robdyck

I know this has been discussed a lot, but I'm wondering if there's a simple method to get an elevation marker in plan view to display a room's floor elevation in the format shown in the image? I can figure out a bit of the number formatter thing, but I can't get it to return a floor or ceiling elevation. The automatic macro returns this value in inches and the same thing is true for the data in a schedule.

Just gotta make sure the top view (just lines) doesn't have the shadows turned on! Hmmm, not too sure about this...I think it might defeat the purpose. What should be black is of course now gray. And that's a lotta paint to get wrong, despite all the labelling!

Does anyone have some layout tips or suggestions for printing exterior elevations, where the house is a very dark color. It's one of these all-black farmhouse styles! And I don't need to print in color, but if I could....! What I'd really like is a tool to fade the colors in Vector View, but not the lines. I'm thinking of a layout box sandwich...color for the bottom bun, cad mask of partial white for the middle, and lines w/ no color for the top bun.

I use a pony wall for this. Otherwise, the fence and the retaining wall would need to be on different floors. However, for the fence you could also use a millwork panel ( or any other fixture or symbol) on a distribution polyline. This can work well for a fence style that will be stepped, NOT sloped.

Well done Michael! I figured it must be a roof, but I didn't find that one. Good work.

It's also really easy to create a room schedule that has this information. Once you customize the schedule to your liking, you can re-use the schedule in any plan just by copy and pasting! Here's a basic example...I keep the wall finish column blank because I rarely know the clients' paint choices. This way they can fill it in themselves as they make those decisions.

And...now I know that this catalog has been updated!! Thanks for the notification Joey!

@myrtsbnye Deck Railing, Lumber.calibz

It doesn't get much quicker or easier than making your own double top rail using a 2x4 and 2x6 profile with a 3.5" gap. Add to library as a stacked molding. One drawback to get it exactly like the picture is the intermediate 4x4 posts won't build like the image. I'd add those manually.

This is it! Just keep in mind that if you're using the same material for multiple rooms, you'd need to make multiple copies of the same material so that you can control the offset for each room's tile. Otherwise, the offset applied to one will be global (throughout the entire plan). And, it'd be helpful to make sure the material's texture and pattern are synced before making those offsets and subsequent copies. Forgot to add one item...this works with an Orthographic Floor Overview. That way the material's pattern is represented in the Vector View technique. You can use this view as needed or you can generate a CAD detail from this view.

I just figured it out. It appears as though the polyline label needs to consist of only one macro. This macro is the basis for other macros, and they can be placed in a text table to display accurately and remain stable.

I have several macros that calculate the area of a polyline and convert from sq ft to sq meters. I have an issue where all the different polylines are using different macros but returning the same value of whichever polyline was opened most recently. Any tips from macro users? Is more info needed to provide advice? I can send more info by a PM.

Too funny, Love it!

It helps keep the file size down. In the image below everything you see except the road and the vehicles are 3 symbols from 3 separate plans placed adjacent to each other. This would have made for a huge file size and a very slow pan file except that there is literally nothing inside each model.

It also didn't work for me consistently in X11, but does work consistently since X12.

You could also use a polyline mask to cover the interior walls. For a single plan, it may prove to be faster than placing all interior walls on their own layer. Placing interior walls on their own layer can be worthwhile especially if this is done in a template plan.

They certainly do do something, you just can't change the default. What you can do is control the line weights for each applicable layout box. It can be a very fast way to have all your edge lines a single darker line style and all the pattern lines a lighter style.

Can you post the plan?

Find your desired rafter tail from the library. Right click, place molding profile. Close polyline, convert to polyline solid.

I hear what you're saying, and while I don't necessarily disagree, my opinion (for now) is that p-solids are so much faster than jumping through the multiple clicks of a dialog box. My favorite thing about a p-solid, is that in an elevation view, it will blend with the exterior finish layer and erase unwanted lines. of course, it does need to join accurately.

I would say, no, there isn't. P solids are the fastest, simplest, most stable way to handle this. I have the same condition all the time, and there are other ways, but they suck.

I just your video for Eric...I also get all caps when copying and pasting. No question here, I'm going to search a bit and see if I can find out why. EDIT: And there it is...in your edited post way up near the beginning. That was what I suspected.

it does.

Yes.