GeneDavis

Every deck is a "deck room" and in its spec dialog you can set its height. The outside staircase I show in this pic has two decks, and the bottom step is a slab that acts as the first step up off grade and the bearing for the stair stringer set. You need to learn to control stairs, their elevation locks, etc. You may need to do some 2D CAD workout to determine elevations.

You'll have to post the plan to get any help. Strip it of all its cabinets and fixtures, save it as "stripped," close the file, zip it, and attach it to your next post.

These guys, they're in San Antonio, do a lot of flat thin roofs with big overhangs. Money is no object. https://www.lakeflato.com/projects/houses And this summer house, built up in Wisconsin has thin overhangs, done using a combination of metal roof deck and douglas fir lookouts. https://residentialdesignmagazine.com/case-study-box-camp-by-sala-architects/ Here is another look at the Box Camp house. https://salaarc.com/project-types/featured/box-camp-bunkhouse/ Since Box House was built in a location with ground snow loads somewhat similar to the locale where I do work, I did a study of the structure using Sketchup to understand the details. Here is the whole thing (they have since added a guesthouse wing that is very cool). The structure begins with steel bents, the steel all exposed in the interior finish. I think it was CorTen but maybe just painted. The steel bents are there to support the I-joist roof structure over the conditioned spaces. Then comes the part that does the overhangs. First the 4x6 doug fir lookouts. Get out your wallet. Atop this goes the metal roof decking. Over all this is the tapered polyiso buildup that gives the membrane roofing the needed drainage pitch. The same Sala Architects partner that did the Box House project, did this little three-floor tower, one bedroom one bath mini kitchen with adjacent sitting area, also in Wisconsin. Note the same arrangement of timber lookouts and steel decking. https://salaarc.com/project-types/featured/metal-lark/

Try it and see what ya gotta do. Or am I doing it wrong. Place a fixed window in a tall wall, 2' w x 2'2" h. You're gonna mull and stack and the ribbon mull parts need 1/2" spacing. So copy and paste one adjacent, spaced 1/2 between. Mull. Your big stack is 5 high, so copy/space up 24-1/2" up to make your 2x5 stack. Mull as req'd to make one big unit In 3D camera, look close at the mull joints. They're all 1/2" proud. You want them all flush like the real-world end result. Now go about making them all flush, and report.

Give us some iterior camera views of the spaces with 32 feet of clearspan roof overhead.

See the three labels. They are not mulled.

This company makes open web joists and there might be hope at a joist depth of 20 inches. http://www.openjoist.com/spans.html#20 Consider doing a simple set of construction docs drawn with roof trusses drawn in a 20 inch cavity space for the large span roof, and 16 for all the smaller, then get it to a roof truss supplier locally and see what they say. I didn't look at your plan. Maybe only the big-span roof (is it really one big huge space under with no bearing walls at all) needs the trusses. The rest can be framed in various i-joist sizes. Download and learn to use Trus Joist's structural design app, ForteWeb. You will be able to design all the flat roofed houses you can dream up. Edit: I spoke too soon. Just opened up my ForteWeb page, opened a new file named Maricopa after checking to see if there was a snow load (it is zero) and set the clear span at 32' then let the app do some work for me. As you can see, one of their 16" deep models does it just fine at 24" spacing.

Materials>Sheet Metal>Ribbed You are getting a 2D material surface, "textured" with lines depicting ribs. It will show the texture in 3D renders, but close up you'll not see 3D corrugations. 2D views will show the pattern.

I drew a test building, placed three windows with 5" space between, a typical arrangement if wanting the post cover (casing between windows) to be a standard 5 1/2" width (one would pec the RO clearance at 1/4" for sides), then autoframed, and got no posts. If we want the framing to have the posts, we must manually edit to do so.

In my use of Chief for all the X's I can recall, the default separation controls how windows bumped together are separated. The Out Of Box (OOB) setting is 2". That separation has nothing to do with casing width or depth. Casing width comes into play only when bumping windows to a wall, and the window bump-stops when casings hit wall finish. What exactly is the problem? What will you be reporting to Chief as a suspected bug?

