GeneDavis

Put it in a blank plan. Post it here. Then he and we can all have it.

Thanks, @MollyNDG! Worked great, and I gave the recessed panel (the countertop) a little bevel molding to emulate a simple framing bead. See the pics. I can make a second symbol for doors with the wood grain rotated, so my doors and drawerfronts all have the same panel with framing bead.

Thanks, @MarkMc! Make a door or drawerfront from a cabinet! That is out-of-the-box thinking, and you are using Chief's hard-coded grain orientation for the one-click-to-assign-oriented-texture thing. But, I see no way to do the drawerfront I did with its top and bottom rails at 1-1/2" width and its stiles at 2-1/4". How would one make a cabinet's face frame to that spec?

Here is a very interesting video that showcases Sketchup's rendering and compares it head to head with Nano Banana. Note the focus on the development of the prompts, and how photographs were used taken at the site. The house seen in the video is an interesting modern arrangement, a take on the kind of twin joined barns you see in the midwest occasionally, this one a cluster of three, the solar side of each roof plane steeper that the other. I think it's about 75x75 in footprint, with a roman style center courtyard about 20x20 and an integral 3-car garage, making it a one story thing with about 4500 sf of conditioned space. If you study the shapes and features, you can see how the architect cleverly did the guttering and hidden downspouts.

I use the freeware eCabinets software, which has as steep a learning curve as Chief, but worth the time if you are doing whole-house packages at the rate of two or three a year. In my case the job files are exported for CNC cutting, but the application has "saw shop" features that produce cutting lists, nested part diagrams, buy lists, and more. Chief is used for designing the cabinetry and for producing the photoreal renders. It takes about 2 hours to take a cab schedule from Chief and produce a job file in eCabs. But starting from zero, it'll take you all of a week 40 to 80 hours learning eCabs and building your seeds, longer if you need to learn part editing. Every cab config is built as a "seed" cab. An example is a 3-drawer stack base cab, like the two that you can see in the pic here. My seed is a 24" width version, and to load each of these in the pic into a job batch, all I enter is the width variable.

Give us a few screenshots of what you have tried doing, and please, name the Chief product you are using. Here is a hint: if that pitched ceiling is sheetrock against your rafters, your roof creates your pitched ceiling and you see it when the structure is defined as having no ceiling above. Watch a training video or two about all this.

I find it useful for producing images so we can see rooms in different color schemes, and when doing the prompts, give it the sources for the colors. Examples are "Cabinets to be painted Walzcraft 'Spring Rain' and all walls and ceilings Benjamin Moore 'Chantilly Lace.' And show the lot views outside through the windows as a mature forest of mixed red maple and white pine, tree limbs and crows way up 15 feet and more, the lighting being 30 minutes before sunset." ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Grok have all done well when I've tried this same dialog. I have compared the images to photos on Houzz in which the colors are given, and AI gives great matches. But all three struck out when I tried to get a pendant fixture I wanted over a dining table, even when I gave the LLMs screencaps of the specific fixture I wanted. They blew the image, not getting details right, and blew the scale. I had to make my own in Sketchup and import it, and it was just a simple inverted dome. Same with some wall sconces.

How do we know you framed the walls? I can see mine in my plan view if I turn on the wall framing layer.

I went and made a rotated copy of Chief's "red oak - natural" texture, and used it to paint the door parts needing it. Pic attached. @DBCooper has me convinced there is some code behind this, and it's used in every door in Chief's libraries that has stile and rails, that was done to make material choice selection easy for users. For us the users (not the losers!) who want to do doors or drawers or cabinet doors with stiles and rails and want to see woodgrain texturing, there is always the workaround of doing it with multiple materials and texturing the way you need.

Hi @DBCooper and yes, I made the drawerfront symbol from five separate 3D solids, and painted the upright rails one color, and the others (which in the real world of cabinetmaking) a second color. So I have a two-color symbol which shows when I open my cab for spec and go to materials. The pic I showed upthread in the OP of the drawerfronts woodgrained appear that way because I did not make a copy of Chief's red oak natural and rename the copy "R" which is what I do when I rotate a directional texture like woodgrain, to use for my second color. But my curiosity is bubbling over how a Chief symbol for a five piece stile and rail and panel door is coded so that the door (also two colors, one for "door" and the other for "panel") gets the grain horizontal on rails and vertical on stiles when you choose, simply, "red oak - natural" for the material of the "door". They must have some sort of logic baked in that does that. Sort of like what is going on when you view 3D framing all textured in "fir framing." But that's not it. Try making a one door cab with a width and height such that a five-piece door for it is wider than it is tall. Wider than two stile widths wider. It'll grain right, I'll bet. As an aside, when one does a drawerfront with a recessed center panel such as here, and mount a handle or knob pull anywhere in that panel (I centered handles), they "float" at the 3/4" front thickness, instead of mounting onto the recessed panel. Hard to see unless you light the front and do shadows.

