DzinEye

Ahaa!... you had two exterior walls overlapping each other. Try erasing one and it may work, or erase both and redraw.

I rebuilt your exterior wall and the rooms all came back... but they're back as one big room... still... it's progress.

Your Garage is not a 'room' either. I sometimes build walls across rooms to help figure out where the problem is. If the room forms on one side or the other of the new wall, then you know the side that's not turning into a room has the problem. Doing that with your plan I found that it seems that your exterior wall along these rooms has the problem. Also see how the 'exterior room' jogs into the building along that wall.

Did you change it in the 'Absolute Elevations' section of the foundation dbx ? Looks like you need to lower the footing too though. Should work. You may need to post your plan.

Wait... you need to use the absolute angle of the building wall... which I think is actually 358.72036 based on what you're saying.

Rob, if you select the edge of your lot that you want to align with your building, and in the transform/replicate dbx enter 1.27964 as an absolute angle it should work. If you entered as a relative angle, then you're correct it'll either add or deduct that angle from it's current position.

Ha!... great! Thanks Michael. Grrr... I did not see that in the Parallel/Perp tool description. Now looking with more scrutiny I see at the very end there's a link to another page describing that function. Seems to me that info should be on the same page or mentioned earlier in the tool description.

If you use 'absolute' then you won't have to remember pos./neg. BUT it still seems such a primitive way of doing it, when it should just be a matter of a couple clicks.

Thanks Eric... that seems primitive when we have the align/make parallel tool, but it certainly works!

I have to believe that I have been missing some basic Chief action all these years, so finally I'm going to embarass myself to ask... How does one align an entire cad shape/polyline, not just a selected edge of that shape?

Yep... that's what I've been doing, but after the Nth time I just thought I'd see if there was a trick I didn't know. I'll put in the request.

Is there a way to lock a roof in it's current position, but move it's baseline so the baseline takes on the height info from its new position?

Very nice... thank you Michael

Yep, what Rob said... lol... didn't see the posts until I posted mine

Okay, I just went through the 'exercise'. First I tried the method Dermot suggested, of setting the symbol to flush mount on the ceiling, but that didn't do anything. Probably user error, but my symbol just sat there on the floor. What worked was first tilting the symbol appropriately then locating it in plan view with the ceiling planes showing. Then open a section view and measure the height from top of the molding to where it should hit the ceiling. For accuracy I drew a vertical line and got the length from it's properties. Then simply moved the symbol vertically by that amount.

Ahaa...interesting, I just noticed that in X12 the 'Edit Active Camera' option does not appear under the 3D drop-down menu. It doesn't pop-up as a command for 'hot keys' either. I guess we have to resort to choosing the ortho camera from the plan view.

You're using the orthographic camera view. I should have said TOP VIEW instead of plan view... that's how I see it, but the correct terminology is Top View. So set the ortho camera to TOP VIEW... open up that camera's Dbx and then put in the tilt angle so it's looking straight down at the angle of the ceiling plane. I would cut and paste the angle from step 1, but apparently according to Michael you can use the make parallel/perp tool... but I'm not familiar with doing that with a camera.

Not either/or... doing this step puts the orthographic camera directly above, so you are looking straight down e.g. 'plan view'. Then use the copied tilt angle from step one and input into the ortho-camera's tilt angle so the camera will then be oriented perpendicular to the ceiling plane you want to put the molding on.

I use a Pony Wall with a zero thickness wall type to use for the top part of the wall and the end of the wall finishes off. If you want to use the wall cap feature then you have to give the top part a 1/32 thickness... or leave the top part zero thickness and build the cap from a polyline solid.

Pretty slick, thanks for sharing that Rob

There you go.... looks good! I was almost going to suggest Sketchup, but for this Chief is pretty quick to model it too.

I think it's doable, but it would be a huge chunk of time to pull off. The biggest hurdle just to start is that you'd need to have a photo of a full sheet of veneered plywood. Then in a photo editing program you'd need to break it up into pieces just as if you were building it from that sheet of plywood... then number or otherwise name each piece so you know where it goes. Then turn each one into a separate individually named material in chief and paint onto each door/drawer panel. However... If you just needed the look for a 3D view without actually having individual cabinets modeled, you could do it much easier/faster by modeling the whole visible face of the cabinet from polyline solids, convert all to solids then select all, do a solid union and THEN paint on the plywood material, which will then cover the whole thing.

Yep, same here in the S.F. bay area Perry... always need to show all of the existing walls, and not just that, but per your T-24 energy comment, need to measure all of the existing windows/ext. doors/skylights too. BTW...Those of you talking about using tape measures... I highly recommend a small investment (~$50) in a laser measuring tool! You'll be in love. Very happy with the Skil rechargeable unit, but if you don't mind dealing with batteries Bosch is highly rated as well.

Yeah, I can always easily pull off a new segment anywhere on a story pole except for at the bottom. Hmm... maybe I experienced this bug you mention. I have always had some kind of annoying restriction with that bottom marker I want to set at something other than the specified 'grade' setting. Either I can't get it to stick to where I want it to go, or I can't get the marker to line up with the others, or it just keeps disappearing. At some point a while back I just gave up and started using my own elevation symbol to paste in place. It's been a while, I'll revisit. Appreciate the input.

Didn't mean it to sound like I was trashing your idea! It's a good creative work-around. It's just a lot to do in comparison to my wishful hope of it being something automatic and it would have to be adjusted for each different elevation where I need to show a different adjacent grade. I always appreciate your suggestions.