GeneDavis

Yes, thermal upgrade. Keep cool and carry on.

I am going ahead and buying from your recommended source, Mark. Getting this: MSI GP76 Leopard 11UG-076 - 17.3" FHD 240Hz 3ms - i7-11800H - RTX 3070, with 32 RAM.

For X13?

Here you go. $2,269.99 from Dell. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/gaming-laptops/alienware-m17-r4-gaming-laptop/spd/alienware-m17-r4-laptop/wnm17r420h Meets the specs for processor, DRAM, video card, and it has a 17" screen.

You will simply need to upgrade your system, because they've packed 3D features into X13 that make it quantum leap higher than X12, as far as memory and video card speed go. Did you go from 10 to 13 and never did 11 or 12? You can run 12 all day with your rig, but if you want to run 13, you're gonna need new hardware.

Clay rendering. Color is a huge distraction when you are trying to communicate space and function and flow.

Pressing TAB whenever drag-moving anything, wall, line, symbol, while still holding the left button, opens a dialog box allowing user distance input. Surely you are using this all the time, right? Want to move a wall 3 inches right? Select it, hold, start to drag right, press TAB, and voila! there's your input box in which you type 3.

You only want to be dimensioning to surfaces when you first draw an asbuilt plan from your field measurements. Imagine the most perfect and useful measuring tool: a virtual smart bullet, self-leveling, military-class gps on board, data logging, 0.001" accuracy. Fired through the house at 36" above floor, perfectly level, it passes through a sequence of walls and spaces, recording each. But you can't do that. Your laser will give you the spaces, and with the right jigs, can give you outside to outside on exterior, but the rest, the wall thicknesses, to the accuracy of your laser for surface to surface spaces (maybe 1/16"?), is harder to get. For an asbuilt to be drawn, I try to find every wall I can, interior and exterior, that can have its thickness somehow measured, and it is almost every time, done using subtraction. Door frames, trim, moldings, and more, all in the way. You cannot do forensic chainsaw work to do this, except for walls you know are gonna get demolished. I'll establish those wall types with definitions, ext 1, ext 2, int 1, int 13, whatever, and use those when drawing the plan from the field measurements. I use wall resizing from exterior surfaces, and I edit walls as needed after a plan is drawn, to get the best combination of walls and spaces to match what that virtual bullet had recorded. And as we all know, the asbuilt house is nowhere near perfectly orthagonal. Built long ago to a simple plan that called it 24 feet by 40 feet on its frame deck, it's of course out of square. It's 24'2 on one end and 24'3 on the the other. And the taper is not linear. So I draw it as best I can with my numbers and wall types, and then make tiny adjustments so the overall length comes either to what I measured, or really close, and it is the walls I play with to do the tuning. Chief doesn't make the mistakes. I do.

Can you give us an example of dimensional creep? When doing an asbuilt, your measurement tool can give you inaccuracies, but you use Chief to get a plan that is as close to what you can measure. You have a restraint, in that wall thicknesses have to be gaged somehow, or backed into somehow. You have a tape or rule or laser that gives a surface to surface reading, that rounds to 1/16". Somewhere in your scheme, when drawing the plan from the measurements, you have to resolve where to do some rounding. Where is the creep? Show us, please.

Thanks, Mark! How does this one look? I did not phone to check stock, but before I do, I want an opinion. I know nothing about computers, so the storage spec is a little murky for me. The way I specified, it looks to have a SSD with 1 TB.

And what will I not get if I go down to a 2060? The choices seem limited in quick ship laptops.

How much will I suffer getting a machine with a 3060 card?

My system is old and details are in my sig. I just downloaded and installed X13 Beta and can get no 3D at all. No overviews, no camera views, no section views. I don't really care about RT raytracing, so what should I get in a new laptop to be able to function with this?

Thanks, Eric. Much cleaner than my manual planes. I did not get the generation of ceiling planes outside the room as you did, but got a warning message, which went away as soon as I exploded the group in the room. And for some reason, the ceiling painted right with the planking material, all the planes, without need to do any rotations. I went taller with it than before.

I needed to show a tray ceiling option in a house I've modeled. First, right up front, I had to do some workarounds, as my situation would not build using the Chief tray ceiling tools. I had to manually draw all the planes. The plan (drawn in X12) is here. https://www.dropbox.com/s/o24qyty4cin897w/BZ kitchen dining tray.plan?dl=0 I have attached images to show where in plan this is, and how the problem exhibits itself. The wing of the house is the kitchen-dining area part of an open arrangement adjacent the two-story tall greatroom and a hall, and room division is done with an invisible wall. It is that feature, the invisible wall, that throws Chief's tray tool for a loop. Maybe they'll fix the bug someday, but I gotta do something here and now. And I did. The planes you see are manually drawn. Wanting a planked look for the finish, sloped surround planks going with the slope, the center field going the short way to be 90 to trusses, I applied materials accordingly. Or tried to. Manually drawn ceiling planes do not get their material spec from a direct user dialog. They get their material from the room spec dialog, where ceiling finish is specified. You've no real control of planking direction. I know. I tried everything. Chief gets all mixed up and cannot produce what I wanted. Look at the vector view, which shows the top flat plane getting planked BOTH ways. There was no way I could get the planes to show good definition of plane joints at all the hips, and where edge planes (6/12 pitch) met the top plane. Chief gives one a muddy mess. I ended up modeling the whole ceiling in Sketchup and importing the whole room's tray as a symbol, and taking vector view screenshots with the symbol turned on, and the ceiling planes turned off. A couple of pics are included. But I sure would like to know why I could not succeed with the manual planes and their materials.

Plumbing riser and other details? Examples? Have you looked at the sample layouts (construction drawings) at the Chief site? Viewed the training for CAD from Chief? How is a plumbing riser diagram done in ACAD? Is it 3D?

Here is a hint. Roof settings. Play around with them.

Break the roof edge each side of window, drag edge down. In the no-roof rectangular hole you've created now needs a lower-pitched plane in its place. Manually draw it and adjust pitch to suit.

Ok, now I understand. I'm totally with you on this, and think you should work to get this model as absolutely precise as possible. Use the effort to learn Chief and learn it well. As for the trusses, do a search for my thread about a special truss that was endwall top half with a window opening, and girder lower half. @Alaskan_Son helped with a video to show how well Chief can produce real trusses in 3D. Pretend your project is a calling card, the layout prints an example of your capabilities, to show and impress potential clients. Do CAD details for everything. Go way beyond what's needed for permits. Make those prints so full of information that anybody can build the job, and if done per prints, every detail will be per you.

Did you build deck framing and do you have deck framing level turned on in your camera view?

Tell us why you have to get this in your Chief model, when the truss supplier has already correctly modeled it and provided plans in .pdf. Does the client require this? Are you being paid for this?

What's this? https://www.apple.com/imac-24/ Will it run Chief?

Yes, that is it. Thanks for looking.

See if it opens for you. https://www.dropbox.com/s/zk217tczyvxufop/BZ.plan?dl=0

My thermal envelope ceiling areas are huge, and I cannot figure why. Look at the header line for ceiling area in a house with 2200 sf main, and less that than in the lower level walkout basement at floor 0. I opened up the line to see the detail, and show in the screencap what it has. A number of those lines turn up nothing when I do the plan search thing. What you see is line after line of detail with 700 sf plus values, for spaces, if they are in the plan, with number like 130 sf. I have generated a couple dozen material lists for this plan as I have refined the model to have it give me true counts for framing and trim and other things, but have saved none of them.