DzinEye

Look is most important, but would be nice to know how to get the framing to work if/when needed.

I suppose I could do a big solid up there too... but is that the only way?

I created a curved ceiling plane in this exterior porch room, but I can't figure out how to close the face above the arch?  I suppose I could create a wall with an arched opening to match, but would like to know if there's a different / better way?

 Also note similar anomoly in this screenshot. It works, but it would be very odd to build it that way.  The clouded side hips should go away, it should just be one big hip roof.  Again this may be due to wall alignment.

See links below for building dormers manually, but also note that for some reason your auto-build roof is creating anomalies per red clouded areas on attached screenshot. You'll need to look at your walls defining the space, make sure they're lining up properly, etc..  
 

How to manually build dormers

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/1521/manually-drawing-dormers.html

This one not relevant to your current situation but good to know...

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/1520/creating-openings-in-roofs-for-manually-drawn-dormers.html

Just roughly cobbled it together for you here, but there were a lot of inaccuracies in the roof you should look more closely at.
Going forward you might try copying your plan, erasing the whole roof auto-rebuilding it all again then add the dormer, what you're calling an 'A-frame' afterward.  

Sanibel_r1.plan

21 hours ago, solver said:

A rambling look at the Tray Ceiling tool showing what seems to be a problem.

Good observations showing the apparent bug, and how the tray ceiling tool can be improved.
It seems that there will have to be another checkbox added to the tools dbx whether to ignore invisible walls or not.

48 minutes ago, robdyck said:

The same as whatever it already is, but use a wall covering

13 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

As the existing Wall  ie Drywall probably in this case ...this causes the Material to no longer be at "Default" 

Got it!... thank you... I'll give it a try next time.  That will work on walls, but I get all kinds of other things having this issue too... drawers, hardware, components I've modeled in Sketchup, etc etc..  I've tried painting them with no success.  The only method that always worked was turning off the sun.

4 hours ago, robdyck said:

It's not sunlight leaking or wall layers, it's just some weirdness. The easiest fix...paint the wall material with the same material

Rob, you said: 'paint the wall material with the same material'....  same as what?

It must be related to the sun, leaking or not, because it always goes away when I turn off the sun.  I've never had the effect from interior lighting.

I frequently get glowing artifacts in my PBR's, and as someone above suggested it seems to have something to do with sunlight leaking into the building.  
My quick fix is to just turn off the sun which works frequently, but obviously would'nt in your second shot... which looks great BTW.
I am trying to figure out how Mark McAniff fixed it.  Are his notes indicating things he changed? 
It appeared from your dbx screenshot that you already had given those triangle walls a room definition?

Did you have success using his fix?  If so, what exactly did you end up doing?

18 hours ago, jheath21 said:

How do I get my wall to extend up to the roof behind the garage?

Second one, how can I get multiple materials on the exterior of my walls? For example, board & batten siding and river rock.

Does that wall continue down to the floor or is it only between the two roofs?

If you're just doing rough modeling to see how the building will look (not for con. doc's) then it can sometimes be faster/easier to draw 'wall material regions' to show different wall materials.

17 hours ago, joey_martin said:

Rob and others have ideas that work...seems wordy and overdone though. I simply hit SAVE AS and use _move 8 feet and go for it. I HATE...HATE....sub-folders and copies upon copies. I do a save as and as soon as the client realizes I was right, I simply delete the turd and move on without having to re-link a bunch of files. I have one simple..simple rule....one layout file per job...PERIOD! I can put a thousand different plans, elevations, details, etc...on that one single layout file and let Chief do all the work of "warehousing" everything. As long as my SAVE AS and layouts are in the same folder, I am golden. You can also add a page for the options and delete them when they don't get used.

I'm using this method too, but I have to say it's still rarely that simple.  You're mighty lucky if you only ever have just one outstanding option that you're waiting for a client to decide on so you can just go back to your original or whatever.  Or do you just say you're not going to do any further work until a decision is made?  Seems it's not unusual for me to have one or two options outstanding and before those are decided on by the players I have to continue to move forward with other plan/model development, and then sometimes I guess right and do that development in the chosen plan and sometimes I'm wrong and I have to copy things over to the other plan...which can be a royal PITA depending what was done.

17 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

 

This may point you in the right direction

17 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

See this post, it has houses as symbols

Thanks guys!  Interesting you have to do it from a 3D overview.  Kind of like exporting to Chief viewer.  I can now see it's not quite what I was imagining, but would def. be useful in some situations.
 

1 hour ago, lbuttery said:

I have always made the house a symbol

Huh?.. I was just wondering about this in a different thread.  How the heck do you do that Lew?  Add to library is not an available option if I select the whole house.  You must have to turn off certain layers I guess?  Which ones?  If I only have walls, windows and doors on it allows, but otherwise no.

Wow, this is a really good thread! 

17 hours ago, MarkMc said:

forgot to mention that almost any molding profile ever created can be found from just a few resources on the web in dwg format. Most often I take that in a cad detail, click nodes until it closes to get a polyline.

In one of the fairly recent forum posts, I think Glenn offered a pretty cool suggestion that lines could be quickly connected with one click by selecting all lines, using 'extend' tool and clicking near the center of the group of lines.  They need to be already touching, but not connected, which is a common issue when using Cad detail from view for moldings.  Michael then discovered that the 'trim' command did the same thing. (I have not tried that one).

17 hours ago, JJohnson said:

Whats cool is that you can import SketchUp models into Chief. 

