para-CAD

I use both. I love how Chief lets me use my lone license on one machine at a time. PC or mac. X8 had issues for me back in 2015. I was collaborating with someone on a PC while I was on a mac. As we would send plan files back and forth they would often have the text files miss-located all over the plan. That didn't last too long. Fast forward to today, and I'm on X10. I can start something on a mac and then go upstairs to my son's gaming room and open it on his very expensive windows machine and everything works smoothly between both mac and Windows. For the first eight years of my computer life I was all Windows. Then in 2005 I made the switch. I like to use a computer to create content more than I want to have to learn how the internal systems of the computer work. That used to be fun. Now I just want to produce content, get paid, and be done. mac4life

Every party wall I ever framed was (2) separate walls. Some had fire-rated GWB in the 2" gap space plus sound batting 4x8 sheets. I have a sketch at the point in time in this video

Get CompressPDF app and it will shrink any PDF without noticeable quality loss https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/compress-pdf/id596412507?mt=12

Newish to Chief. AutoCAD self and formally taught. I have many details in a master DWG file and also as write blocks. I have been trying to import them into Chief with poor results. Then I thought, what if I create exact detail pages in autoCAD, print them to PDF at scale, then I could import them into CA layout and they would sit exactly on top of my layout and I could resize the "box" around the PDF to allow the title block from chief to show. Did that. Bogged down chief. Exported to PDF and the exported file took FOREVER...looked great but was 287 MB. Then (all my ideas seem to come as I'm falling asleep) I thought what about: exporting my autoCAD details to PDF displaying them at 100% taking screenshots of the details (jpg/png, whatever) dropping those screenshts into my layout Did that. Images import to fill the screen it appears. Here is what I did to fix that. A Chief Architect rookie method for importing my autoCad details as scaled images. (Framers Lead The Way!) Print to PDF all of the details that you want to import into Chief Architect (CA). Once you print to PDF open it in a PDF viewer at 100% or actual size. Actual size might be larger than your display. Drag the screen to each detail and take screen shots of them (label them accordingly) Open one of the images in an image processing app like Photoshop, or Gimp and go to image size menu to determine the pixel density of the image. On a MacBook Pro with retina display that should be 144 pixels per inch (PPI). With that information, locate your first image you want to import into CA and notice the width of that screenshot (in pixels), say its 1044 pixels. Navigate to the website called ninjaunits dot com https://www.ninjaunits.com/converters/pixels/pixels-inches/ (I searched Google for pixel to inch convertor) Check the box to the left of Activate Custom DPI. Photoshop showed that all my screenshots were 144 PPI/DPI as expected. Type 144 in the Custom DPI box. In the pixels box type in the image pixel width (the width of the first image) The website will generate Conversion to Inches in the box immediately to the right of the pixels box. For 1044 at 144PPI it displays 7.25 inches wide. Drag the image file into your Chief Architect layout. Open the file properties for the image and enter the width in the Size field. The dropped image file will resize to whatever scaled size you just printed to in PDF. **(I had originally imported the scaled PDF in its entirety and somehow it ballooned the CA-created PDF file to 287MB and bogged CA down pretty seriously so this is why I’ve tried the PNG individual file method - no idea if this actually works until I print to paper and put a scale to it.) Change image resolution from JPG 75% to 100% or to PNG. Check the box to Save image in plan. If someone has a better way please share. I tried importing the DWG file but it lost all the leaders and the hatching was all solid black The images show the process and the final screen shot of the detail in layout, printed to PDF from CA. I thought I'd post this since I couldn't find anything from Google except for a thread from 2011 on the old CA site. If this works I hope it helps. If this is bogus, then it's back to figuring out how to import things better (DWG) or redraw everything.....no fun there. Y'all take care.

Hey Jared, I'm up in Kingston. I'm new to CA. I really like it but I need to master exactly how to get it to do the things the way I used to frame. Looks like your post is a year old. Hope its been a good one for you. Mike

Great tip! Can you speak louder on the next videos?

Exactly the kind of technical knowledge I am looking for to become more proficient! Thank you for sharing!

Hey Mick Thanks for your help. This site has some really great people. I'm completely swamped and I am considering outsourcing some of the modeling work. I'll keep you in mind.

