Bill_Emery

Here are two stairs that don't actually join, but provide a continuous appearance.

See this thread: https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?/topic/4657-stair-rail-on-top-of-wall/ there are other methods of handling this situation. Attached is a plan for an unusual existing stair that uses a 1/4" landing to locate the wider stair in relation to the narrow stair contained by the wall. Stairs can be split by a landing, and have different characteristics for each section, allowing for creative solutions, the landings can be so small that they don't present problems with continuity. siskiyou blvd proposed.plan

Chief's tools with regard to Skylights, are fairly basic, and I can understand the frustration. But they do good job of representing the ugly, useless way that they are built in my region. That said, forget about using the Chief shaft, and use walls, and ceiling planes to define creative light shafts, and wells; instead of using a tract home tool. The screen shot shows a trussed roof with girders to form the well.

When you do a save as, you don't lose the time recorded previous to the save. this can become very confusing if your plan has multiple forked saves. And, unless you are disciplined, you don't have any record of the time you spent on research, beam calcs, meetings, phone calls, etc. I used to export these as CSV into Excel, and sort them; but it's not very easy, or straight forward. I now use Manic time to track my jobs; but it requires some discipline, as I must attribute my work to each job, or job phase. Manic Time now has an add on for AutoCAD that makes it very easy, but there is not an add on for Chief as yet.

I think this is what you're looking for. I used a truss base to isolate the dormer framing from the trusses, then took the dormer roof planes into another plan, framed them, and copied back to the working plan scully 2.zip

Check for wall connections, and check for walls with "no room definition" in the wall DBX.

I'm often surprised by what I don't know. I'm pretty good at what I do, but there are entire aspects of Chief that I know little about. I see people like Glenn, or Wendy as a model of proficiency to strive for general knowledge of Chief. But there are people out there with distinct specialties that simply amaze me: Gerry Teacher for his knowledge of Ruby and macros, Chiefer for his ray tracing abilities, to name just a few.

Looks like you've lost room definition. click in the affected area to see if you have a room, if not check you wall connections.

Hi Yusuf, You and I differ a little in our approach to the problem. I think both are good solutions. I do understand what your saying about creating a point of tangency for the two arcs. That said, using Chief's tools for roofs and walls we can only approximate an ellipse by combining arcs. I use a standard (but old) method of approximating an ellipse that produces a fairly smooth curve. The geometric construction gives me all the information I need to produce a roof in an easy predictable way, and all I need to do is to enter the information from the construction into the DBX. This has some advantages. You'll notice that my roof planes come quite close to the point of tangency that you describe without a lot of manipulation.

Here is the construction. The book shows it for isometric construction; but you can use any angle. We are bisecting the mid points of the lines. A good tip is to start with Chief's oval, as your initial starting point. It shows you the centers, and tangent points; although you can't snap to them. Chief could make ellipse construction very easy if we could snap to the oval. The ellipse tool does not show the focus points of the ellipse. 4 center ellipse08242015_0001.pdf

I think the point I want to make is that I can do this easily without guess work. The construction is only an approximation of an ellipse, but it works well here, because we can only approximate and ellipse with chief roofs and walls. This is a basic construction that I used to teach in first semester drafting when I was an instructor at City College in San Diego. I can copy it out of my old text book, and post it.

Hi Scot, Yes, these could be built manually, but it's easier to let Chief build it. Yes, you get a gambrel. The gambrel is based on the geometric construction of the ellipse. The construction gives me all of the information I need; the height of the roof change, the pitches, and the radius of each roof. I just plug this info into the DBX.

Here it is done as an "old school" geometric construction. the roofs are set to the angle of the construction, and then curved to the constructed radius. This is done with auto roofs, so it's real easy, precise, and predictable. eliptical roof.plan

I'm sorry, I'm generally using square or rectangular stock for my deck posts, and the cross box resizes nicely. Yes, you would have to modify the newels or columns you commonly use to have a cross box.

Perry,] you only need to make one railing post. It automatically stretches in the x,y and z axis, and the cad block stretches automatically in the x,y axis.

