GeneDavis

Look again at the pic in Eric's post. It shows the reporting as "Mixed," meaning it is giving unit counts for framing reporting in specific lengths, and footage for the others. It is showing in the table, for a line item reported as in feet ("ft"), and with the unit price per foot shown, the line reports total cost or ft x $ = $$. Sounds like you want to run the material list in linear length format, not one of the other three choices.

Like this? I changed the ceiling height for the loft and the open below rooms of the second floor to 12', went to the attic level (no rooms, just walls), edit>cut the three windows in that gable attic wall, went to floor 2, and paste>hold positioned the windows. Then went to the attic level and deleted the attic wall, which was not needed. Then I moved the window labels of the lower windows under those stacked, so both labels are seen in plan. You can also go into the window spec for each and offset the label, but I find dragging in planview easier.

You're using auto-framing to provide wall framing details, no editing?

Why not just hide the gaps with solids? IMHO, it would look better than the returns. Does the porch have a flat ceiling or are you planking the rafters to vault it? Because if vaulted, consider not boxing the soffit, and doing same planked finish on the rafter tails, so you can lose the pork chops out front.

Here's a plan I just did for a 24x24 garage with mono foundation, one OH door, one window, one man-door. Size of file is 3.8Mb, would take one click to upload to a post, no zip required. What is so hard about attaching a file? Is the template all loaded up like a Rene Rabbit one and worth big bucks? Copyrighted?

I did some noodling around on various sites where R is discussed, and found lots of moaning and gnashing of teeth. Having learned my lessons from what might seem like bugs, I've come to the practice of not changing wall layer elements for placed walls, but always making new wall types.

Manually with solids if you want the pedestals and gapped pavers. Which software has tools for this done with fewer clicks and drags and keyboard input?

My suggestion upthread is hereby amended. I'd forgotten that you can simply uncheck "ridge" in the framing dialog for roof planes, and that when you draw the ridge as a roof beam after framing the rafters it is properly located under them. If you want a beveled top on that beam, sawn and not a seat piece stacked, and you want to see it in 3D, you'll do the beam as a solid. Or you can jack it up with a move, and annotate with a detail that the top end of the rafters all get a small birdsmouth.

@Designers_InkI don't see a plan file in that dropbox link.

Thicken the slab edges to 24" total depth. The edge footing will have a 20" height if your slab spec is 4" thickness. I put a 20 x 20 bevel on the inside faces, for a 24" haunch. Sort of like what is attached? This one's a 16, so the x by y on the haunch is 12 x 12.

I selected the three planes, used the trans/rep tool to raise them 24", and all three still have identical top of plate values. See attached.

I have your plan and see your three roof planes at the porch, all of which have identical pitches, baseline heights, overhangs, and fascia tops. The walls are railings with the elevation common at the top of the 4x12 top rail, that elevation being 144". Are you talking about an issue with this plan?

@Jambruins I don't understand your question, as presented in the opening post. Here's what you said: "I have always manually modified the middle portion of the house to get the gable roof but is there a way use auto roofs to do it?" I downloaded your plan file and went to all the walls that manage the roof build, changed roof settings to be as they should, added room divider walls in two places, broke the two long walls where needed to define the front and rear gables, then turned off auto roof build, deleted your roof, and turned auto roof build back on. You can see in the image what I got. Is that what you wanted to do? Scott Harris's trick of jacking up the room height for the center cross gable spaces, he moved the room height up 1/8", is what it takes for there to be enough of a break at the valley points to get the center cross gable at a 12-pitch. I'd like for @scottharris to give us an explanation of what is behind that trick to make it work. Steve is not really showing you how to do it automatically, but is showing you how to manually use the gable roof line tool to modify the auto-gen roof your plan delivered using your settings. And it would be also beneficial if Steve @SNestor to show us his method for getting this roof to auto-gen with the main gables at 5:12 and the center cross at 12:12.

If it happens to me, I'll switch. From rye whiskey to scotch.

You might try a 1/16" square ridge and edit it's material to air gap, then manually add the structural one.

How is tile dealt with when it is done with material regions?

How do you create folders in your library to organize all these 40 or 400 CAD details?

And here is a pic of a basecab like what I think you might be doing. Common height top drawer, two large lowers. Look at the "Item heights" in the fronts spec dialog. Chief calls the item "drawer" but it is really the drawer opening. See how they differ? They differ so that the drawerhead heights match. That bottom overlay is 5/16" more than the drawerhead above.

The overlays are not the same, and for the to drawerfronts to be same height, the openings need to be adjusted. The lower drawerhead covers the entire bottom "separation" while the one above is covering less than half of its lower "separation." i use CAD to draw a partial section view of the cabinet, placing all the fronts in their stack, which then resolves where those intermediate separations go, and thus gives you the openings. Attached is an example of my use of CAD to determine cabinet specs. Shown are two sections of basecab drawer stacks. One a three-equal-over-one-large-bottom, the other a top-drawer-two-under-equal-size. The work was done for frameless, but the logic would be same for faceframed. I'm always doing a 3/8" reveal at top, 1/8" betweens, and full cover no reveal at bottom. My work shows the d'boxes and the small boxes are for determining where the drawerslide mounting holes go. I use Chief to precisely draw kitchens and baths, and then use a separate app for working up the cab batches for CNC cutting of all parts. I show an image from that app, eCabinets, a side view of a basecab, three drawer stack, top drawer over two large lowers, both equal head heights. My cab box is 30-3/4" high (stands on 4" adjustable legs, not shown), the top drawerfront is 6-1/8", the two below both 12".

Who is the buyer?

Check the main layer in the exterior wall type definition, and observe whether it is 16 or 24. If it is 16, then reframe. If it is 24, edit it to be what you want, then reframe. If it is 16 and reframes at 24, save the job and close Chief, go to the file in your directory, zip it, and post the file here in your next post. And before doing that next post, go to your profile and complete a signature so we know what version of Chief you use, and the hardware upon which you run it.

Not exactly. I have dozens of CAD details in dozens of completed project plans, and would like to bring all or most of these into a file I'll build as a new template. I have been opening the CAD details, then copying and pasting into new CAD details in this new file. I was wondering if there was a way to click and drag or drop.

I leave terrain off in the layerset, and CAD for the terrain, the polyline (all white lines) has a transparent solid fill with light gray color, the top line of the p'line has a CAD line overlay at a line weight that makes sense. You can get fancy and do a 45 deg. line fill in that p'line to give the foundation a dashed line look, but I was lazy on this one. The reason I turn off the terrain (different from what Eric suggests above) is that often there is too much going on and one gets multiple lines. This simple approach works for me.

There have been discussions of the SAVE AS method, and the TEMPLATE method for organizing work, and I've been terrible about organization and efficiency, and do neither. I want to get better. Isn't good TEMPLATE practice the same as SAVE AS, if the template has all the settings, defaults, SPVs, etc., as a good SAVE AS? I've a bunch of good CAD details that are in plan files, and want a recommendation for how to bring them into a file to be used as a template. What is best?

You can model the whole space at the height of the tallest ceiling, which makes window placement a little more straightforward, then use ceiling planes, both flat and pitched, to create the overhead you need.