robdyck

glennw: I like that ramp idea. never though of that before; I'll give it a try! Russ: My typical approach is to make sure that the framing, stairs, landings are finalized. Then, in a section view, I draw a CAD line along the nosings, and replicate it vertically for each rail and convert those line into 3D molding polylines to get exact appearances correct. I'll place one spindle and replicate it on the correct coordinates after I've calculated the spacing. The key is to keep adding every custom made molding to your library so it's easily available for any plan. Is that in any way similar to what you'd do? Or anyone esle, for that matter?

None of Chief's stair settings allow me to automatically display stairs and railing in the manner that we build locally. Any railings that I need to display in 3D are built manually so that I know the same model can be used to produce a dimensioned detail. It's no help to you CEC123, but that method has saved me many headaches, as well as giving me better layer control. I can assign different elements to different layers for different purposes. One difficulty I find is no control of stringer thickness (that I'm aware of). Also, in my region, the railing assembly would be built on top of a sloped wall that would be framed to match a closed stair stringer. Chief doesn't do that.

Does anyone experience the beauty of random, occasional wall connections displaying a mitered joint in plan view? I use a solid grey fill for the main layer of walls, and the mitered joint displays a main layer line weight. The wall then needs to be dragged back a bit and allowed to snap back into connection with the joining wall to get back to a 'clean' connection.

Simple problem: when specifying a fill style such as "angle hatch" for a framing member and selecting "transparent fill", it simply won't become transparent. For example: where a deck is framed, I'd like to specify a transparent fill for beams (so that the posts show through) and place them on their own layer so they display in my final plans without displaying the joists. Currently I draw the beams and posts using p-solids. I thought it might be easier to just change the layer of the auto-framed beams as opposed to drawing my own. Certainly not a big deal, I'm just curious why it doesn't work. Thoughts?

I'll certainly adjust my settings now. I did indeed do a couple of tests at different resolutions, and @ 96 dpi the only part of my printed layout file that was unsatisfactory was the portion that was an imported pdf. That portion was quite pixely and wouldn't be legible when printed to paper. Perhaps an email to tech would throw some light on this. I do use imported pdfs in my layout file regularly. I typically show some details that have been provided by the local code authority which are only available in pdf (and obviously i'm too lazy or prudent to redraw that which has already been drawn).

Great suggestions. I appreciate it. I had been printing @ 600 dpi too ensure that imported pdfs and renderings printed clearly. 96 dpi was fine for everything except the imported pdfs and that brought the file down to 2MB. I settled on 300 dpi which was clear enough for the pdfs with a file size around 6MB. All that being said, I am curious why my imported pdfs bog it down so much when in X5 I never ran into this issue using all the same settings.

I've imported a few pages in pdf format to a single page 3 of 5 in my layout. This adds about 12 MB (from 2 MB to 14MB). Obviously this slows down the printing (to pdf) as well as emailing the file to clients. This has only been an issue for me in X6. Anyone else?