DzinEye

I've been making my own roof slope arrows since day 1 because I never liked my control over the appearance of the auto-labels we get. I'd sure like to be able to use the auto-labels, so I'm giving them one last attempt. I know how to control the text and the arrow-head. Does anyone know of a way to control the length of the arrows? There seems to be no connection to the length of the text string, it seems like there is some baked-in ratio to the text height ? Is that the case, or is there another way to control it ?

Thanks Ryan! I assume though that this is limited to square cuts/breaks like line would do ?

Yes, line and/or polyline is exactly what I was thinking, but the specifics of it being a knife would be that soon as you make your cut it disappears automatically (could be a setting if you don't want it to)... but also the knife polyline could be you select a line or framing member and the cursor becomes the cutting polyline parallel with the member you clicked on.. then you could grab and manipulate handles on that line to create a polyline knife

Just finished watching when you posted this. When do we get the 'best practices video? This was great, really shows what is 'possible' in the right hands, but definitely also shows it is pretty grueling to do. Impressive though. Thanks for sharing. Having watched... ideas for Chief improvements pop into my head ... how some kind of a knife tool to cut framing members. Something you don't have to continually copy paste move rotate and then delete. A similar Cad detail from view tool would be nice too... copy the part needed from the detail and the detail disappears without having to go find and delete it manually.

Nice Eric

You have no rooms drawn on your 2nd floor, so it's quite difficult to offer help without spending a lot of time fumbling with guesswork. The roof in your picture could have been done at least three or more different ways, but since it's a straight-on front elevation it gives very little clue as to how they did it. Do you have a view from the side? If not, then you get to try modeling several of the possible solutions to see what you like best. Did you auto-build this roof? Note that the lower roof section of the roof in your picture is a lower pitch, then it steepens partway up. Your steep roof starting at the bottom will swallow up a 2nd floor.

I don't see any walls going through roofs? What're you talking about?

@SNestorOnly looked for a minute or two Steve as I have to run out, but something unusual is going on because even if you change the wall type to say Stucco 6 it still does that... Sorry I take that back.. forgot to uncheck 'railing'.. sigh

I was interested in that comment too...

@Alaskan_Son Thank you Michael... much appreciated. I thought I zoomed out ridiculously far and still couldn't find it in a marquee. It appears it was 'ridiculously far10' I can't believe I didn't think of the select all method, but I would have been confounded by the deselection process anyway, so thank you for elaborating on that that alternative!

Yeah... that's exactly what I was thinking when I couldn't find it using a marquee window. It appears now that it was just way way waaaaay out in space.

Thx Eric. Of course the first link that popped up when I searched 'extents' alone was the one you refer to with the video you did prior. It was interesting that apparently Chief changed the language of that warning pop-up?!? The warning in the question you responded to used the terms 'extents unusually large ', while mine used 'extents extremely large' which is why my search went astray because I constrained to all search terms. Anyway... thanks for the video!

I'll try again... I searched using all terms 'extents, extremely, large' hoping to narrow down the search

Here it is... just started laying it out... pretty sure it's something I created when making the pool. Onstad_Existing.plan

I have my model and site placed very near the 0,0,0 origin, but I'm getting the attached message during operations. I assume that this means that I somehow accidentally placed something way out in space. When I use zoom fill window I get what appears to be a blank screen and when I drag a selection marquee over the entire screen nothing selects (everything on, nothing locked)... so how the heck do I find whatever it is that's floating out in space? I tried searching on this and only came up with an article telling me how to move the model near the origin... which it already is.

If you're just trying to show that you're slapping down some plywood on top of ceiling joists to create a platform in your attic, then what you did is fine as far as I'm concerned. If you're actually trying to make it a 'room' with other attributes, then you should create a floor level

I wish I knew why but that 'lower wall split' feature doesn't work all the time... I just had it happen a couple days ago, ended up covering that wall with a material region so I could move on. Looks like your floor is missing?...is that on purpose?

You'll need to use molding polylines

Thanks Steve!!! Didn't think of that. That totally highlights the problems I've had with manual roof planes snapping to the wrong wall layer. I often flip back and forth between building roofs in the Roof Plan (where 'main layer only' is on, and working on roofs in 'working plan' where I have all the wall layers on. Still think it would be nice to have roof planes 'know' that they're supposed to snap to the main layer.. but at least now that I know what the heck is going on I can avoid the problem.

You didn't attach the plan

Steve, I suspect you manually built the roof planes, right? I have found that I have to be super careful about making sure what is getting snapped to when starting a manual roof plane. You would think/hope that it would only ever snap to the main framing layer, but I have found it can randomly snap to outside of sheathing instead.

If you specified fill and it's not showing, it's because of the wall display setting being used. Are you using the Saved Plan View for Electrical ? If so, it's not showing because the Walls, Layers layer is turned off. Turn that layer on. That is the easiest solution...but if you want to try wall hatch, go to the Build / Wall pull-down

Some good nuggets there Dermot, thanks. It seems to me that the duplicate materials are not always due to differences in attributes though. I used to frequently get copies of things that were the same. I've found that to avoid this happening when selecting materials I should always first go to 'Plan Materials' organize to In Use on top and be sure to select the item that's already shown In Use. Maybe I should 'Suggest' this, but it would be nice to have a way to default that view of already used materials when selecting materials, as those few steps of organizing the list I do many dozens of times a day.

You can either define the wall type to have grey fill in the wall DBX, or you can use the Hatch Wall tool

Have you tried exploding the auto-dormer and manually adjusting it? Looks to me like you should try that then pull the exterior wall back further into the room and in that walls dbx's roof panel select 'lower wall split by butting roof' and select an interior wall type for the lower wall. This doesn't always work but worth trying.