GeneDavis

These are ubiquitous and should be part of Chief's package, but it will be a challenge to get it right. It will require the the Chief programmers obtain clear specs. I'll go ahead and begin a thread in the SUGGESTIONS section, and maybe we can collectively get them the right information.

I'm on the smartphone & away from Chief, and so cannot check. Is this available from the library as a window treatment, with all the controls for stacking and panelizing, and so that louver count goes up as height increases, etc.?

Here is an Austin builder showing how the detail is done in a 2x6 wall, no doubling. They frame the opening in the 2x6 large, then sub-frame inside with 2x4. This yields a 2 inch recess. The builder I spoke with north of San Antonio was achieving a 6 inch recess with the doubled wall.

I've no solution, but when I was seeing that look down in Texas last year, I asked the builder how it was framed, and he said they doubled the walls where the embedded windows were to be. 2x6 out, 2x4 in. Where I saw it, the detail only appeared on street-side windows. All stucco, the stucco returns at the windows bullnosed with large radius corners. The look of windows in 18th century mission buildings.

Thanks, Joe. Impressive work. A very useful piece of annotation, and it's smart.

I am going to write a request in SUGGESTIONS that Chief add the feature to the cabinet build dialog. But note this about specifying. Mr Gulfshore Design, and you gotta admit his work is quite good, and his contractors do excellent realizations of his designs, does not need to model it in 3D. Attached is one of his cab elevations, and I have highlighted the "money quote," the key piece of annotation that describes how he sees the cabinet face arrangement.

Beaded faceframes with inset doors is an extremely common look, particularly in Maine. Go here to this guy's blog and scroll through the pics and see. Actually, enjoy any of his stuff there, cause there is a bunch. http://www.gulfshoredesign.com/blog/?m=201402 But why is it so important to see it in a Chief rendering or 2D elevation? Can't you just get by doing plain inset doors and drawerfronts, and let the rest happen in real life? Don't any of the manufacturer libraries have this feature?

Specify? As in, use a dialog box, call it all out with sizes, dimensions, colors, etc., and voila! Chief models it for you in 3D? What are you asking for, exactly? You can use the 3D tools to model it all, exactly the way you want, if you need to get the look you need in 3D, but if time is money, and it is, why not just do it using CAD details and specify it that way, so it gets built right?

For use as a background? There are plenty on the web for you to copy.

Did this in Sketchup and put it up on the 3D Warehouse. It is all one color except for the mirrored upper panels, and the brass and plastic-tipped coat hooks. About 32 inches wide by 6 feet tall. Hope you like it! Search for "hall coat tree bench" and you'll find it.

As cool as the no-post look is at a corner, the build is an expensive one, and the window product is very high cost also. My need for a window-tight-to-corner is to have a 4x4 corner post (actual 3.5" square) in 2x6 framing, and X7 still does not permit this. You can do the slam and get a post of 2 and a fraction inches, but you cannot edit it to get a 3.5" frame post.

If you are going to do an arts and crafts interior, you might like this table I did in Sketchup and put up on the 3D Warehouse. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, architect, painter, furniture designer, did his famous Hill House in around 1895, and designed the original table, which appears in photographs of the interior. This version is smaller, and sized 60w x 22d x 29-3/4h. Search for it using "hall table mackintosh" and you'll get it.

Looks like Deboktabo has left the building. No name, no plan, no followup.

Like this? I-Level is showing a few different ways to use sawn lumber tails, but this one gives the right look if one is doing them exposed. As for doing it in Chief, I would use solids placed on their own framing layer, or try drawing in sawn member rafters sistered alongside the i-joists.

Your client's no to Sto and I presume any other EIFS such as Dryvit, Parex, and the like, probably stems from all the stuff that flew around about twenty years ago in which residential builders and their lawyers successfully put the problems of leakage, mold, and more back on Sto and the others. All this, while the products continued to be used successfully on commercial buildings. It all happened because of the bad installations. The builders were clueless about installing this stuff, and their subs were worse. Ask your client why and if you can drill into his head a little, it will come back to that for sure. How about seamed panels?

Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater, built with a lot of painted concrete, and it was built in the 1930s in western Pennsylvania. I am guessing that in your part of Tennessee there are lots of commercial buildings done with Sto exteriors. Contact a guy I knew way back, Steve Wachtler, in Nashville. He is president and CEO of Sto International, and can direct you to the right people in his firm for designing your exterior envelope. As for your roof, you will need to investigate all the kinds of flat roofing schemes done in your locale, and done they are, almost all on commercial buildings. Use Google Earth and you can see plenty all around Nashville. You might do best engaging a good commercial architect in your area.

It is in my locker but it says it is the beta version. Should I wait?

That's it. Thanks, Dorothy. And when done, I can place a north arrow along the 110' PL and since I know the PL's bearing, I can rotate north accordingly, and all the PLs can then be bearing-labeled true.

I have an as-built situation, with a plot plan of the house on paper. No CAD available. Have modeled the house in Chief and footprint matches that of the plot plan. I know how to reproduce the boundary. My problem is rotating the plot bounds and placing it so the setbacks shown on the plot plan match what is on paper, and getting my north arrow rotation right so the line bearings read true. See my plot plan, attached. None of the bounding lines of the plot are parallel to house walls. Would appreciate any and all tips, or links to how-to videos.

I just model it with solids and assign all wood parts to a layer called Screened Porch Framing. I have done screened porch framing all in Sketchup and then imported the whole shebang into Chief as a symbol, but that was before I realized I could do it just as fast in Chief. The screen can be modeled as a solid, too, and textured with screening image, if you want some 3D render semi-photorealism.

The pic of the SU model is showing some kind of surround. A thin frame. The model should be edited in SU to remove the surround and just leave the door slab. Then it will model correctly when brought into Chief.

Be sure and examine the feature that makes an annotation set "drive" a layer set. It is a feature many Chiefers use. See attached. The LAYER SET setting in the Annotation Set Dialog Box is set one of two ways. Either it is set to the "Use Active Layer Set" setting or it is set to a specified layer set. In the image seen here, it is set to the Framing Set layer set, which means selection of this anno set will "drive" the layer set selection and turn ON that "Framing Set" layer set. It is a great feature of the program. Once you get comfortable with the plan view layer sets and anno sets and have figured out how it will work for you, it is time to create all of the anno sets for detailing so you can do your CAD details in all of the scales such as 1-1/2" = 1'-0".

Need to model a deck railing that is built so 2x2 balusters mount against deck edge. The 2x2s go down and have bottom ends 2 inches below tops of rims and are screwed to rims, thus the whole railing is offset out from the "deck room" edge. I can model this affair using solids but was hoping there might be a way to spec it so Chief builds it.

Haven't seen A36 used for a while. It is A50 where I've been, and where that is, the steel suppliers will help with the design of the connections.

So why is this intermittently not working for me? Is it only in play if the number, the dimension number, is inexact? Because I dimension wall-to-wall, the walls having been exact-dimension set, and I cannot get the tilde.