GeneDavis

What are his problems? Why does the engineer need to see appliances and cabinets?

Uh, material list? Why not explore that? Allows you to add for waste. Gives you quantities in each, or length, or square feet, or cubits, miles, however you specify. Work your model for exact 3D precision, because just like in Sketchup, it's gonna report what's modeled.

Rob, Pella callouts are in inches.

Cannot comment without examining the file. Close it, zip it, and post. If too large, strip a copy of cabinets, fixtures, furniture, terrain, and then zip and post.

Which means you'll need to subscribe to Sketchup, with the Pro version going for $299 per year. Might be worth it if you are going to use 3D Warehouse symbols at the rate of two or three a month. I have the free version Sketchup Make 2017, which is desktop, and no longer available. None of what I can download from the 3D Warehouse will open with my 2017, but I can scratch-build all I want, and am proficient enough with it to make furniture and fixtures.

Be really helpful if someone would do a video tut showing how to take one of those texture photos and make it work to do a realistic lawn. Not knowing anything about materials, i made a new material with one of them, and the tiling is awful.

I am a nitpicker when it comes to these window trim details, and have no reentered the room to say this: The single-molding thing for a crowned lintel window head works fine if you are OK with having to do the measure/math to get your end-wraps of the crown to look as expected. Doing it without entering an "extend amount" in the dialog results in a crowned lintel that looks like this when the lintel is same thickness as side casing: And like this when the lintel is thicker than the side casings: In either case, the "extend amount" needs to be set to the distance the crown projects from the face of the lintel piece, to correct the appearance. Here is a pic showing an arrangement with a thick lintel and a profiled crown, done with no extend for the lintel, and a wrap for the crown. This one shown above was done using a lintel in the window spec dialog, and a 2D molding for the crown. I was lazy and did not trim the crown returns back and that is why the returns look buried in the wall rather than seeing the cut-end outline. I don't think Chief works "wrap" right when it comes to a flat frieze (lintel) head trim. Here is a view of a trim specified with the thicker (it's 1/8" thicker) lintel than the casing thickness, and with wrap specified and no extension. It's flush to the casing and I believe it should be 1/8" proud.

If you are going to upgrade to X14, here are views from a plan I did when we bought a lot in Fair Oaks Ranch near Boerne and wanted to build. Never went through with it.

If it's in the Hill Country, chances are it's gonna get a reinforced slab foundation done sometimes as post-tensioned, and those things need engineering. It's easy to find someone in San Antonio to do that, but some of the firms will charge your client for doing a complete re-draw which IMHO is stealing. Those heavily reinforced slabs are a feature of building in the Houston area, also. My nephew is a TX P.E., civil, in Houston. Are you doing a Houston area job? I can ask him who he knows that would review and seal your plans, but all that structure stuff is gonna have to be done by you. Much of the big roof residential in TX gets stickframed with rafters supported mid-span off wall lines below in attic with leaning struts, so you may have to get into that, which in Chief, will be troublesome to do in 3D. See the image below. Maybe you ought to just give your friend a "lite" version of a plan, don't bother with structural, focus on shape, flow, windows, doors, exterior finish and trim, roofscapes, cabinetry, really everything BUT structure, and charge him accordingly, then he can job it locally for whatever is needed for permitting and contracting. In other words, a complete "design," but no con docs.

You did not have the layer on.

That's what I did and it framed, but I think you may want to consider the choice of material for joists. I had to disconnect a railing wall to make it not a deck, and then reconnect. Funny behavior.

I do what I do because from inside, the frame is buried. Unless a remodel is involving window replacement, I don't need exact unit sizes, and if it does, the casings get removed and the window salesman is responsible for getting sizes. Modern clad windows exhibit their frame edges at the exteriors, but i won't do the outside ladder work to measure.

You asking about as-built? I locate casings and record their widths, then back my way into window sizes. By "locate" I mean in plan: wall face to casing edge, then across window, out to out on casing, and note width. Why would one measure sash width and find it of use? You should set a standard way for measuring as builts.

Thanks to you both. I run a laptop, one onboard monitor, and when I open OBS it is full screen and I cannot find a way to reduce its window so as to get to Chief. I've hotkeys set for start stop and pause recording.

