GeneDavis

You should ask this at the HD forum. We're all Chiefers here.

Apologies to Keith and Mick . . . Tax free living Is easy to do Drop your roof down We'll do it, for you Man-Sart Builders. Just call us, OK? Man-Sart Builders. We'll roof you today.

Think of an inflated attic. Lots more floor space under roof. Turn a story-and-a-half into a true two-story and stay under any roof-height restrictions.

You gotta wonder if that is the original roof of the house. Nice job, Doug, that will look as-built.

Your picture of a built porch throws a curveball at us. The newels have a cap and a base, and the posts also, but the posts look to be barely bigger than the newels. Maybe even same. As in 5 x 5 actual size newels and 5 x 5 or 5.5 x 5.5 posts. Whether you use the two rail Joe Carrick method or manually place posts right where newels are you get the top cap of the newels poking through the barrel of the posts. See the attached. See the newel caps showing in the posts? And hey, try to get the posts to snap where needed. I find I gotta do CAD detail from view to set targets for snapping. I find Chief's railings tools lacking when it comes to something like this. I am doing a curved one right now post to beam, 44" segments changing only a few degrees of turn as the panels track the curve. Chief cannot handle it cleanly. Nor can it do what you want here unless you go for the most basic of posts and newels. I usually throw in the towel and go solids, or Sketchup and import. I want my balusters to look the way I would build it. When you are fudging posts into a railing, you don't get the right look, for my eye. As for my throwing that video at you, I'd no idea of your expertise. And your opening post with the question was pretty vague.

Watch, listen, learn. I'm on a phone, so I'll ask. Does your sig line say what Chief version you're running?

That bay is an opening, no? Tell us what you want to do, and be precise. What you MAY have there is three linked railing walls, the bay segment invisible. Or it's one wall and the bay is a doorway.

Framing>post. Easiest.

I think you'll get your answer from those over at the Chief Home Designer forum. This is the Chieftalk forum. We're using different software from you. You want Hometalk.

The big gray thing is the W12x35 steel I-beam needed to carry the roof load. This is to be built where the gsl (ground snow load) is 100 psf. The post is a remnant from when I had first placed a smaller W6x20 thinking I had to be completely above the plate elevation and into the trusses. I can and did raise the W12x35 so it's half into and half below the trusses, and the post is not needed. The client really balked at the post, even thought their view from in the room has an array of 4x4 (3.5 inch square) wood posts between them and their terrific view through the woods and to the lake beyond. The rear wall (plan bottom) behind the chairs needs work at its junction with the 2-panel screen wall. The wall end is 16 feet from the bottom right corner, location dimensioned, and the screen panel wall is supposed to go point to point to join corner to corner, asbuild house to screened room. See image. View of the lake and a newer file attached. I used CAD to place post locations along the screen panel wall, this in preparation for doing all the stick work in solids. I'm going to PM some detail so we can hook up by Zoom. Thanks. Ranch camp 2 bedroom.zip

How difficult, Glenn? Or are you joshin' me? I need the railing wall to be 5.5 inches with a starting and ending newel arrangement, 5,5 square bottom and mid rails, 5.5 x 16 beam at top May we have an explanation of what it took to solve, and the file? Or a Zoom?

