GeneDavis

Which is where, please?

Where the basement slab has bearing loads, posts or walls, we thicken the slab appropriately, and typically use CAD and text on the foundation plan to show where and what. It can be modeled in 3D by making and placing slabs and or solids where needed. What do you do if you want it all included in the concrete count in the material list? I'd like NOT to do walls with footings and posts with footings.

Antics with semantics. What Chief is calling "panel frame" is a stile if it's vertical, a rail if horizontal, and a panel if it is the entire assembly of stiles, rails, panels, and if glass, "lites." And if it's window talk, there are sash, the movable or fixed segments all surrounded by the frame. Doors have fixed and moveable panels within their frames, but for windows those subassemblies are sash. And you can bet that elsewhere if English is spoken, the terms are all different.

So Chief hiccups, and we need to do a dive into the darkness, and heaven forbid, drag a wall? I thought that for as common a wall and roof condition as this, Chief would step in with the automatic. The automatic!

Select the N arrow to open the dialog box, and specify its angle.

I just recently installed the free app Greenshot, after having a problem with Techsmith's Jing which I had been using for years. No .pdfs though. This is an image in .png format. I am just getting into it, but text must be in boxes to be added, which I was used to from Jing. I like the obfuscate tool, which I used here to show you. Also attached is a .png of a .pdf layout page I did using Greenshot .png clips taken from a Sketchup file, to convey truss envelopes to the truss engineer for a job being started now. They imported into Chief nicely and resized just as I wanted them.

You are doing it wrong. Your PLAN is done upright, meaning no angled walls. You don't first do it XY upright and then rotate it. You place and rotate your terrain perimeter (building lot) the way you want it, with whatever setbacks drawn, the plot moved into place and rotated correctly to get the parallelism you need. In the image attached, the plan is "upright," no walls angled. It is the plot that has the angles.

CAD detail does it for me. I like for the foundation plan and whatever sections and details are pertinent to be on their own set of pages. The foundation sub gets only that page or pages.

The studs for that top wall simply sister alongside the truss ends, and whatever top plating, single or double, goes atop. So in fact it is a wall conjoined with the truss ends, and one of the images above, I forget which, depicts it perfectly. Who would want to build a wall atop the deck with studs only a few inches long. But I used to frame, so what do I know?

How do you do a third floor atop a roof.

A lot of pics of a Deck House at this site, which shows how one almost exactly like ours got a nice renovation. It is in NC. https://www.freshpalace.com/2013/01/02/deck-house-renovation-in-chapel-hill-north-carolina A couple pics from the site attached here. Ours differed from the one shown in the EXISTING photo in that it had an additional bay on the far end that was a 3/4 depth screened porch. The view of the front shows the split-entry staircase inside, all original. The mahogany door is original because it matches what we had way back then. Do a search for Lock-Deck and you will find various dealers out in the Pacific NW that sell the tongue and groove product used to build structures like this. The planks are king sized versions of t&g flooring, in that the product comes random length (6' minimum) and is t&g on ends. Any room you are in, upstairs or down, you look up and you are seeing the beams and the decking. To build this in Chief, I would specify my floor and roof structures as having zero framing, and model the beams all with solids. No ceilings. Pretty simple, actually.

And then there is manual roof building. And editing. And figuring out how to do curved roofs. And crickets. Rafter tails. Shadowboards. And the interior side of things. Pitched ceilings. Curved ceiling planes to form groin vaults. So much to learn.

We owned a post and beam house forty years ago, a package design, Deck House, from Acton, MA. It came to the jobsite as panelized walls, the wall segments going between the 8' on-center 4x4 posts. The roof structure was 4x6 double tongue and groove western red cedar, a laminated timber product, with the bottom faces all of select wood, small tight knots, and all prefinished. We were in a zone 6 climate, and there was 4 inches of rigid foam board insulation on top of the deck. Main floor deck was the same as the roof. Heavy t&g spanning 8 feet, no floor joists. Ours did not have the porte cochere deck, but looked pretty much like this. What was really cool was how the windows went right up to the bottom side of the deck, with no header over. The top frame of the windows was milled with its top face pitched, so the inside thickness (height) was more than out, but still, the feeling was, when looking out, that cedar planking just continued through and out. All the millwork was mahogany. A beautiful house. Large three-bay greatrooms facing the rear on main and lower walkout level with floor to ceiling glass in sliding door panels gave a view of the oak forest, with its dogwood tree understory. When the dogwoods bloomed, being in the rooms was like viewing those huge Monet paintings in the museums. '5

Chief builds your roof based on your defaults. If they spec a roof frame of 2x10s, the roof plane is positioned so the 2x10 framing members get a full-seat bearing on your wall framing. If the wall framing is 2x6, that birdsmouth horizontal dimension will be 5.5 inches. Your subfascia spec in your roof defaults guide Chief to making the rafter cuts OUTSIDE the wall line. Play with it a bunch and you'll get it.

Yes, learn all the features of OPEN BELOW as room type, including full familiarity with every aspect of its specification. Floor elevation, ceiling height, etc. AUTO STAIRWELL is just Chief creating one automatically based on the staircase footprint.

Rebuild foundation.

The help function in Chief will explain it all for you. Have you looked? Works in Chief .plan plan views and elevation views. Not in .layout views.

From that link Mark provided, looks like it takes about $1400 to get one with a 17.3" (diag.) screen, which is IMHO the min needed for Chief work. https://www.hidevolution.com/evoc-high-performance-systems-nh772-nh77ddw-17-3-fhd-144hz-i7-10875h-rtx-2060.html?___SID=U I see them with specs like this barely used for about $1,000 on Craigslist in the big Chicagoland market where we are currently camped. I got one like this but with an older gen GTX card, from one of the forum members here. Great machine. Asus.

I gotta ask. Why aren't you realizing more income for yourself by preparing the construction docs using Chief 9, which is maybe even more current that the ACAD the draftsman is using. Chief 9 has all the horsepower needed to produce first-class con docs. Why the draftsman? Why not just you? Drawing things twice makes too much room for error. You'll need to learn annotation skills, which include dimensioning, notes and callouts, schedules, and more, but it is all there in Chief for you. And you will need to learn to use layout. Don't ever think you are too old to learn this. Many of us were likely ten years older than you are right now when we first began with Chief. The video tutorials make it all so easy today.

Your 9.0 is pretty old, and most of us cannot remember how it works. Looking at the feature list dated 2003, it had improvements in Layout. That is where you should be sending your views, and from which you should be printing to pages in .pdf format. Why don't you try going to the Chief website and watching some training videos about Layout.

Describe your at-home printing method, in detail. The one you use to put ink on letter-sized paper on your home printer.

And the garage floor gets a nice tile finish as a bonus. Change room type back to garage after.

You want your plan view to have a hatch pattern at the drops for the doors? I know of no auto way to do that. Use a CAD patch if you gotta have it. Walkout basements are typically done with a pony wall scheme, and you will need to manually edit in elevation or section view to pull the frostwalls down and do the stepping. Goes fast, and it is easy to slope the footing undersides (actually sides) at the steps, if you want to match reality.

Here is a nice little French bombe piece one might want to use as a vanity in an elegant powder room. From the 3D Warehouse, imported into Chief, and here is a screenshot.

Look what I did. Hit the RETURN key followed by the space bar. Paragraph breaks make your text much easier to read. There are scads of bathroom cabinetry at the 3D Warehouse site, and any of it can be downloaded into your model.