GeneDavis

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.

Too much glass! That's my problem when running the web-based ResCheck package. Owners buy these big-acreage lots with killer mountain views, then want windows and sliding glass walls everywhere. In your jurisdictions, how detailed does plans review get for your IECC certificates? And how detailed is inspection?

Yes. Drew one. Put it on a useful layer if you want, otherwise it will be on CAD, Floor Framing. Copy and paste as needed. For X all in a row, drag-space-copy is fast and easy.

Is the scope to provide construction docs for constructing a building? Because the way that is done using Chief Architect is to "draw" the building, get everything about it exactly the way it is to be built, and then, and only then, to do the layout. Only when going to layout (the term we use for creating the documents) do we concern ourselves with using CAD details. Take a look at all the sample plans shown on Chief's website.

The file can't attach unless you close it firtst.

Watch the training video "Understanding default sets," at the Chief site.

Everyone has their opinions, and mine is that the elevation you show is pretty plain. And I am not sure what value, really, those dashed lines accenting roof overhangs bring. Have you tried suggesting an alternative, straight out of Chief? Something like what Michael (Alaskan Son) showed in a thread about techniques? Pic below. Very pale pattern lines, shadows, and a semi-transparent mask over the foundation. Or are you asked to comply with their standards because they have multiple sources for plans and yours have to meet their specs.

I want my great room with the ceiling finish it has, which is tongue and groove boards. The kitchen is for now undecided, but may be different from the other two. There is wall separation between all three, just as there is wall separation for the other rooms on this floor.

OK, I watched the silent video, pausing it so I could see various things, and I am lost. Here is what I have.

I cannot get sound in Michael's video.

OK, I see. You need to define the small area of floor there as having less structure depth, and to do this you will need to use the room divider wall type to wrap the area adjacent the floor opening, then specify structure accordingly. Chief won't give you the ability when doing this to bevel the ceiling, so you will do a polyline solid to get that triangular-section piece. A CAD detail should be drawn to show the framer what to do.

I want the room ceiling, the top of the tray, one material, and the tray sides, another. I did a one-room house as a test and can get what I want, but not in the plan. The plan file is here (I hope I did Dropbox correct.) https://www.dropbox.com/s/zk217tczyvxufop/BZ.plan?dl=0 For some reason, I have an error message and something in my specs of settings is keeping me from getting what I want.

More detail needed.

But I still gotta ask. Why is hidden so important? Here is a sample from Chief of a plan, and note how the shed dormers are treated. Any builder can understand it.

In the example given by the OP, all the walls are shown as single dashed lines, no matter what level (0, 1, . . . ), and if we want to get that we need to do CAD work. Those wall lines are an important element. Doing those roof planes with solid fill and controlling order of draw is done, then the entire group of CAD lines representing the building lines, i.e., the outer face of the main layer, is given FRONT status in order of draw. Creating the CAD goes quickly.