WhistlerBuilder

Hi Chiefers,

I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to make the railings on decks attach to the fascia instead of have posts sitting on the decking.

I live and work in mountain country / temperate rain forest and we have major issues with water up here. The standard chief design with the posts sitting on the deck surface wont work for some of the sealed decks I do, and I have also run into an issue where the edge of a deck terminates in a tight door to window junction. This means that for my deck location to be accurate in the plans it would be really helpful if I could have a fascia mounted railing to plan where that railing meets the exterior wall in order to avoid an adjacent window.

I have attached two images showing the two configurations I am talking about.

Any help would be appreciated!

Cheers,

I am using two breaks where maybe 1 will do. But I found it was not giving a sharp enough transition to represent how the terrain would change elevation in a rip-rap rock stack terrain wall. Chief has no option for this, or none that I know of. The closest thing is terrain retaining wall, and I find those are horrible to work with and always get messed up unless its attached to a foundation wall. Retaining walls also do not have an option to show them as a rock stack wall.

I guess I will try more configurations of the terrain breaks to see what works.

Hi all,

I am having a problem with Chief giving me the error where the terrain elevations are generated ignoring the terrain breaks and retaining walls. It gives the error "The terrain interpolator is ignoring terrain breaks and retaining walls due to complexity of the calculation."

I am running into this problem often when I am trying to do complex landscape or site elevation plans. The plan I attached that is throwing the problem is a rather large building with some accurate site grading requirements.

I could be missing something simple and just not know it. Anyone who has lots of experience doing accurate landscaping your input would be very welcome.

The building is removed because the whole plan vastly exceeds the size limit for the forums. The terrain only version is still throwing the error so I think the error is in my Terrain break configuration. Something I am doing is triggering the errors and I would love to know what it is so I can change my design and avoid this in the future.

Thank you in advance,

Cheers!

Landscape_Error.plan

Old Plans done in Vectorworks.

Hello helpful forum people,

I am looking to produce a plan set for marketing purposes. The realtors selling one of my current projects are asking for the plans to show the flooring materials in each room. I am unsure how to do this in Chief. Can chief even do this? I have done it with other software, but can't seem to figure out the chief method. I really do not want to manually do this in Photoshop.

Any hints or tips welcome.

Cheers,

Well its not snapping at all. This is pretty stupid.

How then do you move it from the middle of the building back to the siding face it was originally drawn on? I found out it was moving it into the building by drawing a different material region that extended outside the building perimeter so that the material region would show up in a 3D view. For some reason the software keeps moving the material region into the center of the building. It is doing this on multiple drawings/plans.

When I add a material region to front and rear elevations they show up in the location I draw them on. When I draw a material region on a side elevation, after converting the shape to "Material Region" it moves the block from the face of the drawing to the middle of the building for some reason. Since I am trying to apply a material region to the siding and not the middle of the building this is a big problem. Not only does the material region shape dissapear, but I can no longer select it as its been moved into the building. This is incredibly frustrating!

Any tips on how to fix this?

Selecting the Terrain Perimeter instead of the terrain area and unchecking flatten pad fixes many of the problems!

Thank you so much Johnny!!!!

I feel like you guys are using a different version of chief than me. I use elevation regions and I did what Dermot said as well and I got completely different results!

I fixed the front mostly using terrain breaks. But now look at what Chief did to the sides and back. Massive random pits and hills. It does this kind of nonsense to me all the time and makes accurate grading plans impossible with this software.

13 minutes ago, Dermot said:

You might have better luck if you turn off Flatten Pad.  Basically you are giving the program conflicting data so it is having problems generating a reasonable model.

That does nothing for me. All the errors are still there. In fact it made a lot of them worse. What else did you do?

I am having a problem in multiple drawings with chief completely ignoring the "Flat Interior" command for Terrain Area's. The software always draws elevation lines within the area that is supposed to be flat. It as if this command does absolutely nothing. This is incredibly frustrating when trying to do accurate site plans.

So far the only work around I have found, which does not work all that well, is to load the area with tons of point elevations. These seem to be the only thing that effects the elevation calculations in chief. The elevation line or spline function generates the incorrect elevations within areas and spawns even more errors by creating random dips or bumps all over the place.

Does anyone have any solutions for this? I have attached a current duplex plan I am working on. I am trying to keep the front area flat, with the terrain rising along the sides of the building and continuing to rise up behind the building. As you can see chief has generated these ridiculous slopes on the front of the building in a "terrain area" that has the "flat interior" assigned. On one side I loaded it with a number of points to adjust some errors, but it still generates problems. On the other side you can see chief has generated errors and there is no solution applied. Suggestions welcome!

 

Cedars_Phase_2_v4.plan

1 minute ago, Chopsaw said:

Just be careful when printing because there are unresolved issues with transparencies depending on the printing process that do not show on the electronic PDF file.  I recently had a very expensive colour print job ruined by this problem.

Thank you for the heads up. I will test ahead of time in office with 11x17's.

Cheers,

There was a polyline that roughly matched the problem area. I removed and re-drew it as a set of lines. Even turning it off did not fix the problem.

I did however just fix the problem by deleting adobe as my default pdf program and used the "Chief Save as PDF" option instead. This fixed the issue with the offending layer turned on or off.

Thanks for the help guys! Quick fix for a silly little issue. Apparently adobe is not the best option for exporting to pdf!

