GeneDavis

Won't work for me, Kevin. See the attached. Chief only exports in a spreadsheet format with extension as shown, and Docs won't import that type.

I don't have Excel but use Sheets a lot.

Right, Scott. Today we have a layer called main layer only, and maybe we need another called pony wall switch. This is a common need for any plan with a split foundation, one part crawlspace, part full depth. I'll do a suggestion when back next week.

Need to do this. I did a foundation wall as a pony, upper framed, lower concrete. Want the lower showing for foundation plan, but the upper for the framing plan. Can't try anything 'cause I'm traveling, sitting at gate 32 waiting out a delay.

Those who draw roofs like this should be required to work in the framing crew when they are framed and sheathed. And then with the roofers for all that extra valley and hip work.

I've live window and door schedules in a plan, and without my input, they balloon way out on their right ends. They have been expanding so far out it is ridiculous. I delete and regenerate and still get the behavior. What's up?

How do you all deal with this. I get these lines that are annoying, when taking camera views and elevation views.

I'm about ready to send in a ticket, but first, let me present it here. On the outside of exterior walls, I am using the tool to do some board-and-batten accents on gables. A view of the house is attached, plus a zipped up copy of the plan. All worked well for the upper gable. For each gable, the boards that surround the field and battens are done with p-line solids. I used the material region tool to do the 1/4-inch thick field panels and the battens that face them. The tool worked as expected for the upper gable, but for the one at the end of the extended eave shed, the tool would not produce the battens. It is easy to reproduce the error I got. One selects a batten, converts it back to a polyline, then tries to use the material region tool to get the effect. You'll see the bug in action. My workaround worked, 'cause that is what workarounds do. But am I missing something about this tool, which I have used very little? Cabin 2 bed 1 and half bath.zip

Since each plank is a solid, anything with knots is going to look ridiculous, in that every plank will be a clone of all the others. So, do any of the wood textures, no knots, work?

What do you do for this? I want to get realistic-looking light effects under the wall cabinets and atop the counters. I turned down the wattage, but haven't played with the cone angle or drop-off rate. Shadows, no.

The client needs a real architect.

What I'll do is set the newel height to 1 inch so the three are still there in planview, then do p'line solids drawn over them with heights set where needed.

I used the OOB settings for "Indoor High Quality" and getting this, after an overnight of passes. Why the soft-focus? I am raytracing again, this time unchecking the "use focal blur" box in the advanced panel. Early results are better. But why would the OOB settings have that blur? And what use could the blur have? Does fuzziness have a place in architectural rendering?

Maybe I drew the staircase wrong. See my pics. I go up a run to a landing, and make a turn from there to the top. Simple arrangement, gotta be as common as dirt. Chief treats the whole staircase as one, in that I cannot specify newel heights for the various pieces of it. When I set the newel height for the balustrade at the bottom tread, it is too tall for the horizontal balustrade across the edge of the landing. How is this best done to get section-controllable newel heights?

No, that isn't it, but thanks. Here's the plan. The roofs that won't box are the two main 12:12 planes. The gable overhangs are done as separate planes because they do not get the boxed detail. Edit: my problem has been solved. Not sure why it was solved, but all is OK with the eaves. Edit 2: no, the problem is not solved. The archived file was OK, but the one I have zipped and is here has the problem. Edit 3: forced a fix by unchecking "default to overhang" and entering 24" in the distance box. Cabin 2 bed 2 bath.zip

I have checked the box for boxed eaves and this is all the box I get. I unchecked to remove, then checked, same story. What am I doing wrong?

Truss chord sizes are editable. Not so for web members.

The orientation of the dimension text is as shown in every example of plans Chief shows it its website. It is also the same orientation seen in sample plans at most all websites for architects and designers. Not so for Sketchup layout, though. SU does what you want. But you are working with Chief, so what are you going to do?

OK, Perry, I took my pills. Thanks for the reminder.

Got it! You cannot stack a floor two wall above a floor one room divider wall, in this case. Did not try this in another, but when I changed the floor one room divider walls to invisible glass shower walls, I was able to stack the walls above that I needed, and get a clean model.

I tried to model the barn project I just finished, using the Perry method of doing a second floor, and had pretty good success at getting a clean model that looked good inside and out. But then I realized I had built the whole thing using the default SIDING-6 wall, which is insulated, and has drywall inside. I took my clean model and tried changing all the walls to my wall type SIDING-6, uninsulated, no drywall and the model started acting weird. On floor one, the octagonal entry is separated from the barn with walls type ROOM DIVIDER. This worked for me earlier, and it is in place on floor one. The problem is with floor two, which in the model (file attached), I am unable to get walls of any type to separate the floor two part of the foyer below. To roof this, I want the barn floor two at 60 inch rough ceiling, and the foyer floor two at 33.25 rough ceiling. The barn has a trussed roof, the foyer is rafters in 2x6. If someone has a solution, I would like to see it. Test barn.plan

Thanks, Perry. Thanks, Ross. I had tried the planview fix specifying the wall also as a pony wall, with room divider specified for the lower wall type. That fixed the 2D part and gave me the look I wanted. But Perry's trick of using a second floor, open below, takes the whole roof intersect thing and makes it a non-issue. Nice clean model. I did not check to see what happens, Perry, when you go about the surgery as you did. Adding the floor must have blown the roof off. If I was to model this structure from scratch knowing about this, I would add the second floor before building the roof. To cement this all in my mind, I will go back and in a brand new plan, try it out with the barn-with-turret-foyer thing I did.

Just wrapped up a job with a low entry "foyer" room at the corner of a taller main building. The model was a mess at the corner, but I did workarounds to complete the docs. What I do not understand, is how to properly specify the walls where the high building adjoins the low. I used "roof cuts wall" to model things, but as for what the lower wall spec is where it is to be open, I just don't know. I tried it with a less-complex roof for the low-room addition, plan file attached. The model is not really "clean." My snipped images point out the imperfections. In plan view, I would like only a ceiling break line that divides the main big space from the low space. What is the best wall type to use for the lower parts of these walls? I used glass shower, but wonder if this is best. Test corner foyer.zip

This is new to me, so I hope you'll forgive the question. What dimensional information to you give the builder on the construction docs to show how to build the dormer? And more relevant to Chief, where do you pull it from. I've orphan dormers that do not relate to any walls below. They are really just fancy skylights. If I'm the framer, I would appreciate a dimension up the roof deck from the subfascia line to the front wall line, the height up from roof deck to sidewall plate, window r.o. top relative to plate, overall width, roof pitch, overhangs, and window size. But that's me. It'll take more details to define all this, than it will for my octagonal turret entry at the northwest corner of the building. Each of my two dormers for the current project center on large overhead doors below. Anybody have some examples of how you do it?

Thanks, Scott. What I did was select only the dimensions or strings that had the 1/16" accuracy, and changed the format to only go as fine as 1/8". What happened is as shown here. Only the mathematicians in the foundation-building crew or the framing crew would say that it is wrong. Doing an octagon in a 9'-8" square results in sides that are about 1/32" longer than 4'-0".