Alaskan_Son

This is a good example of just picking your poison. Yes, you can use another program, but then again, you can also just do it all in Chief. There are several tricks to do so, but the easiest (especially considering your B&W line drawing example) is probably just to take an Orthographic 3D view>CAD Detail From View and just draw dimension in manually. You could also optionally use Plot Lines and manually insert the desired dimensions in Layout.

This reminds me of a Pool Table Sizing Tool I made a few years back. It was one of the first things I developed when I was first learning text macros. It's not the most eloquent coding and I haven't used it for a bit, but I believe it should still work perfectly fine. Just drop into the plan, make sure the "POOL TABLE SIZING TOOL" layer and the your "Cabinets, Labels" layers are both turned on and you should get automated feedback telling you exactly what size of pool table and cues will work for any given room size. I'll leave this here as a freebie for a limited time: Pool Table Sizing Tool.calibz Here's a little table I use for this purpose as well... Seven foot table: 3.5' x 7' (Playing area: 38" x 76") A - 11' 6" x 14' 6" B - 12' x 15' C - 13' x 16' Oversize eight foot table: 4' x 8' (Playing area: 46" x 92") A - 12' x 16' B - 12' 6" x 16' 6" C - 13' 6" x 17' 6" Eight foot table: 4' x 8' (Playing area: 44" x 88") A - 12' x 15' 6" B - 12' 6" x 16' C - 13' 6" x 17' Nine foot table: 4.5' x 9' (Playing area: 50" x 100") A - 12' 6" x 16' 6" B - 13' x 17' C - 14' x 18' A is the area required for a 48" cue. B is the area required for a 52" cue. C is the area required for a standard 58" cue.

You too

If you really need to show those walls for whatever reason, set it to .001" instead. You'll end up with essentially non-existant walls (even in 3D Vector Views). In fact, unless your dialog Number Style is set to Decimal Inches, it won't show in your dialog either.

To get the most accurate answer you should post the plan.

No. a mono slab is defined by walls but it does not actually have any foundation walls to speak of. If you have no walls, then Chief doesn't display walls. Select that room and increase your Stem Wall height to be taller than your slab, and then you will have walls. Otherwise, as I said before, all you have is a Slab and Footings.

Your problem appears to be that your are working with a Monolithic Slab defined by Slab Footings and as such there aren't any walls to speak of. All you have to control the display of are the Slab and the Footings.

One thing that seems to get commonly overlooked is to just use one of the most logical tools for the job... the Materials List.

You bet. Roofs can get problematic when you have extra unnecessary segments, particularly when those segments are at off angles that don't proper;y correspond with a wall or another roof plane.

It was added in X11 I believe.

This roof plane is your problem... Check out the shape in the upper right quadrant.

Why not just use Chief's built in capabilities?

There isn't one. What you described is really the closest thing but its problematic.

Be careful. That method results in twice as much library data as you really need. The catalogs copied to your user library will also no longer update when you run a Library Update.

Did you try it?

Reference Display hands down. No need to draw things twice.

My thoughts too. You don’t even need to use a molding polyline necessarily. You could just apply a molding to the room itself. Plus, you have full control over what material gets added to the side of that opening.

Is there a specific reason that you're using the Hole In Floor Platform tool rather than just defining the hole with walls? If you use walls then you can get the desired behaviour.

You're right that they're inaccessible, but you're really thinking about it all wrong. Don't think of it as accessible vs. inaccessible. Just realize that those "global" Text Macros are Chief things, not Ruby things. Ruby has no clue what %blahbahblah% means. It's gibberish. %blahblahblah% is pure Chief.

Copied and pasted from something I posted a while back... I tell it like this: People have to look at Chief and Ruby as 2 entirely separate constructs/entities. Whenever CHIEF sees two % signs enclosing some text, it will display any appropriate automated text. If that text happens to match a user defined, evaluated text macro then Chief will defer to RUBY to run the code. RUBY has no clue what anything between percentage signs means though. Only Chief knows that. When CHIEF “sees” the percentage signs on screen, Chief either fills it in per the defined macro, leaves it as dumb text, or defers to RUBY. The only thing Ruby can and ever will do with the text wrapped in % signs is display it as a “%name%” string or error out. My favorite example is to write a custom evaluated macro with a value of “%layer%” into an object. You should see the result is what you might expect...it reports the layer of the object. Now modify the macro to “%layer%”.reverse and see what you get. In both cases, RUBY is doing nothing more than placing the dumb text on the screen. CHIEF is the one that replaces the text with something else when the resulting on screen text results in either a defined macro (either internal or user defined) or (starting in X12) when Chief recognizes valid Ruby code. The above is the fundamental reason we cannot access those built in macro values using Ruby. It's because Chief is the one producing that output. Ruby has no access to it. Yes, Chief chooses to allow some things to route through Ruby, but not every macro in Chief is handled like that.

Tim, You have to mentally separate Text Macros (simple string replacement) and Ruby (a programming language) . They are 2 entirely different things. Chief has Text Macros, and as an option, Chief allows us to use Ruby as a programming language inside those Text Macros. In X12, Chief added the ability to enter Ruby Code directly into various data entry fields.

I always recommend that even Interior Designers really consider just upgrading to Premier. There are a handful of extra tools that you'll eventually find irreplaceable. In this particular instance, we have something in Premier called CAD Detail From View that makes super quick work of figuring out those offsets. Set the desired Fill style or Material Pattern, CAD>CAD Detail From View Use the generated linework to figure the required offset(s) Enter the offset(s) in the Fill Style or Pattern settings.

You can use the Material List to do this quite easily. Are you familiar with the Components panel?

Switch to your Text tool and you will automatically select Text items when clicking on them.