GeneDavis

All slabs?

I can fake it by building a single wall somewhere in the plan big enough to put one of each type I want to show in a detail like that. The wall type is opening no material and a single layer. The doors and windows get no casings, and of course are all specified so that they are not scheduled. But to get as detailed as you show in your image, where one needs to dimension stiles, rails, panel details, hardware location, you are simply going to have to do it with CAD. The images I speak of are simple ones to show general info.

I use Sketchup a lot and find it the easiest tool for making custom doors. They readily import into Chief and are stored in the library. The only reason to need them is if you are going for realism in renders, and if you are populating whole house with doors, where you will have door slab widths of say, 18" up to as much as 36", you will want to build models for each specific width. That is because Chief will stretch or shrink your model to fit your specified door opening. In the pic attached, you see an example of multiple door symbols being used. The closet pair uses narrow slabs, while the room door is wide. Being planked doors, with planking at about the same width, you can see the narrow doors having a lower count of planks across the panel area. But stile widths are correct. You will get this if you build and use a separate symbol for each door size. If you only use one symbol, expect Chief to expand and contract as size changes, and all components, stiles, rails, and paneling, will be scaled proportionally.

Go and examine it in your default settings. Base cabinet example. Out of the box, Chief has the opening behind the door set to one shelf, placed at center, meaning equal spaces above and below the shelf.

Then there are roll out trays, and trash pullouts, and spice pullouts, and all the other stuff hidden behind doors and drawers. If Chief is going to enhance the software to show simple shelves, they should go beyond that so that cabinet elevations can show all the other items. Are there NKBA standards for the way all this is shown? I don't know.

To do it in Chief I would try first to make a beaded DOOR symbol. In other words, take that plain flat-panel door and put the bead around it that you would get in the faceframe in real life. You can do the door with zero margin, and make your 2.5mm or 3mm margin as opening-no-material stuff in the door. The only problem with this method is that as the door gets scaled up or down, W or H or both, the bead size changes. Inset cabinetry with beaded faceframes is a big deal in millwork-happy places like Maine, some other parts of new England, the environs around Minneapolis, and maybe out it the Pacific Northwest. It is my favorite look in cabinetry.

I saw 4 Clicks open for the Chants at Red Rocks in '85.

Thanks, Joe!

We like to do a corner wallcab oversized in all three directions. We can get larger susan trays inside, and we can resolve trim of adjacent straight-run wall cabs into the sides of the corner. Such corner cabs have sides 2 to 2.5 inches deeper than the adjacent wallcabs that join to them. I can fake it by placing a 24 x 24 corner tight into the corner, then moving it 2.5 inches out each way. Chief makes it look OK in plan view, but when you select the cab in plan view, you can clearly see it is a 24 x 24, and not the 26.5 x 26.5 that you want to have there. And the schedule, of course, calls it out as 24 x 24. Chief won't let me specify a 26.5 x 26.5 wall corner cab with sides deeper than 12. What do I need to know to work this out?

Windows Live Movie Maker works just fine for adding your audio narrative to a walkthrough. And it is a clean and safe download, free. It may already be on your PC with Windows. I found I had to try out both mics I have, one part of a headset, and one in the laptop body, to see what worked better for me. Also, I found it best to write the script and do it carefully so it could be comfortably spoken so as to begin and end within the time of the video. Write it, speak it, time it, edit, try again, rehearse. Works just fine this way. I am doing a project a room at a time and am pointing out design and spec details as a room is walked through and panned. With WLMM you can link up easily, right in the control panel, to OneDrive, Vimeo, Facebook, YouTube, or Flickr so as to share the videos with anyone you want.

I think I'll try and see if I can do it with Windows Live Movie Maker. Will report back if I get it to work.

How might I add my voice-over to a video I did?

Well, the bug centers it, but at least it is sized right. It is a simple editing job to place it where it belongs, and edit lengths, so all looks perfect. Pic shown with edit that placed the sill to align with the wall framing line. One CAD detail drawn and saved, and you're done with it, if you want to leave the Chief 3D model as-is, with the not-quite-right placement. Some questions for you. Other than you, who does it bother that the section view, framing shown, has the mudsill misplaced? Are you producing only construction docs for your clients, or are you handing off the Chief files as well?

Of course! Thanks.

I've got a spot in this lamp and it shines right through the table as if it is not there. Table material has transparency = 0. Light data is Light = ON, Casts shadows = OFF. Attached is a screencap of the raytraced rendering.

Our problem is that Chief does not have a linear light. Only points and spots, plus of course the "general" types, neither of which will do. But since most "lineal" lighting used for coves like you show are in fact, strips of point lights closely spaced, you will get close if you try that. Use very low wattage for each point. Try making a light symbol, the light being a simple tube, maybe 1/8" diameter. Make its material clear glass, totally transparent. In the light symbol dbx, add a whole lot of point lights along its axis at 3 inch spacing. Set each to not cast shadow. Bury the light up in your cove feature. Show us your results.

You change your vertical overlap to something big, then you trick the door down by jacking up the "separation" at top of the wall cab. See the pic. Your situation may be close to this. Adjust the numbers accordingly to get what you want. I prefer this in wall cabinets and have them built with a 1-1/2" door overshoot at bottom, and a 1-1/4" tall light rail. This, with frameless cabinets. Cleaner look, and the undercabinet lighting is nicely housed behind.

Yes. A landing is just a converted p'line, and can be circular, star-shaped, anything. I don't stack them so much as place them adjacent each other in plan view. You'll have to select around the perimeter to delete (as required) railings on edges. I work a lot in Sketchup, in tandem with Chief. The pic attached is a study of a staircase which I would do in Chief by making the winders part a sequence of landings, height set appropriately, and then linking the straight runs with the Chief stair tool. Doing studies in SU lets me quickly get to the elevation data. I could probably do the workout in Chief, but I am used to SU.

I have not tried it yet, but looking at the shots, the roof texture could use some rescaling.

No need to strip it down. Put it in DropBox, give us the link. In fact, USE DropBox for storage.

And this, to demonstrate the control one has over the lines drawn over the watercolor.

Perry, that is indeed a problem, if you are unable to control line weight and line color when doing the line-drawing-over-watercolor. Here I have dialed line weight down to 5 and jacked the black color a little lighter by drawing up the lighter-darker slider adjacent the color block. And Michael, how about trying a camera view and not a vector view? Your funeral home view lacks perspective.

I've learned that photorealism can bite you when clients are looking closely at textures. That's why I prefer the NPR approach with watercolor and lines. Final view with shadows, then watercolor, then lines. As Dennis says, trees and shrubs help, too. Post processing a raytrace with something like FotoSketcher can deliver nice results.

Attempts at photorealism don't do it for me any more, and I have embraced the NPR approach. NPR = NotPhotoRealistic Watercolor with lines is a favorite, but you need to do the work to ensure your glass in windows and doors is opaque.

You can curve stair sections, and you can get the curved sections to extend out to a wall, but sometimes, to model a setup like you need to do, it is best to use landings for all the winder treads, and link them as required to straight tread runs. So the answer is no, there is no easy way, if by easy you mean just do something like draw a walk line and BOOM, the stairs build with the press of a command key.