I'm more comfortable modeling furniture and lighting that have surface complexities, using my Sketchup Make 2017, which produces .skp format files that readily import into Chief. Your image of the chest did not make it clear to me what molding profiles are used in the "backsplash" surround, or in the bottom valance edging, which wraps the legs. But I could guess at it, and do the piece in fifteen minutes or less. The Thomas Moser counter stools shown in the pic attached have shaped legs that are angled, contoured leather seats, and seat rails that would be more work to do in Chief than in SU. The cube pendants with their curly power cords would be tough, also, unless you want linear cords, which would not look real to me. There is a joke around here that certain Chief experts could model a banana using cabinets, but I am not one of them.

So, Joe, you've already built a floor 0?

You can learn about multiple stretch planes when doing this. It'll be fun and instructive.

Doing a garage/barn with a bay at one end and having issues with two things. Walls specified as "inside battens and planking" generate a set of girts on inside surface where wanted, but a copy of those girts is inserted at center of main layer, inside the 2x6 framing. Easy way to see is to look around at the 3D framing overview. Also, I have a ceiling surface I want to eliminate. The lounge room and sauna rooms both have a surface above the ceiling framing I would like to lose. File attached. Barn garage one floor only.plan

A garage with a barn look is to have two garage bays one end, and at the other, two rooms, one a sauna with 90 inch ceiling, the other a lounge with a taller ceiling. One common roof over all, the structure to have balloon framing all exterior walls. I was OK with my progress doing it all one floor, no floor 2, and I was concentrating on getting the structure and framing all done. I then "backed into" doing the sauna and lounge spaces, and cannot find a clean way to do the floor finish, the ceilings, the hole in ceiling in the lounge, and the inside framing for all this. Here is the plan in the stage I was before going to work on the two rooms. (Barh garage one floor) Note the tall window bank at each gable. That will cause problems for me in the next iteration. Barn garage.plan Barn garage one floor only.zip

Take a look at the sample plans on CA's website. You'll see examples of what you enumerated.

For an expensively-detailed garage/barn, siding is vertical WRC with knots, nickle-gap, and needs nailing on 16" centers. I want to let in the 1x2 horizontal girts and then sheath over the flush framing, then do cedar-breather over zipwall then the siding. Is this possible? Clashing wall framing layers? Pic shows the general arrangement, for which I placed the girts against (not into) the framing.

OK thanks all, and I found the molding over at the zero location, but it seems a bug and I'll file a ticket.

@robdyckTry adding a CAD circle to the library. I used the CAD tool circle-about-center, drew one, and there is no add-to-library icon. I can fake it with a polygon but it must be something about needing one straight side.

OK Robert @robdyck for someone like me wanting to use a 3D molding to do a cable railing and then the larger but also circular wood handrail at top, tell me how to make a molding from a circle drawn in Chief CAD.

I need to make the cable railing and the top rail manually for this staircase to get the arrangement I want, and cannot seem to model either the 1/8" dia cables or the top handrail. I do an elevation view, use CAD to draw the line I want (have no idea where in the y axis it might be drawing, then term it a molding line, do the molding selection, and get nothing. Tried the all-off layerset with only moldings turned on and see nothing. What is the trick? This all seems different from previous releases.

Roof beams when "drawn" model immediately below the structure envelope of the roof. Note how it works. You draw it by clicking an origin point and drag and release. A roof beam is a drop beam, in structural parlance. It is placed under the rafters envelope with the rafters bearing immediately on it. Roof beams are commonly placed horizontally under the ridge of joining roofs, and the rafters top ends lap or butt with no ridge member between, the rafters bearing on the dropped beam. Their when-drawn size is controlled in the framing defaults for roof members, and the size (4x12, etc.) can be edited after a member is placed. A member's location can be edited with x y and z movement, and angle movements. I have never understood the angle part. Eric shows the member exiting the plane's envelope into space. It was drawn that way. It got its slope attitude from the origin point and the drag direction and limit. Describe for us what this beam is to do.

Use camera "perspective framing overview" and ensure the layer on which your beam sits is turned on.

The ceiling is on. The roof hole tool, used independently of the auto floating dormer tool, cuts a hole through the roof and the ceiling below. The OP did not say what kind of dormer was wanted. I presumed skylight-type and did that.

Can anyone tell us what closing and then reopening a file does to erase deck framing? I lose deck framing even not closing a file, and never know why. Decks are weird. You lose framing but not the deck planking. Lose a floor inside, and you're looking at the basement. The floor finish is gone, too. But whatever action wipes deck framing, leaves the planking alone.