Atari2600

Hi there, We are an high-end residential DB firm with about 10 Chief Architect users, with experience ranging from 2 months to 20 years. We are very interested in working with a skilled trainer to help us develop a training program and perhaps run at least six sessions (at a minimum) over this next year. Our primary goal is to help our team align our workflow and we believe that bringing in an outside expert might do the trick. (As some of you can imagine, getting some users to possibly “change their ways” can be a challenge at times. We are located in DC and having someone willing to meet in person or willing to travel is a plus. While Zoom is certainly an option (any may be cost effective) it’s not our preference. If this is a challenge you are both interested in (and one which you might be skilled at doing), please PM me. Thanks & Happy New Year everyone. Matt Dirksen Landis Architects | Builders, Inc.

We are a 30+ year old residential design build firm in the Washington DC area, and have an immediate opening for a Project Architect / Project Designer position. We use both Chief Architect and Revit LT, and are particularly interested in candidates who are competent with with both architectural design and with finish selection management. If this may be of interest to you (or you might know someone), please send me a PM. thanks! Matt

And thanks again for the 3D Viewer app! It's especially nice on an iPad. I do look forward to it's continued development.

Hi all, I recently went to the AIA convention in Philadelphia, and was quite impressed with what was going on in the VR world. Since then, any of our projects we have designed with Revit LT have given us the opportunity to easily create "stereo panoramic" renderings, and send them to our (and our client's) smartphones. From there, we drop our phones into Google Cardboard to view the renderings. This is pretty cool, especially when seated inside of a clients existing kitchen, and letting them view the proposed kitchen rendering using the cardboard goggles. For the spatially challenged, it very quickly helps them understand what they might see when the kitchen is complete (impressionism aside). I would LOVE do do this with our Chief Architect projects as well. Does anyone know how I might create "stereo panoramic" renderings? Or how to send the model into another program where I could easily do this? (We also use Revit LT, Sketchup, and AutoCad) I try to export to an autocad file, and then to Revit, but it looks like I'll have to re-assign all the materials all over again. Like everything, I'm looking for an easier way. While I did just start playing with the Chief Architect 3D viewer app (which is also pretty cool), I would still love to figure out how to utilize Google Cardboard. Any help is greatly appreciated! Matt

+1 to that. Of course I am wondering why you are building a walk in closet in a living room...

So I notice when I zoom in on the pdf, the 2x4's on the right do infact begin to "appear" lighter than the one's on the left. Just as an experiment, what will happen to your 2x4's if you delete everything else? Furthermore, will it actually print incorrectly? If it prints just fine, then it might be an issue with how Acrobat is handing the file.

Thanks Doug, I do appreciate it. A question: what is a "UNC mount point?"

1) Not having to drag the file off the network to my computer's local hard drive to work on them would be a good start. (In practice, we work off the files on the network, but this was one of the first things Tech Support told me we should do, in order to improve stability.) 2) A simple way to keep associated templates and resources "centralized" so everyone can both use them, and add to them. (To be frank, this might already be simple, but I haven't quite learned how to set this up yet.) Right now, if I have a file I am working on on my machine, and I go to another machine to view the model, I will typically get errors associated with missing textures and such - usually because they are targeted to my local library. We often bring files up on a large screen in our conference room. I know that I can locate all those textures in my local library, and copy them over, but this is not a very proactive approach, imho. 3) Proper Remote Desktop support (not sure if this is a network thing or not, but It would be nice. Internet speeds are pretty fast these days.) I suspect I can go on, but that's what has surfaced sofar... thanks.

Hi Eric, While Revit doesn't convert back to earlier versions (without exporting), I have found that AutoCad (both regular and Architecture) easily saves backwards, Vectorworks saves back a few versions, Sketchup, Adobe products, Microsoft products, etc... In other words, while I understand that BIM is sophisticated, most software I work with is capable of saving back a version or two (and VectoWorks is a pretty descent BIM package, imho.) With the exception of Sketchup, none are as joyful to work with as Chief (which is an important consideration).

Thanks Tommy. Just got back from the Office meeting with a friendly competitor. They also use Dropbox extensively (since they often bring work home with them.) They are all on X7, so they don't have compatibility issues. At some point, I will need to upgrade to X7 again, and "hope" Chief got the bugs fixed. Again, my main fear is some of my coworkers may have more issues with X7 and we really can't create a scenario where we have both X6 and X7 files floating around a network. For a ten person design staff, that would be crazy. In AutoCad, we have a few different working versions but we don't have issues with saving an AutoCad file back a version or two - especially for the engineers.

Thanks for all the replies so far. A few of us are heading over to a friendly competitor's office tomorrow, and I will get a first-hand look at how "they do it". As great as the software is, there are definitely some fundamental issues which need to be addressed, before I can confidently recommend it to all of our team. The (lack of) network support being one of them. Matt

Here is a good quick read on the subject: http://www.associationofconstructionanddevelopment.org/articles/view.php?article_id=10850

I'm a little confused, will a hardware lock version allow me to use X6 and X7 at the same time? Right now, we have a few rolling licenses which allow us to use the software on various machines, but it the license is only for X6. If we install X7, it uses a different license.

Having spent many years managing Vectorworks at a medium/large remodeling firm, we had very similar issues over there. The biggest problem was dealing with VW's desire for an "annual upgrade subscription service". Given our capacity, it was never economical to upgrade the software every year. Unlike Chief, at least we were able to down-convert VW's files to an earlier version if we ran into issues, which also allowed me to easily test out a new version for several months to get it prepped for the whole office. Since it took VW about half a year to release their "fully optimized" version, we opted to upgrade every two years. And thanks for your advice about the archive files. While it's moot right now, I'll look into it down the road.