I guess I wasn't clear.....I suffer from that occasionally. The wall that is an interior-6 goes through both sides of the 12:12 roof. I need it to remain an inside wall inside the 12:12 part..........and then become a siding-6 exterior wall on the outside, but following the 12:12 roof angle (not a vertical change like in using the split wall tool) I guess this is not an automatic wall configuration? It would be nice if the software "understood" that a roof line just caused a wall to transition from an ext to int and cut the siding to match the roof pitch/ angle. I'll attach the plan, it's pretty jacked up. The client has made all kinds of changes and I think I might just start over from scratch. (I seriously need to get professionally trained) I seem to have walls or floors always blocking the stairwell .......but that's for another thread......maybe there should be a noob section........for the basic stuff that us beginners haven't mastered yet. Lot 1 Blk 4 revD.plan

Can someone direct me to the literature or video that explains how to configure a wall to have siding on the outside part but remain finished GWB on the inside part? Every time I use the painter the inside wall (in the actual model room) converts to siding. I'm hoping that there is an attic wall or something like that, that I can use along the slope of the roof to make one wall line out of two different wall types. Thank you gentlemen.

So thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I went through all dialog boxes and found that the Open Below space over the stairs had 11 7/8 inch I joists selected rather than 2 x 12 for the floor system. Now I'll now to check those defaults more closely before starting!!! Thanks again!

aha.......thanks for the time and expertise you all shared with me!!!!

And HI! back, cuz!!!

I thought I did......but I'm using 2 separate computers and keyboards......sooooooooo...looks like i selected it but didn't click the attach this file. 924SF - 2 BDRM revE.plan

Okay. I broke it. Being new to chief and being swamped with work it Is never a good combination. I have a client who wants to experiment with a very small spec home. Everything was working perfectly up until somewhere around revision C for D. Then I noticed that the ceiling above the stairwell appears to be about an inch higher than the rest of the second floor ceilings. I have no idea what I did or what setting I may have selected to cause this to happen. But now that it's present, whenever I try to auto roof things go wrong. Maybe someone here has seen this before and can steer me in the right direction. Thank you so much in advance. -- Mike from Kingston , WA

Thanks Mick!

Y'all are awesome! Thank you for taking time out of your life to help me out. As promised I found out what you had already knew...Adding a Step to an Edge was the success. You're right..........I'll let Chief do more auto steps as I learn it. Thanks all.

Nice Gawdzira! Thanks! I'll give that a shot.

Here is the file. Ontario St Duplex v2 all.plan

Great points so far. Thanks much!! I tried the break line tool, but I will need to re-try now. The roof is on the first floor garage wall and slices through the second floor house wall. I assume that I can use the first floor house wall as a reference line when cutting the roof plane? I will try to upload the file in a few...........I didn't know that was an option. Very cool.

Hi everyone, As I'm doing my due diligence to search for an answer from the user and reference manuals, I decided to also post this (probably overly basic) question here on the blog site. I have been using chief architect for about three weeks, and unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you would view it, I am being swamped with work. CA is great but my deadline-driven learning curve is brutal. Whenever I use the join roof planes tool in the scenario shown in the attached image file it causes the garage roof to extend into the house through the wall. I assume that there is some command that I can select that will cause the wall to be a stopping point where the correct roof planes would be generated. Any help with this is greatly appreciated and if I discover the answer in the literature I will return and post it here. On a sidenote, one of the frustrating things that I've noticed as I jump between AutoCAD and Chief Architect is that the spacebar acts like the escape key in CA which is okay until you're in AutoCAD and you press the spacebar and repeat the last command. Or try the ESC key in CA I really enjoy reading the insight provided here by the veteran users. Thank you.

Dennis - Thank you. I shall give it a shot and report back. David - I guess I wasn't clear enough. Sorry 'bout that. The space under the stairs is part of the first floor master closet.

Hi, I'm new to CA. I have a pretty solid grasp of AutoCAD from release 11 to 2016 and some time with SolidBuilder, SoftPlan and WalPlus. Chief seems to be the most robust and user friendly of anything I've used so far. So I have the cart way out in front of the horse and I'm scrambling to overcome the learning curve so I can complete a project and get it in for permit. I'm looking for help from the CA pro's on how to do something. I've attached a screen capture of the issue. (well that failed - here's a DropBox Link ) This house actually exists and has the space under the stairs as sloped closet space. How do I draw the wall so that it replaces the upper railing side of the stairs and only goes down to follow the bottom edge slope of the stair stringer so under the stairs remains open? I'm saving my $$$ to see about attending a training class this fall/winter so until then it's going to be asking for help here or watching all the videos I can find. Thanks in advance. Mike