robdyck

Has anyone ever experienced a situation where the Use Layout Line Scaling option remains stuck in the checked position? That is to say that a layout box display it's line weights as though it is checked, despite it not being checked. Toggling it makes no difference. If so, I'd love to hear how it was resolved.

One can also use a general framing member for this application. Framing members wrap wood grain correctly automatically. Adjust schedule controls as needed and same with layers and labels.

That particular condition showed in the OP can also be the cause of a sill plate being spec'd in the foundation wall dbx. This would not apply to a pony wall.

What is the best way to build/ model a shallower floor depth in a portion of a stairwell where the floor platform needs to be reduced in order to maintain headroom? If I build a small room on the main floor in order to spec. a shallower floor depth, I get all sorts of issues. But I can't think of a single way within Chief to accomplish this without plenty of manual adjustments. I'm curious how as to how others handle this situation. I've made a small room on the main floor and used a 2x6 floor depth On the main floor, a cabinet gets cut off in plan view, crown molding gets cutoff in 3d.

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/3d-library/index.php?r=site/detail/770

Hey Rob, You probably shouldn't use a 3d molding there. I'd find the correct crown molding in the library and then when you draw a molding, it will use that molding automatically. Then you can open the molding dbx and adjust it's height.

Can't say it would have occurred to me to use the %height% macro in plan view.

Thank-you Eric! I've watched your video, but seeing this (combined with the info in your video) is helping to make sense of how the NF works. I had something very similar but was getting an eval.. error and that's because I was inserting the room macro in those brackets. I appreciate your help. What NOT to use: %room.elevation.ceiling% %room.elevation.floor%

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.