase walls automatically balloon frame anyway. Its only the partition wall between the house and chase that needs to be specified as balloon framed.

You can still use the same method if balloon framing. You might just have to check Balloon Through Ceiling Above for the partition wall, or at worst, you can manually modify a little framing in the Wall Detail(s).

Can you be more specific as to what you mean by this?

That is simply not a suitable model for Chief. I could convert it and reduce the number of faces/vertices, but no amount of reduction is going to make that a usable model in Chief IMO.

The best approach really depends on a lot of different specific details; for example: Certain objects like light fixtures, interior furnishing, wall hangings, and various other symbols can just be placed on different layers and then layers can be toggled on and off. Architectural objects like walls, windows, doors, roof/ceiling planes, etc. cannot reasonably be toggled using layers. There are a few minor exceptions, but for all intents and purposes, these kinds of changes need to be done either in multiple plans, on multiple floors, or in multiple instances on the same floor... You can keep everything in a single plan and on a single floor even by just copying and pasting any given portion of your plan (can be done rather quickly using edit area). If your different options involve multiple cabinetry configurations you can sometimes use layers to display multiple options, but this really only works of cabinets aren't occupying the same space. For all intents and purposes this almost never works. You can however convert any group of cabinets to a symbol and then you can use layers again. You can even save your cabinet configurations for later use by either saving as an architectural block to your library, dragging off to the side in your plan view, or cutting and pasting to a different floor. If your various options only involve changing cabinetry styles, then you may be able to use Style Palletes to both store and toggle your various options. For quick material changes, you may not even need to create multiple anything. Sometimes I find it faster to just make changes and export picture 1, make changes and export picture 2, make changes and export picture 3. Undo as necessary to get back to previous iteration if desired. Yes you may have to redo the changes later, but some quick changes are a lot more efficient to manage this way. For anything beyond real simple symbols and quick changes that can be made on the fly, I think its almost always easiest to use multiple plans or multiple floors. These 2 methods allow for the easiest transfer of options from one iteration to another using Cut/Copy and Paste Hold Position.

I'm curious why the hesitation to do something that could literally be done in a matter of seconds.

Not that I'm sure I'll have time anymore, but the conversation is almost always far more productive and efficient for everyone involved when you post a plan so everyone knows what you're doing. Sometimes the solution isn't to add a floor but to insert a floor. As I mentioned before, sometimes the additional floor is not necessary at all. We also don't know if you've manually messed with wall polylines or attic walls (both of which could screw things up), we don't know what your roof situation is (auto, manual, baseline polylines, etc.), we don't know what level you placed your windows on, and we don't know anything about what your various wall and room settings are....to name just a few things that come to mind.

No. I didn't do anything with the roofs. I have Auto Rebuild Roofs toggled on and for whatever reason Chief just places one of the cricket planes up on the 2nd floor.

Yes. Stop doing it that way and try my suggestion. Manually adjusting walls in elevation and manually adjusting Wall Layer Intersections will ultimately just lead to the aforementioned headaches later on.

Post the plan, or if you can't for some reason, email it to me and I'll take a quick look. Its usually pretty easily sorted using Select All and Fill Window tools though.

Don't use the experimental plans as actual working plans. Just play around with them to test things out.

No. My opinion is that this approach only ends in tail chasing induced headaches.

By the way, you don't always need the extra floor. It totally depends on the plan. If for example its a 2 story plan where the chase only extends up through a single story section of the plan, then the upper part of the chase (the Open Below room) can just go on the existing second floor.

Just do a Save As of your plan and try it. learning to experiment with TRASH plans is one of the most fundamental learning tools at your disposal.

so yes discovered that as well when I was doing the cross section. I ended up removing the inner wall, and because the chimney is lower than the peak of the roof, the elevation never actually showed the now missing wall. I was going to try and put in a psolid. But your solution sounds much easier. thanks Every house and its chimney/chase configurations are a little different and they all need to be modeled differently depending on the specific situation. As was mentioned before, whenever possible, they should just be modeled as they will be built. The trick of course is figuring out how to model them as they will be built. If I understand correctly what you're talking about in this particular situation though, I believe the best approach is some variation of this (most parts of which were probably already mentioned in one form or another but I'm not sure they were all fully put together): Make your chimney/chase its own room surrounded by walls As was already mentioned by someone else 7 years ago, build an extra blank floor (don't just try to use the attic level) for the upper part of your chimney/chase and define those chimney/chase rooms as Open Below. Use the appropriate wall definitions on both floors. This may require placing breaks down on the first floor exterior house wall(s). This is a very simple example plan that required no adjusting of walls in elevation and no manipulation of Wall Layer Intersections. Chase example.plan

This is some next level back door trickery, but Chief has a bit of a quirky behavior we can take advantage of for things like this and it also has a number of other extremely useful applications. I almost hate to mention it for fear they’ll “fix” it but I’m gonna anyway: You can use Edit Area to select dimension strings and place them on another floor. As long as you ONLY select the dimensions themselves, they will actually remain tied to the original object(s). New or existing nodes however can also be attached to objects on the current floor. You can use this behavior for all manner of things but a few that come to mind rather quickly are things like: Stacked floors that have matching dimensions like you already mentioned. The reference display also works, but the problem with the reference display is that the dimensions can’t be positioned or formatted independently on a view by view basis and you can’t add or modify segments for any slight differences like bay window bump-outs. Dimensioning plumbing drops. Using this method you can actually have a dimension that references the actual fixtures on the floor above. Dimensioning cantilevers. Again, a dimension can accurately represent both the wall on the current floor and the wall on the floor above and/or below. The dimension on the current floor will adjust automatically for any changes to walls above/below. Anyway, those are just a few simple and relatable examples. I won’t get into it all right now, but it’s a handy little trick.

Ya, I wish there was a better way too.

%(room.internal_area/7).round%

Almost certainly this^^^^^^ I'm not familiar with it, but at first glance, I'm not so sure that GPU is up to X13 specs.

Exactly what I was going to say. Either roof planes or just draw manually with solids.

Unfortunately, Chief doesn't have a dedicated tool or process for this operation. You can however make one for yourself. For example, one thing I commonly do is use the All Off Layer Set for things like this.... Select your desired layers in Active Layer Display Options. This can be done before or after switching to the All Off Layer Set. With the layers still selected, switch to the All Off Layer Set. If you're already there, skip this step. With the layers still selected, check Display using the Layer Properties edit tools. This assumes you have those tools activated; otherwise, you'll have to turn those tools on first. Select All (Control+A) or draw a marquee around everything. With objects still selected, switch back to you desired layer set and Move as desired. At some point, remember to go back and reset your All Off Layer Set so that all layers are turned off. NOTE: You can also take this one step further and create an "All Layers On and LOCKED" layer set and do the same thing. This main difference is that you use the lock toggle instead of the display toggle. This approach has 2 advantages in that it will allow you to select objects like windows and doors that will not display if the wall layer is turned off, and it will also allow you to see other objects and use various snaps without even switching layer sets. Again, you just have to remember to re-lock all the layers when you're done so that its ready for you next time.

It's the result of Chief's Grid Rounding behavior. I don't have the time or inclination to explain it at the moment, but it's working as designed. The unexpected dimension being displayed is simply the result of where that dimension segment happens to land on the rounding grid. Either change to Distance Rounding in your Dimension Defaults or change the rounding accuracy for that dimension.