SHCanada2

This is most of my business. What you do is create a basement from the main floor, and save that in your template plan. and turn off auto build foundation. You can ignore the main floor, might even be able to delete, I just never have, in case for instance I have to show the new laundry for the main floor if the basement is being suited

By having the basement in your template, you can go into the defaults, and go to floor 0 and set the default ceiling hieght. You can also put the furnace, elec panel, HWT, main stack, typical 5x8 bathroom fixtures all on the plan so you are just moving them around. my template plan also uses furred walls for the basement.so i do not have to change the wall type from the stock concrete.

And then you create a layout template with the template plan (basement level) linked.

Once you have it all setup, it only takes a few hours to create a basement plan. If you know exactly what you want and its a simple rectangle for the foundation, its under an hour. Where it typically takes some time is if you are truly finishing the entire basement and are needing every inch. then the dimensioning to furnace needs to be accurate to any adjoining walls and where humidifiers attached to furnaces will impact where the wall can go, same with anything that has pipes or flues like air exchangers. Bulkheads also take some time as rarely are pipes all run in a nice straight pattern, except perhaps the main duct.

The other PIA is the stairs. CA does not have an easy way to have stairs fit within a set of walls. I find it easier sometimes to just draw the first set of stairs up, then draw a polyline rectangle for a landing and any winders as lines, and then stairs up the other direction. As long as the first set of stairs is accurate the render will be accurate as you cannot see the floor of the landing anyway...unless of course you have only a few stairs bfeore a landing, and then you have to do a landing or try the L shaped stairs tool

basement walls are usually furred and/or thicker, stairs next to outside basement walls generally will not copy in the correct place on higher floors without adjusting to wider stairs or different positions. I find the landings then start to do weird things when you try and adjust. point to point move is the best option I have found, once they are copied onto the next floor

thank you both. The cabinets on the other side had the backsplash on

11 hours ago, DBCooper said:

Now what I really wish we had was the ability to manually turn on/off the backsplash and/or the edge molding on any counter edge instead.

or at least put the backsplash setting on the custom countertop as a whole, which would be overidable on the cabinet beneath it

I will try that tommorow.

But, is that the proper behaviour? if you look at the cabinet  beside the sink, there is no backsplash there on the wall with the window, so why would there not be a backspace there but backspace on a wall with no cabinet? I did actually have a cabinet there which was set to have no backsplash and it still put in a backsplash.

I did get rid of it by drawing a custom backspash on the wall, which ironically did not actually put on a backspash, but it did get rid of the teal tile one that was there

I have seen this before where if I had a cabinet on a wall with a backsplash, and then I disable the backsplash, the backsplash does not go away.

But I do not remember how to fix it.  anyone know? other than putting in a custom backsplash

I'll do a walkthrough on an addition if it is complicated otherwise I just send PBR camera shots as they update automatically on subsequent plan revisions...sometime I have to move them around but its not that much work

4 hours ago, Chrisb222 said:

unless doing so helps increase sales which helps the company stay in business

sexy sells. That is why some customers go with me. I spend maybe 10 min on their PBRs but they love it. But maybe the competition is coming for me, and I need to spend another 10 min on AI.

My biggest beef with any of this is repeatability. With CA PBR, I can go change the cabinets, walls etc, and simply print the layout again and everything is updated. With AI, I have to export the image, goto the AI Engine, tell it the commands, then get the image and put back into the layout and print. Sure I can do it, but I might want to poke my eyes out when I have to do it 50 times a month. I would be happy if CA made the process simpler, but I dont think given the speed and quantity of AI engines, I would want CA to pick a  specific one.

So what would I want...maybe that CA is configurable to autsaves camera views to images in a certain directory, and when I am done with the AI render, CA has a button to pull the latest file for each of those directories into my layout. ...or something like softplan has to manage the process...

I use the working layer set as more of a "most layers on" or fiddling around. Otherwise you run into the dimensions and text shown on all layout problem. I'd like to know how one could use the working plan view for both a site plan and a floor plan. My guess is people who use working plan view only use it for floor plans and then for a site plan they have their layout set to use a layerset instead of an spv

the sales/marketing people I deal with want blue sky and sun. basketballmans has too much exposure where the sun washes out (and why the odd shadow into the street?), but rene, they would think yours is too grey.

3 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

But I'm in Alberta which has the most sun in all of Canada, so maybe they are biased. grey sky here =depressing

Sooo in pondering this some more I'm guessing softplan tested out some ai engine and through trial and error found a command sequence that does not alter the architecture. I'm guessing they are working on some more wrappers. For instance the next improvement they may give is an option to make it brighter but behind the scenes it will execute certain commands they will have tested because, to basketballmans point you also have to tell it what not to do.  If they gave people direct access to the ai engine they would be flooded with calls that it altered the building. Or maybe they are trying to find tune ai to do that testing for them

3 hours ago, dskogg said:

I tried Gemini 3, uploading a pbr plain render of a house with no landscaping, 

are those the real houses beside it...as in you gave it an address?

have drawers gone out of fashion

5 hours ago, hyldahldesign said:

So many workarounds. Seems like it should just be something built into chief. I may be back with some questions.