Hi Perry, you can already show a cross box for a deck post if you create your own deck post symbol, and create your own block for the 2D view

I've used a truss base at the area to be framed over so the conventional framing won't be deleted. I've taken the roof planes into a new plan, generated the framing, and then copied them to the working plan. Lefeber Addition 2.plan

In reading Joe's latest post, it struck me that in order to make corrections to a plan with differing floor heights we need to have stacked rooms so that floors and ceilings can move up and down freely. I will generally draw walls to create stacked rooms when I get the dreaded error message "Ceiling heights may not be changed..." It occurs to me that instead of giving us this cryptic message, it would be better if chief simply drew a wall (perhaps in red) to create the stacked condition. Corrections could then be made based on a coherent cross section view that shows what I've told Chief to do. (Remember, I'm supposed to be in charge of what's going on.) This would make problems obvious, and also correctable. One of the problems is that we have an obtuse error message that occurs on the floor below. This does not address the issue of allowing things to ge out of control. Larry's plan is a good example of this; The basic problem was a misalignment in the hall hidden by the stairs, with the wall in the crawl below; but all of the defaults were already out of control, and there were other wall alignment problems, that made it difficult (but not impossible) to correct without a rebuild of the basement. This really speaks to the need to work systematically. If my defaults change in the design process; I need to bring them up to date as soon as I know. We can't ignore the accuracy of the model, and expect to get good results. Chief is so easy for beginners, that it is easy to assume that everything will work without much thought for the Z axis. It would be good if Chief stressed the importance of the defaults, as we happily work without much thought in the X and Y axis.

Greg is correct in his analysis of the problem. The reason all of the rooms change is that Chief is forced to push the entire slab room below in order to get what it needs in the problem area at the stem wall and footing part of the foundation.

Scott, In this case I used "Floor supplied by the foundation room below" for the existing garage, and then Auto built the foundation. If Chief knows what I have above; it will do a good job or auto building what is below. Chief's programming got me close to what I wanted, and then I made a few changes. Chief actually put a footing and stemwall along the existing garage wall in question; but I changed it to a mono slab (turned down footing), thinking that was what Larry wanted to show. Anyway, I think Chief does a pretty good job of figuring out what we want, but we will probably have some editing with auto built foundations. I'm not sure exactly what you asked, and I'm not sure if I provided you with a relevant answer.

'Bill, don't you need a concrete stem wall between the garage slab and the raised wood floor foundation? " Usually yes, but I don't think that is what Larry was trying to show. You'll notice that I posed it as a question. He has an existing garage that he is converting to living space at -24" with its existing slab footing. I could have shown the slab with an adjacent stemwall and footing for the new addition, but again, I don't think that's what he wanted. I think he is using the existing garage wall as the bearing wall for the new addition. Perhaps Larry will let us know more precisely what he wants.

I don't think that there is anything incomprehensible or sinister about the floor defaults, or the structure tab. To me it's more about careful setup of the floor defaults, and an understanding of what happens in the structure tab. I want to set my default to get most of what I want, and then use the structure tab for those rooms that must differ. I notice that the structure tab will allow me to do anything (within reason) I want if I don't have a floor below; so it can be to my advantage to get my main floor correct before building the foundation, or floor below. Joe advocates for working from the top down, and I believe this is the correct approach. I think that most casual users don't take a structured systematic approach to setting up their defaults, figuring that they can just dive in, no matter what the defaults are, and that they'll be able to work it out in the end. The problem with this approach is that I end up with way too many variables, and I don't even know where to start to make the necessary corrections. In the end, it is much more time consuming to sort out these ill conceived variables than it is to get it right from the inception. I think we get the idea that Chief is very simple, and very forgiving as we draw along the X and Y axis. Things are way more complicated when we start to work in the Z axis. The defaults, and the structure tab appear deceptively simple, but the combined effect of careless setup, while trying to modify impossible situations computationally in the structure tab result in error messages, and the inability of the program to understand what we want it to do. Chief can't comply, and we become frustrated. The bottom line for me is careful setup of the defaults. It's false economy to just dive in and hope for the best.

Larry, Is this what you're looking for? I deleted your foundation, established new floor defaults, and rebuilt the foundation. I did have to modify several foundation walls. FLOOR HEIGHTS BE 1.plan

It has been reported that there are some issues for those running multiple screens on NVIDIA cards. This is a NVIDIA problem, not a Chief Architect problem.

Hi Michael, Based on the DBX it appears to be a deliberate feature. However, there appears to be no documentation.