Maurice

For building permits we only need to cast shadows on block plan for buildings for 5 individual hours on Sept 22nd between 9am and 3pm but for multi Unit developments with more than I house on the site the required fenced in backyard requirements are quite small, as they are small the Town planners want the shadows cast by the 2m high fences also shown to check if each backyard gets required sunlight. The problem is CA fences will not cast shadows otherwise it would be easy as they follow teraine, only way is to use walls or solid rails and modify to follow terrain at correct heights to imitate fences which is very time consuming. A option to have fences cast shadows in plan view would fix this

I know this has been up before but can't find it with search engine. Town Planners here, insist on having shadows generated on site plans in plan view not only for buildings but retaining walls and fences. This would be quick if fences in CA would cast a shadow but they don't even if joined to building. Only solid rails or walls do, which means using a wall and editing it to follow slope and required height, just for shadows. Grrrrr Am I missing something or is this still the best way, and can you please fix this CA !

It just seems stupid for them not to have added a elevation setting it would mean you could then use the tool

Is there any way to adjust how much cut versus fill you want using this feature, it appears fixed at 50 - 50 but quite often we want say a 3rd fill 2rds cut. I cant find anywhere where you can adjust elevation of this feature unlike other elevation lines or points ? generally we cut in more than filling due to obtaining a footing foundation

You misunderstood the gap is along wall not depth ie for recessed windows and doors if say window is 1800 and you add a 20mm gap for rough opening it also does it for the brick veneer so brick opening is 1840 so you see 20mm gap either side that is why rough opening has to be reduced for elevations For Fireplaces there appears to be no where, where you can get rid of rough opening in defaults just on insertion, so you get a 50mm gap between wall and brick fireplace until removed

Been adjusting rough opening defaults for windows doors etc to a smaller amount 5mm as we mainly have brick veneer walls here and from outside we get gaps around recessed windows/doors to brick openings in elevations. When you block a full length window and a door together it adds top and bottom value all to the opening top which is annoying also ie no room at bottom. But I cant find anywhere to change default rough opening for masonry fireplaces, looks strange having a 50mm gap around fireplace in brickwork on elevations, am I missing where this is possible or am I stuck changing it each time fireplace is inserted in wall ?

Yes you can copy in tables from word into either rich text or text if each cell has only one line, but if you have multiple lines in same cell it changes them to indivigual cells and screws it all up. In rich text you can only have exterior border, but in text you can have border and grid lines So tables are possible to be copied in as long as there is one line of text in each cell only

I went to my Layout sheets which I have a timber roof batten table on it that was made way back on past versions many years ago, it was made in word then, simply copied into CA in plain text not rich text. If I open it now it is all individual items of text in a table made of different cell sizes made of individual lines. So it has total lost its formatting, looks like this is something that got lost since way back V4 -V7 or so along the way

We used to be able to copy a table of text from word into CA now when you copy the table from word into CA16 it looks correct in the text Dialog box, with multiple rows of text in each cell of mutlitple rows and columns. But when you close the Rich text box to insert text into plan it disintegrates, if you reopen text it now has created a cell for each line in each original cell total mess ?

We generally have 2 types of slab floors here, we either use a raft slab for entire house and garage using brick veneer walls for both, or use raft slab for house but for garage a double/ single brick with piers wall on a standard strip footing, and pour infill floor slab later. Now using a brick veneer walls to make a house and garage, raft slab developes perfectly, unless you name with Chief the garage as a garage, then footing on garage section offsets externally. If you turn off monolithic slab for garage in its room dialog it still developes a raft slab with the footing offset, remove monolithic again after slab development reverts it to a normal footing under wall with infill slab, but footing is still offset and has to be moved in under wall. Trying to use Garage Curb setting with same wall still offsets garage wall footing, Im lost, not even sure what USA uses this curb setting for, and cant turn it off, all I know is Im stuck constantly having to manually correct garage floors/footings manually. It shouldn't be needed, Im missing something just cant work out what, been trying different setting/ walls for days trying to finally fix this. All the wall settings work fine else where but garage screws them up ?