I suppose you could ask them to put in a room area schedule which is a paired down version of the room finish schedule without the rooms names and totalized by floor. But really, I think they might just be wiser to put a video out on it like I did. It took 41 seconds to do.

As for "which" rooms go into a schedule, jurisdictions have different rules, so I doubt there would ever be a hardcoded method which only chose certain room types. I suppose they could make a specific to form to let you pick by room type. But really you can already do that in the schedule and just have it in your template

hmm, I'm not sure I would call that "built in". It looks like it snapshots the current screen to an image file, uploads it to the cloud, AI runs on it, then it shows it back to you, where you can then download it. And it doesn't look like you can alter the AI image.

Is this any different than capturing an image in CA, uploading it to an AI engine, getting it back and then putting it on your layout. seems like the same thing, no?

At least with an independent AI engine I can tell it to make it brighter, or change colours or pick the one I want.

If it was truly "built in", I could run it on my camera, see different options, pick one, then tell it to make it brighter, change colours, and that is all saved in my model.

This perhaps is softplan's step one before doing a truly built in and fully functional AI assistant for images.

the current plan view looks like:

 If you make them longer in plan view, they show as longer:

If you make them longer in truss detail, it does not look to make them longer in plan view. what are you looking to see in plan view?

how would the truss look any different in plan view from before and after you modified it?

I'm not understanding something...

8 hours ago, REOWENJR said:

insert it into the framing plan

plan view or elevation view?

..and probably need to look at the terrain videos

18 hours ago, para-CAD said:

So back in 1989 through 1995 I exclusively framed houses within 150 miles of Houston Texas. Every single set of plans had a small text box on the very first page, cover sheet that had heated space first floor heated space second floor those two numbers added together and then all the unheated space listed as garage, covered porch and the like.

here it is even simpler for the past 25 years. main floor, second floor, foundation optional

if there is a reno in the basement, then "finished area" which is usually total less utility room. So i have for my template 2 different ones to pick from plus parcel coverage if needed

but that is not the only way. you could change the room type for any room you do not want to include, and not use that as the actual room name, and then exclude it from the schedule, or in the room specification ->include in schedule you could set the rooms you dont want to include to a different category, and then not include in the schedule. for instance go into the room and change the include in schedule from rooms to 3D solid. The schedule I just created will then exclude that room, or just exclude from the schedule altogether. or create a new category called "unconditioned" and create a new schedule with only rooms that have that category. Lots of different options

The only other thing you need to do if you want multiple totals is create individual schedules and then stack them on top of each other

here is a simple example:

...but the trick is what to do when you want to exclude certain rooms. If you have two rooms of the same type of room, but you only want to exclude one, that is where it gets tricky. CA has a field on each room as to whether or not it is include or excluded in the living area. You can use this flag in a macro and set this property in a custom field in the object information panel, and then use this in the schedule, but there is some work to it. my macro has:

stdArea=standard_area

include=include_in_living_area

if (include == true)

      stdArea.to_f

else

         0

end

this effectively creates a new field to be used in the schedule instead of the std area i show in the video

@Doug_N Did you try polycam?

5 hours ago, Doug_N said:

The iMapper is a lidar system that is accurate to 2mm over 30m.  I will let you all know how this works out my asbuilt work.

did you book a free demo?

I looked on their website and there are images of the 2d point cloud, but they all look wavy. I would expect if there was 2mm accuracy, the walls would be straighter.. It will be interesting to see how you make out. $99US per month is a bit pricey. I prefer per scan pricing. It would be also interesting to see how good their room "Stitching is". This is where I can always tell the accuracy of these things. If all the walls are a bunch of different thicknesses, then it is probably not correct.

bit of a weird website. if you click user guides, there looks to be a bunch of bitmaps under "Academy" I could not find an actual user guide

you could check the CA log file. I think you can see where it is located under preferences.

It almost sounds like you are being starved for resources if it works for awhile. Other far out possibilities:virus scanning constantly running against the CA data directory where CA is constantly writing files, but that is a way out there guess.

You could also disable the Nvidea card to see if that is related

but better question is when did it start to do this and what happened just before that

I also evaluated iguide as they can generale elevations and could generate door and window sizes (with a grain of salt).  They had a pretty good price package and the camera price was reasonable(~2k) when on sale. 

The only issue is in order to get an elevation one needs to be perpendicular to the building face. Here, where the houses are 4ft to the PL or less most of the time, it would not work for side elevations. If I have to build the CA model to get side elevations, I might as well build it to get front and rear elevations.

But it was very tempting.