GeneDavis

What happened to the people we had in whenever, X5? The kind that you placed in planview and were 2D, but the image always rotated to face the camera?

Wow! Michael! What a great tutorial! Very interesting uses of symbol make and use, and CAD DETAIL FROM VIEW use. Super helpful. Thank you.

I think most of us know what a curved mansard roof is. I asked the question because I could not envision one, over this porch in question, and be in keeping with the gable end above. A mansard roof, to me, is an arrangement of steeply-pitched roof planes around the perimeter, their crests all the same elevation, with an almost-flat roof crowning the whole thing. The O.P. has not returned to comment, and the solution with curved planes is not my idea of a mansard. I think there is information missing.

Give us an example please of a mansard curved roof.

One word, son. Photons.

And that is the answer, Mark. But let me clarify for our readers, particularly the Chiefer that got this started in an earlier thread. You must save the resized symbol to the library. You must then open a new Chief file, and place the symbol you created and put in the library, placing it into 3D space. That means there are no walls, no floors, nothing in 3D space except this symbol. Now go to File>Export>Export 3D Model (STL, ) and send it off. This is what is meant by convert to symbol. Now, in a Chief file, doesn't matter if you have walls, etc., IMPORT that file as a symbol, be sure to make it an Electrical type, and import it. One can now make whatever adjustments in the Symbol dialog to place a stretch plane, and have it operate as one wants. Note in the attachment, I have already stretched it after placement and locating a stretch plane at z = -9". The shade and canopy have not stretched, only the downrod.

Do it with this one. The attached file has the infamous "barn pendant" symbol, in its resized form. The goal is to put a stretch plane in the downrod so it can be lowered. I saved it to Library and brought it in, but it still acts wrong. BarnPendantResized.plan

Show us how to "save as symbol." Thanks.

This is a new thread to discuss what was embedded in the previous thread about stretch planes and zones. In that topic, a Chiefer had taken a symbol, resized it to about 50 percent of original, and then wished to set a stretch plane for using it above a counter. I found it impossible to do because I could not figure out how to export the resized symbol. Try it with any pendant light in the Chief libraries. Take the symbol, let's say it is 20 x 20 inches x 40 inches high, resize it maintaining its aspect ratio to 10 x 10 x whatever, and try resetting a stretch plane so its stem will stretch. Would not work for me. You can succeed with the symbol at original size, but not after resizing. So how do you export one that has been resized, and then turn around and import it back so Chief now has a fresh look at it?

Go into your interior wall specification, and change how the wall picks up dimensions.

Go to YouTube. Many more videos there.

Please go to YouTube, search "Chief Architect Symbols" and take the time to watch the many instructional videos there. Plenty of examples of sizing and stretching there for you. That, or line up some one-on-one instruction via Skype or something.

A roof segment can have a radius, but no other curvature options are available. Curved roof segments can be joined and geometry specified so one is tangent to another, but still one is limited to circular arc geometry.

Sorry about your situation. Try this. Do your setup for your Arch D (24x36) paper but be sure to draw your outer borders nice and wide, as if the actual paper size is not 24x36, but is 22x34. Draw a border at 22x34 and think of it as your "guide" border, and draw your border inside that guide. Leave the 22x34 border there if you want, or delete it after drawing an inside border. Do all your text and dimension setups so that 1/8" is the smallest text height to be printed to your Arch D. Consider using a fairly plain font like Arial, and do all-caps, always. Then when printing your 11x17s, simply use the check print scale setting, set to 1/2. Since your D-size setup has margins drawn nicely for 22x34, everything should look good at half size and fit to 11x17.

"I am not through moving the stair tower walls . . . " Why not wait until you are done, then build stairs. Stairs with manually-specified starting and ending elevations remain stable. Have you tried that?

Post plan please.

Working at the material level, I did a wall with a brick exterior layer from the library, and edited the material pattern colors (both field and lines) so the background (field) is white, and the lines are gray. Shown here is the result of sending the elevation to layout. This has no effect on 3D views because in those, one sees the texture, and not the pattern.

Yup. A weakness, but some might say "une bug." Worth reporting, I suppose. Has it already been done? Reporting?

I just drew a four-wall building, changed the walls to out-of-box Chief-X8 stucco, then with the paint tool in object mode (one wall at a time) painted one wall another color of stucco. That is the wall on the right in the two-color image. I then went to my 3D tools and changed the spraypaint mode to "blend color with material," selected a pink, and did the wall to its left, going clockwise. The other image is the other two walls, original stucco.

You want the tool to work at the object level. Use HELP to find out how to change settings, so you can just "paint" one wall at a time. There's object level, room level, floor level, and plan level.

Each of the flare-out steps can be done as a landing. Any shape can be drawn with Chief CAD, and then turned into a landing. I just sketched out a couple of landings, one as your first step, the other as your second.

Model it up in solids, block, make symbol? Looks like Texas.

If selecting perimeter walls and specifying footing parameters is called "manually," then yes, done manually. If there's a better way, I'm all ears. Why would Chief confuse us by giving us two ways to do this?

I've done a string of jobs for a guy that builds RV barns, all of them monoslabbed, and have not used level 0. If inside thickening is needed, such as for a single load point or at a loadbearing wall, I use p-line solids and line and layer control to include them in the plan and section views.

You can get a foundation plan. Layers, line control should yield this for you. All on level 1. Here is a quickie plan with mono slab and the plan view I show has only "slabs" and "footings" turned on.