I am getting a weird square of white coloration and pixel blur right in the middle of my site plan. None of the other pages in my plan set have this issue. I have spent hours trying to figure out what the issue is with no success. I have updated my adobe. I have selectively turned off and on almost every layer in the plans, especially ones that correspond to either the edges or the area of the problem.

If you zoom in on the pdf to the bottom right corner you can see the problem area bisect a tree where on the right side the tree is clear and on the left side it is blurry and has a white overlay.

I would attach the plan file, but it exceeds the 25 mb upload limit.

Any suggestions on how I might be able to fix this? The plan is part of a presentation Friday and I really do not want this blurry area in the presentation.

Cheers,

Oso 2017-Site Plan Jan 17th 2017-6.pdf

1 minute ago, DRAWZILLA said:

your GTX 580 is old, and you will notice a difference if you get the 1080 GTX.

 Exactly what I wanted to show my boss so I can get an upgrade on my home pc =D

Office PC Specs:

Operating System
    Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
CPU
    Intel Core i7 3770 @ 3.40GHz    36 °C
    Ivy Bridge 22nm Technology
RAM
    32.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 668MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
    ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P8Z77-V PRO/THUNDERBOLT (LGA1155)    33 °C
Graphics
    S32F351 (1920x1080@60Hz)
    27MP35 (1920x1080@60Hz)
    NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (Gigabyte)    42 °C

Storage
    465GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500G (SSD)    26 °C
    279GB Western Digital WDC WD3000HLFS-01G6U1 (SATA)    21 °C
    232GB Western Digital WDC WD2500AAJS-22VTA0 (SATA)    23 °C
    232GB Western Digital WDC WD2500AAJS-08B4A0 (SATA)    22 °C
    298GB Seagate ST3320620AS ATA Device (SATA)    26 °C
  

HumbleChief - Current specs on my home pc. Office pc is not as good, but has a gtx 1070 in it. I notice it is slower, so I think it is a processor issue not a graphics card issue.

There have been lots of helpful tips for working with larger files. Thank you for all your comments. This discussion has already born fruit for me. Just for reference I am going to post my pc specs.

Operating System
            Windows 10 Home 64-bit
        CPU
            Intel Core i7 6700 @ 3.40GHz    42 °C
            Skylake 14nm Technology
        RAM
            32.0GB Dual-Channel Unknown @ 1071MHz (15-15-15-35)
        Motherboard
            ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. Z170 PRO GAMING (LGA1151)    46 °C
        Graphics
            S27B350 (1920x1080@60Hz)
            S22D300 (1920x1080@60Hz)
            3071MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 (EVGA)    56 °C
        Storage
            223GB INTEL SSDSC2BP240G4 (SSD)    27 °C
            232GB Samsung SSD 840 Series (SSD)    30 °C
            931GB Seagate Expansion SCSI Disk Device (USB (SATA))    40 °C
            2794GB Seagate Expansion Desk SCSI Disk Device (USB (SATA))    47 °C

Hello all,

I have asked about hardware specs before, specifically about graphics cards and got some good answers here. I was wondering what I could do to speed up the general working speed of chief for designing larger buildings. I know from previous conversations that chief is really not designed for apartment complex style design. Unfortunately it is the software I have access to currently and have spent a long time getting trained up in. I do not want to move into another platform just yet as I am still doing single family and duplex designs fairly often, but our company has shifted focus to building mid sized apartment complexes of 50-100 units. I am running into the issue of chief taking a long time to implement changes, move lines, and snap calculations. The software seems to pause a lot before "building" the different layers with every small change. Is this a ram issue? Processor speed? number of processor cores? Graphics card?

My home PC seems to run faster with better quality and more ram, along with a better quality processor. My office PC has a better graphics card though, so I am thinking this a processor issue?

I read a posting about a multi core system build on the forum a while ago. The build used two Xeon 8 core processors on a single board. I was thinking a build like this might be the answer?

Suggestions and comments welcome. Thank you all for your help in advance.

Cheers,

Thanks for the definitive answer.

Cheers,

Their Hardware recommendations link for video cards specifically references OpenGL. Which is what the Quadro / Firepro cards are designed for. I will submit a request to tech support for clarification and see what they say.

Thanks for the help so far, but it seems like other people are just as much guessing at this as me.

Hello Everyone,

I had a post recently where I asked for help with hardware suggestions for speeding up Chief's performance with large files. Specifically multi family buildings with 40+ units.

There was a bunch of answers but mostly the consensus was that Chief was not designed for this type of work.

One area I have recently discovered as a possible solution to this problem is switching from a standard graphics card to a "workstation card"

Workstation cards are purpose built cards for 3D rendering and work on Open GL based software instead of a gaming cards direct X software. Nvidia has the Quadro Series and AMD has the Firepro series.

For 3D rendering programs such as 3D Studio Max and Maya there is a substantial difference in performance from gaming cards. I was also told that other Cad software is dramatically improved as well. What I am curious about is if anyone here has done the switch over to a workstation card and experienced an improvement in Chief's performance.

Thanks again for all your previous replies to the last post.

Cheers,

Thank you for the insights everyone. In agree that it seems chief is not the software to use for such a building. This is unfortunate as I am finally getting trained up and efficient in it. The symbol suggestion was something I was considering, but the main reason I drew this up in chief was to try and make use of the material estimating feature.

I will see what I can do in regards to updating OS and graphics card, but I don't expect that much of an improvement.