GeneDavis

I just did an image search for modern San Francisco interiors, and found two pics of open-riser staircases, one with cable railings, the other glass railings. In both cases the treads look over-thick compared to what you see in, say, Miami or New York. Over-thick so the space between is, well, maybe 3-7/8". And the cable railing looked to be that tight, also. So, to code?

Show us wall elevations in each room, no glass house, plain vector views. Patterns and their linked textures get the vertical position in 3D space based on your zero floor elevation. Thus if your countertop height is absolute 36, a multiple of 3 inches, your tile will look OK. But your countertop is likely set to real world build conditions with cabs sitting on floor finish. Like, 36 7/8" or something. Whatever that thickness build, is your correction in the materials dialog for vertical offset. But remember, if you are using that same subway tile elsewhere, where you need a different offset for the tile, you need to make a copy of the material with a new name and its new required offset. I do 3x6 subway in showers and tub enclosures, but 2x4 subway for backsplash over counters, so I don't need to do the new material thing. In the showers, I want the subway to start at the top of the tile-finish finish floor build.

I tested this with the lower wall as brick cladding framed, height 48" off zero floor. If the window has no casing out and is set to 48.000 off floor, the wall is broken in plan view. If the window is set to 48.00001 off floor, the wall is visible. Same behavior with outside casing. If the casing bottom edge is a 48, the wall display breaks. Raise it off by 0.00001 and you get the display. Other than in the pony wall dialog, where is this control dialog for Display In Plan View of Openings in Walls thing?

All 3 dormers appear in the first image, to have their face walls at the house wall location, stacked directly over. Not way out over the porch's railing wall. Are you drawing an as-built of this house? Are you instead wanting to recreate a plan using a stock plan offered at a website? If so, the upper floor plan should show where the dormer walls are.

I won't download your .pdf. Just post it as a picture. Did you break that second floor front wall at the large dormer extents and make it a gable wall in the roof tab? Do that. It'll auto-build at your main roof pitch, probably not the 14/12 of that dormer (looks about like that) but you can edit the planes and rejoin them to the main.

My cabinet source (fronts, drawerboxes, panels, trim) is Walzcraft, Lacrosse, WI, and they have almost unlimited styles. For a flat-panel mission/shaker drawerfront, I prefer to slim the rails from the 2-3/8" I use for door stiles and rails, to 1-1/2". I made a door and drawerfront in solids, with center stiles and saved in my user library, and this is the look I get. Vertical spacing, size, of drawerfront is per Blum System 32 standard. The drawerfront has a 6-1/8" height, a 3/8" margin at top and a 1/8" margin between it and the door. A drawerfront with this style pretty much confines the owner to selecting a knob and not a pull, at least for the drawer.

See my topic on this in suggestions.

1/2-13 is what I would specify.

Thanks, Gary. Porch room did it.

I need a wide flange steel beam over a big feature glass door opening, width of 18'4". A W14x26 will perform nicely, so I specify it with its size in the door spec dialog. Wanting it cleated top and bottom with 2x6s in this 2x6 wall, I specify "box header" (thanks, Chief!) and get what I want to see. But while the steel member comes in when taking a 2D section, Chief seems to be wrapping the beam in timber or something. Here is the spec dialog. And here is the section view. You can see the thin flanges and thin web. Chief has not taken the next step in steel WF beams ("I-beams") to permit specifying flange and web thickness, but we can all live with it as-is. But I-beam is so so antiquated as the term for these members. It's wide-flange, please. Anyhow, the section view. I dimensioned it to proof my spec input. See the "wrap" Chief is doing? Here it is in 3D, and you don't get the surprise real steel inside by using surface delete. So I go, hey, I've modeled real WF sections in Chief before. Yes, but using General Framing, and placing it manually. In a test plan, I placed the same piece of steel. Here it is with the spec dialog shown. And a view in 3D shows it as the real thing. Note about material: these members come in, in my setup, textured as framing, i.e., doug fir graining. Like all the lumber. I painted them gray. I think this is a bug and will report it as such, but wanted to present it here, for discussion.

I can't seem to be able to do that. And why is this needed for such a common need for texture. Stamped 'crete surfaces are done all the time on porches.

See the pic here. A small building with a thickened-edge slab (monoslab with footings at perimeter walls) is modeled, the porch walls are railings and invisible, the footings 16 wide 20 deep making the thickened edges 24 high. The only way I could think of to do a textured floor surface was to add a finish layer on top, which I did at 1" thickness and made the material stamped 'crete. But look. No texture at the 16-wide edges where the "footings" are under. What to do?

