GeneDavis

Light bulbs are not "lit." They are a solid object, the surface of which is "painted" with a material called LIGHTING WHITE. Go and locate this material in your Chief library. Now create a new solid object in a room. An easy thing to do is just use the slab tool and draw a quick slab. Open the slab for specification and change its material to LIGHTING WHITE. Now take a camera shot and render it. Shoot us a screencap of what you get.

I am happy to use out-of-the-box Chief to do the walls of screened porches, doing them as railing walls, post to beam, adjusting the specs so I get the middle and shoe rails as I want. One can use the post spacing to get the bay sizes one needs. It would be nice if Chief allowed a way to do a screened porch door in a chosen bay, the door going between posts without a door frame, the door auto-sized by width to fit the bay. I draw the doors using CAD in plan view to show their location and swing, and use CAD in elevation to patch one into the chosen bay or bays. My doors do not appear in the door schedule, and I have a CAD detail in my library that I use in con docs to show door construction. How do you do a screened porch door? Mine are simple stile and rail affairs, one middle rail, all parts 1" x 3-1/4" with a 1" x 6-1/2" bottom rail.

Duh. Thanks, Joe.

I run into this when drawing screened porches. I use a railing wall, post to beam, and cannot resize the beam. It's been requested in SUGGESTIONS that Chief give us control over this, but we're not there yet. So what do you do it you want a specific size?

Lessen the pitch to get it down from the window, so you don't have water problems there. Lower roofs often have lesser pitches than the primary roofs, above. It's good architectural practice.

And here is a comparison, done with the elevation camera. Left to right, a CAD 2D, an image that rotates to the camera, and a solid silhouette.

Thanks, Joe. I see that now. Since we're talking about people images, how does one best use the silhouettes and CAD images of people, the ones available now as bonus content?

What happened to the people we had in whenever, X5? The kind that you placed in planview and were 2D, but the image always rotated to face the camera?

Wow! Michael! What a great tutorial! Very interesting uses of symbol make and use, and CAD DETAIL FROM VIEW use. Super helpful. Thank you.

I think most of us know what a curved mansard roof is. I asked the question because I could not envision one, over this porch in question, and be in keeping with the gable end above. A mansard roof, to me, is an arrangement of steeply-pitched roof planes around the perimeter, their crests all the same elevation, with an almost-flat roof crowning the whole thing. The O.P. has not returned to comment, and the solution with curved planes is not my idea of a mansard. I think there is information missing.

Give us an example please of a mansard curved roof.

One word, son. Photons.

And that is the answer, Mark. But let me clarify for our readers, particularly the Chiefer that got this started in an earlier thread. You must save the resized symbol to the library. You must then open a new Chief file, and place the symbol you created and put in the library, placing it into 3D space. That means there are no walls, no floors, nothing in 3D space except this symbol. Now go to File>Export>Export 3D Model (STL, ) and send it off. This is what is meant by convert to symbol. Now, in a Chief file, doesn't matter if you have walls, etc., IMPORT that file as a symbol, be sure to make it an Electrical type, and import it. One can now make whatever adjustments in the Symbol dialog to place a stretch plane, and have it operate as one wants. Note in the attachment, I have already stretched it after placement and locating a stretch plane at z = -9". The shade and canopy have not stretched, only the downrod.

Do it with this one. The attached file has the infamous "barn pendant" symbol, in its resized form. The goal is to put a stretch plane in the downrod so it can be lowered. I saved it to Library and brought it in, but it still acts wrong. BarnPendantResized.plan

Show us how to "save as symbol." Thanks.

This is a new thread to discuss what was embedded in the previous thread about stretch planes and zones. In that topic, a Chiefer had taken a symbol, resized it to about 50 percent of original, and then wished to set a stretch plane for using it above a counter. I found it impossible to do because I could not figure out how to export the resized symbol. Try it with any pendant light in the Chief libraries. Take the symbol, let's say it is 20 x 20 inches x 40 inches high, resize it maintaining its aspect ratio to 10 x 10 x whatever, and try resetting a stretch plane so its stem will stretch. Would not work for me. You can succeed with the symbol at original size, but not after resizing. So how do you export one that has been resized, and then turn around and import it back so Chief now has a fresh look at it?

Go into your interior wall specification, and change how the wall picks up dimensions.

Go to YouTube. Many more videos there.

Please go to YouTube, search "Chief Architect Symbols" and take the time to watch the many instructional videos there. Plenty of examples of sizing and stretching there for you. That, or line up some one-on-one instruction via Skype or something.

A roof segment can have a radius, but no other curvature options are available. Curved roof segments can be joined and geometry specified so one is tangent to another, but still one is limited to circular arc geometry.

Sorry about your situation. Try this. Do your setup for your Arch D (24x36) paper but be sure to draw your outer borders nice and wide, as if the actual paper size is not 24x36, but is 22x34. Draw a border at 22x34 and think of it as your "guide" border, and draw your border inside that guide. Leave the 22x34 border there if you want, or delete it after drawing an inside border. Do all your text and dimension setups so that 1/8" is the smallest text height to be printed to your Arch D. Consider using a fairly plain font like Arial, and do all-caps, always. Then when printing your 11x17s, simply use the check print scale setting, set to 1/2. Since your D-size setup has margins drawn nicely for 22x34, everything should look good at half size and fit to 11x17.

"I am not through moving the stair tower walls . . . " Why not wait until you are done, then build stairs. Stairs with manually-specified starting and ending elevations remain stable. Have you tried that?

Post plan please.

Working at the material level, I did a wall with a brick exterior layer from the library, and edited the material pattern colors (both field and lines) so the background (field) is white, and the lines are gray. Shown here is the result of sending the elevation to layout. This has no effect on 3D views because in those, one sees the texture, and not the pattern.

Yup. A weakness, but some might say "une bug." Worth reporting, I suppose. Has it already been done? Reporting?