Is there a way to rename existing custom layer sets, I cant seem to find it ? Can delete make new define import export but cant find a way to rename it anywhere

I did send it in as a bug report as stated above, when the patch comes out that's suppose to fix all this it will be interested to see if that's what happens, otherwise yes a feature request for future version would be good

CAs image links are not working to check glens, but glens showed 2 vertical panels in top section with none in bottom, you cannot get 3 vertical in top section with none in bottom section while retaining a horizonatal lite in bottom section, like you could in previous versions of CA, it just depends on proportion of top and bottom sections to get enough glass panels for sizes of 2 sections. Different brands vary but in a full length window 2030 usually 2 sections are top 1430 or 1350 and bottom section 600 or 680 so 1 lite in 1430 is not enough

yes tried all the combinations but you cannot get a correct amount of lites in upper and lower section no matter what you do. I emailed Tech support and they replied that this should all be fixed in next patch being released in next few weeks, Unfortunately I have added a lot more stuff in existing CA16 library now, and I hope the patch doesn't require reimporting library from CA15 for the fix

As nothing has been fixed yet I started to manually adjust window library's so I could use CA16 but came up with another problem, In double awning type windows in past with lites, if the top section of window was twice the size of lower section it would automatically reduce number of lites in lower section ie 2 vertical lites in upper section was 1 in lower section, in CA16 2 lites in top section is still 2 lites in bottom section, which looks ridiculous and out of proportion. This feature needs to be returned or have a independent setting for top and bottom sections of window not one setting for both areas, as these sections are different sizes in most windows

I got old and a new layout printing in colour with CA16 save as PDF feature, its got nothing to do with new or old layouts, its the setting in drawing sheet setup, if you tick box " remember print settings after printing" it will only print in grey scale, if you untick it and choose printer manually it saves pdf as colour, when you first alter this setting and save as pdf it freezes (never ending circle of death) up adobe preview after printing, but if you close adobe and open up pdf manually it has saved fine in colour, after the first time it no longer freezes adobe on saving as pdf unless you change setting again At a guess bug and also probably a conflict in adobes document security when it attempts to open automatically after saving

yes it was brought up from a CA 15 layout template so the new template you made was a layout ? which will not take long, but for me to make a new plan template would be a nightmare with all the customization done. I will try making new layout template, and see if that fixs it. And yes it shows colour in previews Glen and page just prints as grey scale, prints fine in old pdf printer in colour

CA16 new PDF printer is not printing in Colour even when print in colour dilog box is ticked. The PDF printer that was available with prior versions still does, so is this a bug or is colour printing not a feature of their save as PDF option ?

Yes I reported it on Friday and they replied that problem would be referred on to development team to look into

In addition any plans drawn on previous versions have same windows displaying correctly in CA16 except now they have a single lite across top window section in double awning windows, if you copy that same window in plan it retains same characteristics, however if you try to insert same window from library it inserts it in reverse with top and lower sections reversed in size as per above post Looks to me as if dialog box should be adjusted to make it top component size and use values of top instead of bottom, not bottom components size and values

Metric version latest patch running windows 7 64bit I have a massive custom window library, with double awning windows blocked together etc In CA15 and before way back to CA4 the double awning windows defaulted to upper section as movable size which was set to define upper and lower window section sizes. In CA 16 this has been replaced by bottom component size instead. Now all my windows in library's are reversed with large section to bottom small section to top instead of other way, in the library preview windows in 2d view it shows window correct with large section to top, but the 3D view below it shows the reverse which is how the window inserts with large section to bottom Can this pleased be fixed so windows default correctly on import of libraries into CA16 and fix library previews to both show correct view, or have I missed some new setting for conversion ?