Just download to your desktop and drag into open plan.

Def. agree.  If you already have the SU knowledge, some things are just far less time consuming to model in SU and import into Chief.  However, I think with what I saw advertised to be improved ability edit p-solids from more than one plane in X12 Chief is getting better at this.  

16 hours ago, Dermot said:

You can.  Just hit the tab key after you start drawing the line and type in the dimension.

I learned that it works fairly quickly once you get used to not looking at the dialogue box, but I do wish Chief would allow a direct entry method similar to other platforms.  It's a hurdle learning not to look at the dialogue box, because a pop-up dbx is meant to be looked at.  But furthermore, not looking at it often causes slowdowns, because the Tab dbx frequently does not take the dragged direction properly...which requires undoing and re-doing the last process then manually adjusting the angle entry.  This definitely needs improvement.

15 hours ago, Alaskan_Son said:

I’m with you.  This is a common attitude amongst most Chiefers,

I also had this 'attitude' coming into Chief.  Part of it comes from the fact that many of the otherwise wonderful training videos skip precision for the sake of speed.  That may be partly to keep the video short, and partly to emphasize speed of Chief to do things, but it wouldn't hurt to have some of the entry level videos show the process of drawing with precision in mind.  

Looks like you have the 'opaque glass' setting checked.
See your rendering technique settings

24 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

don't want to try the Beta?  should be in your digital Locker  ( assuming current SSA )

I'm on SSA by monthly basis, so not available to me quite yet

24 minutes ago, Alaskan_Son said:

I would call this instancing, and yes, it would be great if Chief had some more true instancing capabilities.

Wow, you really did a deep dive on that subject.   Very strange why the scale  changes in the text block instances...any idea why?
The text instancing ability (if it worked right) would be especially helpful.
 

29 minutes ago, javatom said:

This is an example of the opposite extreme of too much info on the plan.  One county I work in tried to use an "opt in program".  All plans had to be submitted but you could choose whether or not to have the plans examiner and the field inspectors involved.  This experiment has since come to an end.  The picture is an actual plan (not one I made)  that was approved for construction under this system.  I think you can guess why the experiment failed.

LOL!... Hilarious.   That kind of drawing (though perhaps not quite that cartoonish) was actually not that uncommon in rural areas not all that long ago.
The only thing it's missing is a coffee cup ring for an architectural stamp.

15 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

I used pony walls and just made the cap the chamfered part , all settings are above I think....

I looked at your settings before posting,  which showed how you did the walls, but didn't see anything about the cap.  Sorry if I missed it.  Nice job on that detail though!
 

11 minutes ago, Alaskan_Son said:

This is actually a really really good argument against pinning the slab to the foundation walls. 

Yep, that's my understanding and practice as well.  Though you may want to pin a landing area in some cases. 

5 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

 

 it's one piece, 12" x 48",  and set to negative offsets with his method....

Ahh.. I glanced at that too quickly... I just saw 'wall cap' and assumed that only accounted for the very top shape without looking at the dimensions.
So you said 'with his method'... what method did you use?

15 hours ago, solver said:

Clever idea to use a wall cap to get the shape Eric, but curious why it does not show up as a separate piece?

18 minutes ago, parkwest said:

Is that what the new X12 Style Pallette tool does?

Ahaa!... well it appears that it achieves a similar result but in a different way.  It seems to me that it would work just about as well for most cases, only difference being you have to manually switch the palette each time... but perhaps having different plan views for each would allow you to have several different ones at the same time? 
Will be nice to check out when I can get my hands on X12 next month.

For Interiors folks especially, It would be pretty cool if there was a way to make a 'block' of the basic plan, or alternatively what I can only best describe as a 3D reference... or using Acad terminology...  Xref.   That would allow just the basic model without all the interior stuff added, to be referenced into several different options, and any structural (wall, door, window) moves would automatically get applied to all instances.

11 hours ago, Richard_Morrison said:

There is a huge difference between specifications and code notes. Specifications are for the contractor, and define contractual obligations.

This exactly^^^.  
In my experience jurisdictions rarely care about specifications for residential, except for a few things like fireplaces.  As others have said, if you do have a client that wants, (and wants to pay for) specifications, then they're most likely to be properly looked at if they're on the plans, but I would recommend doing it on an alternate set of plans that doesn't go into the permitting jurisdiction. As Rene said, it just invites more questions during the permit process... and 9X out of 10 everything gets changed by owner and/or builder as the project progresses... and then what?.. back to the city for revisions?  I would only ever do specs on an hourly basis.   For ensuring better quality work the best approach is to help the Owners get a contractor that does quality work without having to be told how to do quality work.    Also, rather than specifications, a few well considered arch. details can do a lot more than lots of words in a spec..

The only Code Notes most jurisdictions require are related to; egress, temp. glass, railings, stairs, fire protection and a few plumbing and electric.  You should be able to cover the relevant ones with a list of less than 30 code items. I list them in a numbered fashion on the side of the plan and reference them with a small note at each relevant location.  Although you could of course put more than these minimal amount of code notes, I feel you then only risk glazing over the eyes of who ever is reading the plans... not to mention it just muddies up the plans.  

30 minutes ago, rockyshepheard said:

Is there a way to place a window at floor level without these artifacts?

Appears like you want the window not AT floor level, but between floor levels... correct?  
If you use invisible walls/room divider walls to make a room behind the window the size of the floor hole you want and assign it the 'open below' room type you should be able to put the window there.