All I can say is somebody's gotta do it. Those kitchens, even the simple ones, don't order themselves. You can take a set of plans to Lowe's or Depot, and sit at a desk with someone for an hour or more, and get a buy done for a custom kitchen, because they are using up to date config software from the cab makers. But to do that you need to be paid to be doing the level of cab layouts and details on the con docs that facilitate that, and the time required to go and do the quoting, including all the detail checking, editing, revising, etc. There are some snooty shops around here that won't do your quote for free, requiring an appointment, and a healthy design fee. I have two builder clients that "build" the cabinets on site using "unbundled" buying. Carcases all flatpacked from a CNC-cutter, fronts, drawerboxes, and trim from Walzcraft in Lacrosse, WI, and hardware from the usual supply houses that sell to the cab makers. These are expensive-looking kitchens at far less cost than otherwise. I do the orders for them using eCabinets software, which had a learning curve equivalent to Chief. Once you are into it, you've built a "seed" cabinet for almost every config of base and wall and tall and fridgebox and corners and desk stuff imaginable, so taking a Chief-drawn plan and batching it for the buy is pretty easy. In the eCabs output is the buy list for all the d'boxes, doors, and hardware, and the builders use that plus my trim list to order everything.

Got it. Simply put in text in the comments field, anything to differentiate, and you get a different schedule callout. And since Chief does not report the makeup of mulled units, you gotta do this in comments anyhow.

Take a look here. In elevation it is clear that the flanking units, which got schedule callouts as W05, are different. I drew the L one and mirrored it to get the R one. One was edited before mulling it all up to get the casement handing opposite from the other. So why do they come into the schedule as the same unit? I can edit the schedule to uncheck "group similar" but then I get more lines of other windows, not mulled, that I don't want.

Try a molding polyline.

Watch a training video on custom material making. Hint: it uses the eyedropper and a web page showing a color chart. I've made materials for Andersen's Terratone and many others from their E Series windows.

I made the mistake of starting a new job using the wrong template file, got way into it with the modeling, i.e. building, and realized I was missing a lot of things I wanted. So I did an edit all area all floors and copied the plan, then pasted it into my preferred template file. The terrain and elevation data did not copy in. What am I missing?

And here is the symbol. Plus the image from the source. uploads_files_4463166_Format2.obj

I imported it as an .obj and it only came into Chief with three textures. See the pic, attached, which is showing many more. I am attaching the file, and a plan file with the symbol in it. \\\ SUP.plan

@NewbieMichaelYou showed examples, which are fully-completed Chief models of complex houses and on complex terrain. And furnished with furniture and accessories. Each one a fairly large piece of work. Are your clients architects that have no 3D software? Old-school 2D CAD? Or even older-school paper and pencil?

Have you asked your clients, the architects, what they think it's worth?

I had success doing this. Thanks to Glenn down under for the invisible wall as spacer hack. Don't frame a deck until all floor framing elsewhere in the plan is done, and make sure your floor framing is locked and autoframe is turned off. In Defaults>Framing for floors 0 and 1, reset the spec for rim joist to 1-1/2" thickness, select "lumber" for type. Create a new wall type exterior wall. I took Siding-6 and stripped off in and out leaving only the main, changed it to be 1" thickness, deselected framing for the wall type, made material insulation air gap, made wall type air gap, and then drew a wall with it, inside the deck and parallel to the house wall from which the deck will hang, end to end of deck. Then moved the wall tight against the house wall. I then framed the deck, by selecting its room and clicking on the "build deck framing" tool. It builds with lumber rims, same type (pressure treated) and depth as deck joists, and the against-house rim has a 1" space between the house floorframe rim and the deck ledger rim. That is what I want. Half inch sheathing, half inch Dek2Wall spacer. Perfect. BTW, that 1-inch space that is there happens to be the sum of all the exterior wall layers that are on the house wall, in case OOB Siding-6 with its 1/2-inch sheathing and 1/2-inch clapboards layers. The invisible wall's width of 1" has nothing to do with the 1" framing gap. There is one little hook I can't explain. See the pic here. That 1" wall is visible in the 3D perspective framing overview and I don't know what it is. In the view I show, I used the delete surface tool to lose the floorframe sheating so you can see the joists and rim.

Use grid and snaps in layout? Adjust grid size as needed in defaults.

I have made a "Suggestion" for this, and it's not been achieved yet. For those of us that include deck framing in con docs, it's needed. Editing it as we have it is tedious.