GeneDavis

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".

Here's how it looks on the plan now.

My dilemma is this. I had to put an octagonal "silo" feature on a barn per the client's request, and I used CAD to guide me, drawing an octagon with 4'0" sides. Now I have the whole thing built, framing included, and it is time to dimension for layout. I go auto dimension and the plan is full of dimensions to the 1/16". Having built houses and never having seen plans done to the sixteenth, I wonder what to do. Is this just the nature of bay and polygons in plans drawing? Do the builders complain, or just work it out?

Thanks, Perry. I'm on it.

OK, so I am failing with Chief, and failing with Dropbox operations. The file is in Dropbox for sure, but as for creating a good link so someone interested can open the file in Chief 8, I am striking out. So I did an attempt at zipping it and tagged it to the original post.

I'm so lazy I am ashamed of myself. I've a simple layout, paper size, titling, notes, details, everything I like. From the last version of Chief. My plan file is in a folder in Dropbox. What do I do with this layout to follow SAVE AS and have the plan file linked to the layout. Thanks.

It's a Colorado job, nothing shaking.

First, here's the plan. https://www.dropbox.com/s/k4l6o6ehpze2ymn/RV%20barn%20with%20silo.plan?dl=0 The project is an RV barn the client wants doodled with a turret feature at its northwest corner. It is an uninsulated building, unfinished inside, no drywall, you'll see all the framing when inside. I did the two walls that come into the turret as invisible, specified them as roof cuts wall, tried to hike up the bottoms by specifying the ceiling height of the turret room as 10 feet, but things are going wild with this no matter what I try. I trimmed up the roofs of the turret in plan view to try and get the cutting all done right, but things are still a mess. When built, the two half-walls will be bare inside as are all others. You'll see the studs. Outside, they will be sheathed, and above the roofs, will have the exterior finish of wrap and clap. The framing did not go right with Chief for the turret so I did it in SU and imported it into Chief, so I can represent it OK in the drawings. Any and all help is certainly appreciated. I am really rusty with Chief, having retired from the drawing scene, but a guy I did some RV barns for last year keeps booking new work. RV barn with silo.zip

See if this works. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ispqwcbe4gz580p/RV%20barn%20with%20silo.plan?dl=0

That, Joe, did not work. I placed a point at the center of the turret in plan view. Selected one of the two properly-oriented studs at the top right corner (I tried to select both but could not.) Tried xform repl rotation two ways: absolute angle and relative angle. Whatever it is doing in rotating the stud, it is not about a z-direction axis defined by the current point that I placed.

I'd like to be able to get some wall framing close to what will happen when building. An unheated and uninsulated RV barn has an octagonal turret feature for its man-door entry, and Chief made a mess of the wall framing when I did autoframe. See the attached pic. Studs, when selected in plan view, can be rotated, but there is no way to "make parallel" to anything, since the command is not there. I want to pair studs at the wall junctions as the autoframing did at one of the corners, but am having trouble rotating studs to do so. I select the stud, grab the rotation handle, start the move, hit TAB, and enter a rotation angle, but I am not getting it rotated right. All I want to do is take a stud that in plan view is "upright" with its 5.5" vertical, rotated counterclockwise 22.5 degrees. How do I do that?

Only way to show it is the Sketchup model I uploaded to the 3D Warehouse. See the image. You'll be able to ID it and download it into Sketchup. The model shows half, and the other half is almost a mirror of what is shown. The headers join with large screws over a post that is below, and the model shows the half of the header set that actually bears on the column. I've no idea how this can be accomplished in a locale with earthquake codes like exist in CA. I did in NY, the part of NY that has its own earthquake code. As-built, these wall corners all had truss-framed hipped roofs all bearing atop. Spacing was 2/0 and there were very small loads from roof over the window bays. The large beefy headers were there due to porch roof beams framing into them from outside, the beams coming into Simpson concealed-flange hangers.

Two images attached. 2x6 walls, casement windows, default set to "ignore casing . . . " First image shows windows tight but without making the special move to go tighter. 6" is the offset. The 6 is the 5.5 framing plus the 1/2" R.O. margin. Second image shows what you get when doing what I call the jam move. The corner "post" offset is given by the program as 2-9/16" What I want is 4" (4x4 corner post actually 3.5" square, plus the 1/2") and there is no way to get it. Try it yourself and see. For Andy, yes I know one can edit-frame a 4x4 there. What I want is for Chief to build it and show it both in the 2D plan for layout, and in 3D for rendering. I have framed this condition myself. The windows adjacent the corner are bought with 4-9/16" frames and 2" extensions are field-applied at three sides, their head and sill legs mitering into each other at the corner. The corner inside casing is a 3/4 x 3/4 strip. The framing headers have an interesting joinery arrangement with the 4x4 post. If you are interested, I will show it here.

I've said this here before, and now with a new release, I'll say it again. A 4x4 post can be used in an outside wall corner, to get two adjacent windows tighter together. It's a nice detail if framing with 2x6. Chief can't do it, still.

What you want is a roof plane for which its baseline is in neither the X or Y direction, but rotated. Use geometry or 3D CAD to solve for the baseline direction and slope, then draw and edit edges as needed in plan. Then move as needed in Z.

Sounds like a call-in on NPR's Car Talk, where the brothers are trying to draw out enough information to solve the problem, and when they are getting a little tiny bit of a view of the issue, the owner says, "oh, I forgot to tell you it's a diesel."