I don't know of a short way to define this in a short topic listing, so I just threw something there. A room addition goes onto a built house, the floor structure is exterior deck but a foundation is under part of it. No piers, no beams. But that is not the issue. The roof over the space covers "open below" to terrain, and wood-framed deck. The dividing wall between these two "room specs" which define ceiling and floor, is a segmented curve. Post to beam rail segments, with screened upper and lower panels, 4x4 posts, one of the six segments having a screened door. The problem I have is the tangent wall condition that exists. See the images attached. In the plan view I show a 48" square in the corner of the room, and the top left corner defines where a solid wall ends and joins two walls. The straight one paralleling the roof edge and the curved one need somehow to be forced to join the solid wall at that point. I cannot make things work. I have tried placing a small room divider but to no avail. I have failed trying to segment the curve into six equal facets and place post-to-beam railings along the faceted curve. There is no floor (it's open below) in the "room" at plan top, and wood deck floor in the larger porch room. Ceiling heights differ. The thin wedge segment has a dropped ceiling so as to be able to house and conceal the big W12x35 steel beam needed to carry the roof load for its unsupported span of close to 26 feet. Ground snow load is 100 psf where this is built. I'd be happy with an invisible wall at the curve, as long as it tracked the curve exactly so as to define the deck edge. I can do the whole segmented screen thing with solids if I have to. But that arrowhead point, two walls coming into a solid wall, is kicking my butt. Plan attached. I'm gonna need steps outside also, and I cannot get anything to work there. The steps are seating, really, with only one panel of the six having a door. We are going to build segments, not curved steps. I've been unsuccessful doing steps because the wall segments are all at odd angles. Ranch camp 2 bedroom.zip

I do the 3D DWV work in Sketchup. Been using it since its inception, and I work with it even now more than in Chief. Easy, fast, intuitive, and I find it nice for thinking my way through structural arrangements. Plus never any upgrades to learn. For the builder that gives me most of the Chief work, I do the 3D DWV when things get a little complex with regard to space and routing and combining drains and vents. Most of what I give them is the 2D under-slab arrangements. All the HW and CW work that's done in my upstate NY jurisdictions is all PEX, done with a home run off a manifold for every single fixture, the PEX lines run wherever in framing to be efficient. Old-style iso diagrams like we are discussing here make no sense for that work, and besides, the AHJ plans review for permitting is not requiring anything, MEP-wise. I'm lucky.

I've done DWV for a client that has his carpenters do it, not a plumber, so I show them the parts. The 3D Warehouse has excellent content for Charlotte pipe DWV fittings, with points positioned for accurate and quick joining.

In this badly botched model, you can see the segmented "curved" screened porch wall. There is a door opening at the far end, and six of the seven segments are post-to-beam railings with middle and bottom rails. What the client wants is two tiers of 12" tread-depth steps across here, all joined together. The steps function as both under-porch decor, the floor being about 24 inches above grade, and as seating for overflow guests when there is a large firepit gathering. I draw the steps and Chief wants to make each panel a doorway, when I join the steps to the wall. I need to suppress that action somehow. And how do you get the steps to miter together?

Got it! Thanks to all.

I see no way to toggle patterns when in vector view. The only toggle available is one for edge smoothing when idle.

I'm in X14, and never use this, but need it now. Thanks.

@Alaskan_Son Thanks, Michael! Glad a pro like you stepped in here and took a look at it. Your post lends credibility to this, which is a discussion of a bug report. I mistakenly hit the solution button, so you are credited with a SOLVE. If you are still interested, take a back cut section through so you can view RP-3 on L and RP-1 on R. See the attached snip. What is a real mystery, is how while when opened for spec, these planes report differing fascia heights, RP-3 being lower, a CAD line drawn through the RP-1 fascia top intersects the fascia for RP-3 at precisely the top! No diff! Since having reported a ticket with Chief, I've no response yet, but will report when I get one.

I haven't looked at your plan but a deck is considered an outdoor room with a post-beam-pier structure under it. I think you may have a level roof that needs somehow to drain water if there's no roof over this "deck." Such roofs that are "roof decks" typically have a roof structure of rafters with a minimum slope, then a membrane roof, sleepers, and wood deck atop the sleepers. Here's a pic of a rooftop deck. Build it as a roof, not as a deck.

I've rarely seen a fixture I couldn't model in Sketchup in ten minutes or less. Import as "electrical," check "advanced," do all the material things, add the lights, edit positions, light specs, set origin, check which way it mounts (wall, ceiling) set origin, . . . Make sure the model is done with all its parts in different colors so you can easily ID which is which when setting materials in Chief.

