Alaskan_Son

In my experience as a framer, builder, and designer, trusses are being used in about 90% of all new construction in regions I have worked in or am familiar with (mostly Alaska, Northwest, and Hawaii). The main exceptions are very small roof planes or high end projects with either timber framing or other exposed rafter systems. I know this varies regionally, but that’s my experience for whatever it’s worth.

You can also build the roof as desired (heel heights, overhang, etc. and then simply measure and adjust the sub-fascia to move the soffit location. This isn't unusual for the real world anyway where the control point is commonly the heel height. I've often needed to move the fascia up, down, or rip it to get soffits right where I want them.

I could be misunderstanding, but there is probably a faster way and a way that makes Chief do the lion’s share of the heavy lifting. Here’s a quick power tip from the vault... Build all your trusses as usual setting the appropriate trusses to be Energy Heels... Group select at least all the energy heel trusses, change top and bottom chords to a very small dimension (1" should probably do it), check Force Truss Rebuild, and click Okay...   With the trusses still selected, open them right back up, check Lock Truss Envelope, change your top and bottom chord back to what they should be, and click Okay...  It would be nice if those shorter energy heels behaved properly on their own, but until they do, I think this is the best we can do. If anyone knows of a more effective solution I'd love to know it.

Either manual labeling or custom text macros if you want to automate it. No magic button in Chief for that one though.

Very very good tip Eric.

Concentric Edit Mode, Concentric Jump, using the little solid filled circular edit handle, opening the Arc, locking the center, and then editing the radius, using Multiple Copy...

Never gonna happen. Chief prints up thousands of pages of documentation, gives us pop-ups and information panels in various dialogs and people read almost none of it. Or they DO read it and just ignore what it says or dismiss it as "erroneous". Software companies like Chief can only try so hard. It was considered altered simply by clicking Okay instead of Cancel and you were warned appropriately. I don't personally care that this happens though. This type of functionality can make it super quick and easy to disconnect a wall from it's automated behavior if desired, so it also has its benefits. I can however see why a person might want it not to happen if no changes were made. They could instead let us uncheck that Automatically Generated Wall checkbox, but then people would mess with that setting never bothering to read what it's for and then piss and moan because all their attic walls are "glitchy" or "buggy". There's no winning.

You might want to start by hitting F1 or clicking Launch Help and searching the word "Template".

That's what the Cancel button is for. Why would you think the warning is erroneous anyway? That's the problem with failing to recognize we're the ones making the mistakes. We assume it's Chief and learn nothing.

Very well then. Carry on.

YOU are using that method. That's why you have those errant walls up there.

This is really neither here nor there. It just means that you made you manual manipulations to those walls before you changed that default setting is all. The main reason I personally pointed out that change to your Exterior Wall Defaults is that it just makes it a little more difficult to troubleshoot and it kills some of Chief's automated behaviors. The Auto Regenerate behavior however is not one of them.

This is really the crux of the problem though. As soon as a person does, the wall is both retained and not regenerated, and many people do so without taking note of what they did or recognizing that it may cause them problems further on down the road. That being said, I'm going to help you out a bit here. There is one scenario I know of where Chief doesn't issue that warning and probably should, and that's when placing a window or door into an attic wall. The addition of the opening means you've manually manipulated the wall and its no longer an Auto Generated wall. This one I can see happening without anyone knowing the Auto status was changed, but it's still the result of direct user manipulation and I doubt it's the cause of more than a small handful of these attic wall problems. I'm pretty certain the vast majority are cases where people did get that pop-up warning but chose to make the change anyway. EDIT: There's another scenario where we don't get the pop-up warning too, and that's when adding a Material Region to an attic wall. As with the addition of an opening though, a person is making the deliberate addition of an object to the plan and as such would have to go up and manually delete those objects anyway. That being said, I do believe this is another case where Chief should be issuing a warning and they aren't.

This is evidence of nothing. It's simply an observation. It could very easily be the result of the various users unwittingly meddling with their attic walls. I still think this is the most likely case in most (if not all) of the various examples you've seen. I will await any real evidence to the contrary.

When you've used that plan to actually design a home. In X12 Chief gave us a Save As Template plan to help find a middle ground. To date though, my advice to all trainees and consultees is to keep a little notepad handy. When you find some setting that you have to keep changing with every plan, or some layer that you keep needing to recreate, or some Plan View that you know you'll need all the time, write it down. Then, at the end of the day, the end of the week, or the end of the month, take that list and make those modifications to your template plan. This way it can be done in a clean and orderly manner and it gives you a little time to make sure you really want to make those changes. With the straight up Save As Method, all these changes to your template plan are made willy nilly and happen with every whim. The result is often a confounding mess that just keeps building on itself. That's my free advice on this matter for the day. Gotta get back to work now.

If I could "quickly" elaborate or direct you to a specific language I would. I don't have anything off the top though. I just know I've read and heard many times from Chief that they don't recommend the conventional "Save As Method" many of us are accustomed to where we just keep reusing the same file and just deleting what we don't need. It quickly becomes bloated and error filled, carrying problems forward from one plan and version to the next. I guess the better answer I could give is this... Where in the documentation is the Save As Method recommended? Answer: It's not.

Also, just a side note... Get in the habit of actually reading the dialog boxes that pop-up. If you try to edit an automatically generated attic wall in any way you should get a pop-up that says... "This operation modifies one or more automatically generated walls. The walls(s) will be retained and will not regenerate automatically. Would you like to continue with the operation?" All you have to do is open the dialog box and click Okay and you'll get the message. If you click Yes, then you've just created yourself a supposedly errant, "stray" attic wall.

There are a lot of really good reasons Chief doesn't recommend using the Save As method guys. Not saying it can't be an effective method but it can result in all sorts of problems.

Sorry, you didn't reproduce anything. All you've proved is that you futzed with attic walls in your template plan too.

Could it be possible that you're privy to a lot more plans in X11 and X12 than you were before? And might it be possible that you understand attic walls better now than you did prior to X11? I just don't think it's very productive issuing a diagnosis that you don't have any direct evidence for. It's a lot easier for people to swallow when they think it's Chief's fault so they assume it is and learn nothing from their mistakes. No, until I see some evidence, I'm not buying it. I don't have these stray attic walls in my plans.

The only garage elevation related code I know of is with regard to ignition sources within 18" of the garage floor.

I'd be curious to see if you could actually demonstrate this taking place or if its just your own supposition. I'm not sure I've ever seen this happen unless the attic walls have been fiddled with.

See if this helps you at all...

This is a simple example of getting involved when you didn't need to. You placed a wall on the attic level that shouldn't be there. In addition, your attic walls are super difficult to troubleshoot because you're not using the default layer for your exterior walls. You're just fighting the program.