robdyck

Hi Gene, select that wall and uncheck Pony Wall. It will then rebuild correctly and Chief will rebuild it as a Pony Wall.

Absolutely. But where are these rectangular properties? I see one of those every two years:)

A bit more trickery that's super fast: adjust corner board settings to 1/16 x 1/16 and auto-place corner boards on foundation. If the grade is flat, you can select them all and adjust the bottom elevation all at once. Another option: use a really small solid and save it to your library. Set it's elevation relative to the terrain, make it tall enough for all conditions and place them manually at every outside corner. They'll always be at the right elevation (the top will be buried inside the upper wall's cladding). Drawback is they don't 'stick' to the wall so if you move a wall, it's not going along for the ride. So the question is: what will stick to the wall corner and have an elevation relative to the terrain? If only we had all elevation options (with locks) for all objects! Then the corner board would work nicely to solve this.

@jasonn1234 You would need to use plot lines with Pattern Line Defaults unchecked (set color by material). Even then, in layout, the terrain pattern lines are placed behind the foundation wall lines. In the image below I made them blue so they'd be more obvious. If I needed such a mask, I would already have that cad polyline in each elevation camera, saved in my template plan. It would be faster to adjust the polyline than all the materials and layout box settings. Or the opposite, you could set the foundation as dashed, then draw a solid line above grade.

They are used to help locate major portions of a structure. I would never use them on a residential plan set unless it is quite large and/or complex and they are needed to help builders with layout and to communicate where something is located. On a very large building, it can really make it simple to discuss the plan set with other plan readers (for example: Please refer to the linen closet that is to the left of grid line 3 and above grid line C). For smaller plans, you're simply wasting your own time, cluttering the drawing and probably confusing the trades (unless it is a common practice in your region).

This is a regular go-to for me. Does Chief ever model the railing in the correct position?

For the 2nd Floor Bath cheek wall, you'll need to use a 2x6 interior wall for the lower portion because Chief will extend the floor platform out to the exterior of the 2x6 Siding wall (so it will show through from the main floor. Again, 2nd floor cheek wall should stop at the ceiling break line. This wall should NOT be cut by the roof. And, on the main floor, you'll need to pull the ceiling plane back so it does not cut that exterior cheek wall.

In Chief, try to model it how it will be built. For the area to the left of the Unspecified (Bedroom?), you want the 2nd floor exterior cheek wall to extend inward to the ceiling break line. This means the interior partition should be split at that junction and then reverse layers of one of those portion to prevent re-joining. Then decide if the cheek wall will be cut by the roof OR if it will be a pony wall, split by the roof. If the latter, then select the lower wall type in the Roof tab of the Wall Spec. dialog. If the former, the uncheck Lower Wall Type. For the attic wall, I would uncheck 'Roof Cuts Wall at Bottom' and manually drag the wall into position in Elevation view. Chief will automatically build this wall wrong unless you split it into 2 portions (one for above the cheek wall and one that extends from the end of cheek wall to the ridge).

No offense, but how neatly would you expect the model to display when it's laid out like this? The whole building is completely random. I would expect random results.

You are not laying things out accurately enough. If you zoom tightly in on these corners, you'll notice the interior wall doesn't align with the inside of the exterior wall. That will need to be fixed on both floor levels. After the correction:

You are correct!

Hi everyone, I thought I'd raise a topic before submitting a feature request to Chief. I'd like to hear the thoughts of others on this topic: For larger windows and doors, I often need to spec. the header on the floor plan. Currently I'm using a cad line with a label to show this in plan view. But, because I actually change the framing for these openings in the Framing tab of the door / window dialog, I thought it might be a nice feature to be able to change the layer and the material of the header in the Framing tab, without affecting automatic wall framing. We can already change the header label layer so this would seem like a logical addition of function. This would neatly enable us to display those headers (that are outside the norm) while we're making those changes to the model. This would also enable us to set this up in our default plans which should ultimately become a bit of a time saver. One example: a 16' wide garage door. In almost every plan, I need to show these with an LVL header. It would be great to be able to control its material and layer without affecting automatic wall framing, all from the Framing tab of the Door Specification dialog.

You probably need to update the Cactus Stone catalog. That 'Drfit' folder no longer exists. Also, you'll need to replace that material in any plan using it, or simply assign a texture file. You can do this by copying the file path from a similar material. That particular material should be in a different folder...see image below.

And obviously I'd have a different set of dimensions for cabinet plans / elevations.

Quick example Rob, I don't really need to dimensions most of these items in a floor plan, certainly not very often. So when I drag a dimension it picks up what I want it to. I can still manually drag an extension to a cabinet if I have the need.

Double click the Interior Dimension tool to open the active dimension defaults. Select 'Locate Interior'. You'll see that Wal Options has different settings available than Locate Manual or Locate End to End. If I were you, I'd use the Locate Manual or Locate End to End tool instead and customize it's Locate Objects properties.

Open the layout template and the existing layout file in 2 windows. Save the template to the correct folder. Copy and paste from the old to the new or vice versa on a page by page basis. Both ways have pros and cons depending on the amount and type of information that is present in each layout file. If there is page info and revision info in the existing layout file, then you'll probably want to keep it and copy from the new template.

My bad, I assumed you weren't aware of the available methods. There really is no true function to allow a floor by floor display of certain objects. That might make a great suggestion though! FWIW, I draw all the structural components for a deck / balcony manually. So I'm already placing them on the correct level. I don't use Chief's auto tools for deck framing / structure. I have saved objects in my library that have the correct notes applied to the label tab and I'd rather place everything correctly myself than edit what Chief builds. As or chimneys, etc, I do what you do, manually place cad objects and yup, gotta remember them all if something moves, but it's usually quicker than setting up and managing a ref. display.

Somewhat. It only takes me a couple of minutes to make a new texture file. I often need to do this to get reasonably accurate brick textures or stone textures for a particular product that doesn't have texture files available. It is what it is.

That doesn't really make sense. They are stairs. If you'd like them to display as dashed lines on a different plan view in Layout, there are multiple methods to accomplish that. You can copy and crop a layout box in layout, and set it to use a different view if you'd like. Also, you can use Reference Displays to show as much or as little as you'd like. This can be more work to setup but is handy if it is something you'll need often. Open 'Help' and search 'Reference Display'.

There actually are many different methods for making this connection. You are right in that Chief's stair tool doesn't model in this connection, but that doesn't mean you can't model any connection method you desire. The addition of a tread flush to the top deck surface isn't a structural necessity, simply a matter of preference.

They didn't miss the point. That's what you'd do, you'd use a customized texture / pattern. There is no 'slider' or stretch plane for a texture or pattern. Not really, but sort of. You can 'make' textures in a CAD detail by importing images and tiling them and/or overlaying them on top of other images. You can then export the completed view as an image which can be used as a texture image file source.

A dropbox or google drive link (or similar) works as well.

If you need to send this as an image, first click 'Fill Window' then click 'Print Preview'. You can then use the Export Picture or Export PDF tool if you need to save it, or you could use the Windows Snipping tool which is a bit quicker if you don't need to save it and want to paste it straight into an email.

If you haven't posted the plan, how would we know? That's probably the reason.