That's an out-of-box setting in the windows defaults. Rob must have changed it.

Heh. My corgi doesn't have that problem. In my example of an irregular roof, all 12 pitch with one plane at 5, roof default calling for "same roof height at exterior walls," the math for the determination of fascia height comes from these variables, all set in the roof defaults: pitch (12), overhang (18 for this plan), structure (9.25 here), surface (here at .625 but the .500 sheathing layer is used in the calcs), and plate height ("ceiling" in floor default = 109.125.) And yes, thicknesses of roof assembly parts come into play in the various math solutions that come into play when Chief parametrically builds. In this instance, we are using the sheathing. Chief does not call it that in its spec dialog. It allows a multi layer buildup. You could have shingles, a membrane, rigid insulation, furring, a radiant barrier, whatever, but down at the bottom the layer is what Chief uses for thickness. I think of it as the sheathing layer. That layer thickness is also used in the determination of where Chief builds the subfascia. But where to place the fascia. It's the extra credit problem in your second semester 9th grade math final. You can solve it graphically with your CAD program, or your construction calculator. Or you can write some code. Whatever. The fascia height is calculated (show us your work), and then . . . . . . it's time to calculate the position of the "wild" overhang of that bastard roof, the one with the 5-pitch. Again, you have all the variables. This is the one Chief gets wrong. Don't know why, but Chief places the fascia a little too far outboard (too much overhang), and this results in a fascia height for this roof plane that is lower than that of adjoining planes. Two plan files attached. One called EDITED, the other called CHIEF. In the CHIEF file, wrong fascia placement, you can see in the section how a little CAD work determines where the fascia should be. A precise measurement is taken using a CAD line. In EDITED, the bastard roof (sorry, that's what I call irregular planes) has its overhang edited using the measurement taken in the other file. This brings its fascia height to the correct level. The hips and valleys are manually moved to join (Chief won't join them for some reason.) So there's a fix, but it should not be required. There's a bug and I await Tech Support's reply. EDITED.plan CHIEF.plan

Thanks, Rob, but my view is from the accuracy-in-3D side, which is what this program should be all about. I can build it to precision in Sketchup. It's simple 3D with intersecting planes. Chief ought to be able to do it right. This model took me 16 minutes to do, and I'm slow with SU. I don't think it's too much to ask of Chief that a perimeter roof line with multiple pitches springing from it be built accurately. The fascia is, in Chieftalk, a molding, a 1x8, dead level all the way around. The planes represent the top surface of sheathing, which is the way Chief builds, and that surface line extends down to intersect the outboard top edge of fascia. It's all just simple trig, if you are writing the code for the 3D build.

Maybe it's been this way since X zero, but I cannot say because all I have right now is 13 and 14. First of all, it's not broken. It just a little hinky when you mix pitches in a plan and want a common fascia height. If you've the time to look and explore open the attached file and follow along. A simple L shaped plan with hipped roof has six walls (by definition as it's an L shaped footprint) and six roof planes. All roof pitches are 12/12 except for one of the inside-the-corner planes, which is specified at the wall as 5/12. Overhang is 18" by default except that because I have "same roof height at exterior walls" checked in roof height section, the irregular roof of 5/12 pitch will run out further in auto roof build. Build the roof, and check roof spec for all six planes. For whatever reason, Chief "reports" in the roof spec dialog that the fascia heights of the two in-the-corner roofs, one at 5/12, the other at 12/12, have a fascia height lower than the other four planes, the distance is 3/16". Here is the strange behavior. One of those two roofs, the 5/12, when you look in section view or 3D, does have its fascia top lower, but the other one, the 12/12, has its fascia RAISED from the others. Fine, you say. I can manually edit to get every single fascia top to match height. But you won't succeed. Fiddle with it and see. I put an image here of the plan view, with the 5/12 plane selected. The others are 12/12. Fascia heights with multi pitch roof.plan