Thanks, @Joe_Carrick, it was a text style thing. I had the text stile set at the one I use for 1-1/2" scale details. Changing it to 1/4" text style fixed things.

I placed wall elevation cameras and backclipped section view cameras in kitchen and baths to annotate cabinetry on con docs. All were edited to what I want to see, K1, B1, . . . To control display, and wanting these only in the plan view for K&B, I created a layerset for them. What could be the reason the label text (K1, etc.) is not displaying, when the camera, displaying as a callout, is clearly displaying?

I wanted 5 piece drawerfronts all drawers below the top slab, and wanting less-wide rails than the stiles, made my own with solids. My drawer stiles are one material, the rails and center panel another. I did this so if I want a natural wood finish, I can get the grain displayed in 3D the way I want. You can see that I get stile/rail delineation just like the blind cab adjacent at left has. That cabinet door is from the OOB Chief library. My drawerfront, if I use the same library material "red oak - natural" for my two materials in the drawerfront, the stiles, and the rail-panel-rail group, comes out like shown in the pic with woodgrain. If I go to the blind corner cab to the left and open for spec, I'll get see one material set for the frame of the door and one for the panel. Assigning wood to the frame results in proper wood graining. What is the difference between Chief's symbol and mine?

Thanks! Hey, @robdyck why can't I find Boral in Chief's library downloads? I recall seeing it what, a year or two ago?

Anybody have one? I have looked through all the contertop textures and found nothing like what I want.

I'd like to be able within Chief to create simple 3D assemblies with 3D dimensions, to use in con docs to clarify elements of framing, trim, and cabinetry. I did a test assembly of 3D solids and cannot find how to actually dimension things with any input control. The pic shows how I like to see these, but the dimensions come automatically when I select something. Is there a way to dimension manually and have them show in 3D? I'd like a recommendation for how to do this within Chief project management. Ideally, we could build details in the CAD detail space that are 3D and do this, but I did this in a plan file I added to a project called Projectname Details.

Here is Steve from his Chief Skills channel showing a U-stairs build.

It died due to some kind of fault in the OS which prevented a windows reboot, but one or more of the geek genii at Best Buy was able to recover what was on the hard drive and it'll be back with a new drive, a new fresh Windows 11. I'd been dreading having to start from zero on the only unfinished Chief X17 job I had in progress, one 95 percent complete. I might still. We'll see. I'll go get the machine, specs below, later today. If you are using p-Cloud or Dropbox or One Drive or Google Drive or any other cloud storage, how is it set up with your X17 so things work seamlessly? Is it a once and done thing for each new project at setup time?

The stair tool will draw you a U-stairs with one click. You'll then manually edit the landing by dragging from one edge to make it half size as in your photo, manually adding one adjacent (polyline > make landing) and editing however you need to get what you want. That's a well-built staircase in your pic. It's not easy in Chief to get all those details, but keep at it. I use the stair tool first to draw a simple straight stair, one that reaches the next floor, then fiddle with the treads, locking tread depth at 10", and fiddling with number of risers to achieve a riser height between 7.25 and 7.5 inches. Armed then with numbers for tread count and riser height, I have what I need to edit my U-stairs when I go to do the editing after one-click placing them. Openings and walls all come last. Come back to this thread after you have it all solved and show us your result.

My laptop died. New something needed. Specs of the dead one in sig below. I was doing just fine with the machine which has an RTX3070, and while Chief recommends the 5090, it's 2X the $$$ compared to a nice 18" I see with a 5070.. Will it run the new X18? Beta users?

Plan views, elevations, sections, no 3D camera viewing needed. Is this possible? I am typing on my old laptop, last used with something like X14. The one shown in my sig went blooey on me, and I need to push out a job and only have this machine.

Hello, Hassan. What version of Chief are you using?

My laptop (see specs) has been giving me problems when doing almost anything 3D in X17. Yesterday morning it froze when I was doing something in 2D and as in all lockups previously, my only way out is to do a hard shut down with the power button. Yesterday I got the blue screen of death with some sort of Windows-related error code. I took it to the Geek Squad. Here is something at Walmart.com. MSI Cyborg 17 Gaming Laptop, Intel 7-240H, 32 GB DDR5 RAM, 1 TB PCIe SSD, 17.3" FHD (1920x1080) 144Hz Display, Nvidia G-Force RTX 5060, 4-Zone RGB Keyboard, W11 Home, Translucent Black Whaddya think?

That'll auto-roof if you set all your wall specs right.

Ceiling structure can be under floor structure and include as many layers as you want. You cannot do insulation such as sprayfoam or dense-pac as a layer, the way you are describing it as full fill or partial fill of a structural member layer such as joists or trusses. It is not uncommon for ceiling structure to have an air gap layer. Roof structure can be specified in as many layers as you want, and builds up from structure (lumber, truss chords, I-joist members) with "cover," i.e. sheathing, then maybe rigid insulation, film, and finishes like standing seam steel or shingles.