robdyck

For a garage (for example) on a bi-level home, you may want to at least experiment with dragging the room heights, for both the main floor and the foundation.

@stevenyhof You mentioned things Chief can or can't...Here's an example of can't (at least not easily). In the example below, a full height basement foundation wall transitions to a stepped foundation pony wall. Chief will not connect the footings if the footing step is at the same location as the wall type transition. If I manually drag the footing down, Chief creates a 12" vertical footing. There's ways around this but they are relatively time consuming.

Don't forget that you can manually drag a room's height in section view. Sometimes that can be much quicker than trying to remember all the different elevations. Click on the wall, then hit tab to get the room. Or click on the baseboard if you have the moldings layer on. You can drag to snap points, like cross section lines from other walls, footing, floors, ceilings, or a cad line or marker placed as a snapping reference.

At times, I even need to manually adjust the footing bottom. When a typical full height foundation wall meets a foundation pony wall at a step down location, for instance. Sorry @stevenyhof, not trying to hijack your topic!

There's a few things up north that lead to this: frost coverage, sloping lots, building codes.

More a case of necessary. Stepped walkout foundations on almost every plan...

It can. Either you'll figure it out or you won't. BTW, What's wrong with manually dragging wall heights if it's quicker? I do it all the time. I'm doing it right now, actually.

That's funny...and sad!

wasn't me. I could never intentionally misspell a word.

typo

Its my experience that the windows will group as long as no dissimilar properties are present in the schedule.

Open the doors.

This is what I do. Usually a short wall in the mechanical room.

No auto way to do that. Make a CAD block for that and add it to your library. If its exactly the right size, you can drop it and snap to the center of the opening. If you make it a bit large and don't want to resize it, you can place it behind the walls using the drawing order tools, but then you'll need to explode the block after placing it from your library. Its a silly PITA to have different blocks for all the different possible door sizes and this plan display needs to be addressed by Chief.

For sure. I'm surprised that anyone would actually ask the foundation crew to form an inset like that, but we all know that regional and builder idiosyncrasies are resistant to change of any kind.

In my region, the framing at that corner would follow the exterior of the foundation. And yes, that would leave a small offset inside the room which I assume is a garage.

You're making it much too complicated. Just select your brick ledge wall and make it a 'through wall' at that corner.

No prob. Another plus...shadows! Can you post a pic of your end result?

I'd suggest keeping it live using an orthographic floor overview. Set your camera's tilt angle to -90 and camera angle to 90. Use an appropriate layer set and you won't need to mess around coloring things that already have color. You can place this view 'under' your actual layout for improved line weight control. Otherwise, you'll need to to color everything yourself using fills, which you can easily setup a library of reusable fills for site work. The example below is a live view under my site plan layer set.

Great positive message to wrap up the week, Larry! To everyone who contributes: it is appreciated!

You need to open the cabinet that contains the sink and use its OIP. You need to open the components tab of the cabinet dbx and edit the item there. Here's an example: I didn't want the full model name of the sink in my schedule. The highlighted field is where I simplified it's name. I'm using the description tab of the OIP in my schedule so I can adjust the names of the items in that field.

And sometimes there is no control, like with this wall cap. The sunlight is way down and its still lighting the wall cap incorrectly. It's the same material as the c-top and the backsplash. WRONG: Here I replaced the wall cap with a manual molding, the same molding that was used for the wall cap, and the same material.

One minor advantage is the appearance of woodgrain direction will be correct using the truss polyline. One major disadvantage is the edits to a truss polyline are not as stable as a solid. Click on the the edited truss and it might rebuild, even if its locked. Personally, I'd stick with the solid, and if I needed it in a schedule, I'd convert it to a fixture and then adjust those properties.

A spiral staircase would be an option. It will produce a smoother extrusion for the handrail than a similar 3d molding. You can then delete all the surfaces from the spiral stair to make it a fixture (good for vector view) or just make all other materials Opening (no material) which will show up fine in standard or pbr views.

I've experienced this issue several times lately in different files. Objects, like fixtures, won't rebuild in their correct location on the z-axis. Chief knows where they are, but doesn't move model them correctly until the dbx has been opened and closed. Anyone else seen this behavior? weird stuff.mp4