Hi everyone, We are a medium sized office, and a few of us started using Chief Architect about half a year ago. One significant issue we ran into rather quickly was with backward compatibility. We found out (the hard way), that once a file upgrades to a newer version, it can no longer be downgraded. In our particular situation, myself, and one of our designers installed X7 and started working on a new project together. But while his machine was not having significant issues with X7, my computer couldn't tolerate the upgrade, so I reverted back to X6. I quickly found out I could no longer open his files. Furthermore, there's no way to easily look at a Chief file on our network and "know" what software version the file is for. Now what this means to a firm like ours is: we have to completely make sure all of our machines (and software profiles) are "capable" of handling a new version of the software before taking the risk of fully upgrading. I many have this wrong, but I also understand that our licence numbers prevent us from running both versions simultaneously. This in its own right, is an expensive proposition for us to consider. In my personal situation, when I had installed X7, every time I opened the library, the program would crash, making the software utterly useless. Having looming deadlines, I didn't have the appropriate time to fully diagnose the issue, and decided to downgrade (after working unsuccessfully with tech support for half a day.) Currently, we are weighing the pro's and con's of Chief Architect, and are trying to best fit it into our company's toolbox. While there are some immense advantages of the software, I am curious to hear from folks who successfully use Chief in the context of a medium or large sized office (if you are out there). In particular, how do you use it in relation to AutoCad. In particular, were there any roadblocks? Many firms we have talked to will use Chief up until a certain point in their design process, then use AutoCad to "top off" the drawings once they approach either permitting or construction. Or, perhaps, the keep the primary drawing files in Chief, but pull in Acad details as needed. (While I admit that I have to become more adept at Chief's 2d CAD tools, I don't really see Chief's advantages over AutoCad, especially with wisiwyg, block editing, annotative objects, dynamic blocks, dynamic blocks, dynamic blocks, etc...) I know for some of you, the thought of using any form of AutoCad may be considered blaspheme, but for a firm of our size (where only three of us have limited Chief experience, while all of us have a million years of Autocad experience), we are trying to best understand how to fully implement Chief, and know when it's time to stop using it, because it is taking too long to produce construction drawings and details. Now I know this is partially due to a lackluster catalog of Chief details & templates, and I believe that someday we will confidently use it from start to finish. In the meantime, however, I am hopeful that there is some collective wisdom out there from other firms that have either successfully fully migrated it, or know when to use, and NOT use Chief. I have additional thoughts on this, but I would love to hear some feedback. thanks much. Matt p.s. Yes, we are seeking additional in-house training support. But even finding local "experts" (who aren't swamped) has been somewhat difficult.

+1 to that. Going from commercial construction into residential remodeling, I am surprised how many seasoned professionals refer to measured drawings as "as builts". Personally, I tend to call them "existings", but, I guess using "as builts" is ok until someone uses that language in a design contract (without agreeing to the definition). I can easily see a client legitimately requesting "as builts" at the end of a project, having assumed that's what their design agreement had said they would get.

Hi all, While we know there are numerous videos and on-line resources, my boss is interested in any Chief Architect trainers in the DC Metro area, who are willing to come in and do a training or two at our office. Or perhaps if there are any good trainers who might happen to be in the DC area at some convenient time in the future, and might be interested in helping us out. If you'd prefer to email me directly: matt.dirksen@landisconstruction.com thanks, Matt

Thanks for the suggestions on a workaround. I am currently putting together some simple door elevations, where the door heights vary. I only want to show one "style" of door, so having a dimension which says "Varies, see schedule" would be most appropriate. Matt

In other cad apps, I will typically suppress a dimension value to type in custom text. While I know I can type in the text under the "additional Text" settings, I can't seem to figure out how to turn off the dimension value. I'd hate to manually "fake" a dimension line as a workaround. Can I suppress dimension values in Chief? thanks. Matt

Hi all, I am working with an imported dwg file, and most of the lines that came in are set to colors not associated with it's layer. While I appreciate the layer eyedropper for easily changing objects from one layer to another, the color of the lines I am selecting aren't changing. I am having to manually select the lines, and change their custom colors to "by layer". And since there are text and leaders all over the place, I can't grab more than a handful at a time. Is there a more powerful eyedropper tool out there which reverts all properties to "by layer", or perhaps just an easier way to select all the lines at once? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Matt

Awe shucks. Were on X6 and it doesn't look compatible with our version. (I tried X7 but it kept crashing, so I went back to X6).

Great workaround. While I still have ways to go with Chief, I've become underwhelmed with cad blocks as well, so that trick might be helpful. (I sure wish they would behave more like AutoCad D-blocks.)

I guess because I've gotten so used to "everything" being easier with Chief, I'm actually surprised that the stairs behave the way they do. So while I'm bummed out there isn't a simple solution to the problem, I very much appreciate the comments. I guess it's time to create a "CAD, Stairs" layer!

Hi all, For some reason, I'm having difficulty finding this info. I would like to show my staircase with a traditional "cut" line at about the 4' level above the floor. In particular, I have a closet space under the stairs that I'd like to show on the plan, and I'm rather confused on how to make it show up (without masking a CAD block over top of the whole area.) While this was a simple operation in VW & Acad Arch, I can't seem to figure out how to do this in Chief. Any help is appreciated, Matt

Thank you, David. I guess I'll hunt one of the tech folks down. I will also keep playing around with it to see if there's a better workaround as well. Matt