I downloaded it and have watched training videos, but no one shows me how to just be in Chief and start and stop recording a video of me using the software. When I have OBS on the laptop screen, I see no way to jump out of it into Chief without exiting OBS. Help is appreciated. Thanks.

Use of a lintel as your window head trim might be the better way. In this view you can see my casing sized at 5/8 x 3-1/4" (out-of-box Chief default) and the lintel that is specified in the window dialog as having zero extension and no wrap at end. Thus the lintel end is flush with the casing edge. I had to create a molding for the lintel because Chief does not have a way to specify thickness in the dialog. Wanting a lintel thicker than the casing, I drew a box 7/8 w x 3.25 h and saved it as a molding and called it Lintel .875x3.25. With this done to my block-mulled window triplet, I did a molding polyline in plan view, added one crownmold profile, wrapped the ends, placed it, then edited as needed to get it looking right. Modeling your own house is a great way to learn Chief. It teaches you how to measure the as-built structure, and if you doodle all the features like what you are doing in this window group, it teaches you about how Chief works.

Play with the checkbox in the dialog for molding that selects whether it extrudes "inside" or "outside" the polyline. Also experiment with adding more moldings to the polyline. You can stack up as many moldings you want, and position them relative to the polyline, to get the effect you want.

Print it to Arch E size. No problems at that size. Get your printing done at blueprintsprinting.com. $2.28 a page on 20# paper for 36 x 48 sheets. Or send it to layout at 3/16" = 1'-0". Works for me all the time. My plans get used for building and the only thing I show in plan view as far as furniture and accessories go, other than cabinets and showerheads in bathrooms, are simple 2D CAD outlines for beds in bedrooms. Oh, and for walls, all walls, just main layer only. Kitchens and baths at 1/2" = 1'-0" on the K&B pages, of course.

Looks like TwinMotion to me.

So what exactly is your problem? You show us four different houses, and two screenshots of a 3D from a plan, the screenshots showing roof variation.

If what you have is a simple ceiling drop with a "lip" across its front, you can build the ceiling drop so it will frame and then glue on the lip as a polyline solid. That stick-out lip you want to do for decor and lighting above can be framed with steel studs.

Turn on floor surfaces.

I run them to the floor and make the bottom rail as tall as toe plus panel rails. Looks better to me, and the toeboard install is easier.

Bump. I edited this heavily including the thread title, after 32 views happened, and some of you 32 might want to check the first post, the thread starter, again.

I got more deeply into notes and note schedules after reading and participating in a thread about this a couple days ago. In that thread, @gravattedesign wants the style to be, in layout display, 1/8" font height for the notes (numbers in circles or squares or whatever), and 3/32" for the note text. I think he wants a third font height, even taller than 1/8", for the note schedule titles but that is a different topic. What we don't seem to have in Chief X14 is a way of controlling the scale of either of these text elements, what Chief terms "main" in the dialog, at the time we are generating the schedule. There ought to be a way, like what we have when sending a view to layout, of specifying those text styles, sort of like the scale setting, before the view (or schedule) is generated. I did a test plan in which I set text style for note numbers for 1/4 and 1/2 scale, the heights being 6 and 3 inches. I created a "kitchen" note with the 3 inch style and a "floor plan" note with the 6 inch style. Then I generated note schedules, and those schedules generate with "main" text styles per the one and one only schedules generation action we have. What happens is seen in this image. See what we are getting here? The note text, the numbers in the circles, is set per the dialog that created the notes, thus the 3 inch height in one and 6 in the other. The other text, that of the note line and the title above, come in at whatever settings we specify in the note schedule default. I think it is best to do that default with layer text as the source, because of the way this all works now. So notes schedules like this, when we have multiple display scales in our layouts, need fixing after they get generated. The most direct way I have found is to create layers for each schedule scale. I renamed the OOB layer as for 1/4 scale and did a new layer for 1/2 scale, and set layer text accordingly. Here is what it is in the layersets dialog. I forgot to edit the line weight settings, but they don't matter here for this discussion. With this in place, you can reset the title and line text ("main" is Chief's bad term for this) so you then have schedules that look right for shipping to layout. In this pic, you can see what I got editing the schedule for the 1/4 scale to have its layer be the 1/4 scale schedule layer. And then when sending both to layout, setting scale appropriately upon entry into the layout generation, we get this, the desired look. Is there an easier way?