kMoquin

All these years and I never knew we could curve stairs with the flare tool. (Nor did I need to, but it's great to know how simple it is.)

Great Solution Jonathan

A molding polyline would be a similar operation. Create the step profile as the molding.

What you are seeing is z-fighting. (read this) This is what works for me(from the article): You can also increase the Clip Surfaces Within setting in your Perspective Full Overview Camera Specification dialog. The default will be 24", but you can increase this to a larger value, such as 300". You may need to test different values in this plan in order to create the results you want in the overview without experiencing Z-Fighting. You can specify this in your camera defaults as well, however remember to reset the "Clip Surfaces "Within" back to the 24" default when the overview camera is not in use. This is because all cameras created in your plan will be affected, not just overviews, and this can create undesirable results when trying to take an interior camera view.

What is a bird box?

Good tip Larry - thanks. I've struggled with PDF files slowing things down as well.

Extra coaster Gift for someone who likes shiny things Install the software without internet access

This is how I do it.

You can set up text to be placed on whatever layer you want by editing the text default. (I'll be keeping mine on the text layers so I can turn it off to get it out of the way when I need to edit cad objects.)

Don't use Adjust Materials. Click the spray can (Materials Painter) Select the material you want from the list and hit the copy button.

Joe, I threw in the towel on line weights in elevation when I decided to go with "live everything." Sometimes I will use Edit Layout Lines to erase the hatch or change the line weights on part of the building farther away from the viewpoint. Even with repeating the editing of layout lines after an update, live elevations are still a time saver over cad elevations. Recently I've experimented with putting a shaded image behind elevations for depth. I bump up the brightness and contrast to control he amount of detail.

You can go into your Default Settings > Dimension > Dimensions and select an Active Dimension Default with a scale more appropriate to the scale you are working in.

No crashes at all for me.

Here's my CAD resume (in the order I used them): 1991 AutoCAD (V3? in college) Arris Architrion 1996 Mini-CAD Form-Z 1997 (first job) PowerCAD AutoCAD 1999 DataCAD 2003 Vectorworks (Vexerwerks) 2004 Archicad Sketchup 2007 Chief Architect still use sketchup to make objects for Chief and make quick design studies I feel like I use/understand a majority of Chief

Funny, I find creating a carefully measured as-build essential to starting the design process.

Abandon what you know about other cad applications and embark on chief tutorials using the methods presented. Meaning try to learn the software in it's native language. Don't try to force something to operate the way it did in your old software. Use it at first with all the out of the box settings and understand how things work before you customize things.

really enjoying 10 as well pretty painless upgrade

Chief is a parametric software for residential design and documentation. Sketchup is a 3D modeler that can be coerced to produce documents.

Hire an architect? Go to IKEA? It's not clear what you are asking.

Not sure what you're missing, but 1 1/2 is a common scale for these details. (3 is not uncommon for intricate trim details) Especially for high end projects. Heck, I've eve done full scale trim details in the past. I easily get 10+ details at 1 1/2 to fit on a sheet.

I use CAD for details only and the occasional line in plan or section if it is truly easier to white out and draw over instead of modelling correctly. The design process is back and forth from trace to Chief and back again.

as long as they serve burgers Yes, you can draw just about anything with Chief.

You may need to insert the picture as an "Image" object. (Build > Image) This will allow you to scale and position it more accurately. That is how I created the streetscape in the attached.

I get that warning pretty regularly. (Ie - a few times a day) I work from a Dropbox folder. I assume it's a syncing issue.