kylejmarsh

Dude - sweet! Thank you

A common way to finish a stair headed up to the second floor, which i stacked over a stair going to the basement, is to infill a wall between the stair and the floor, but then have the wall go all the way to the ceiling at about the point where the handrail touches the ceiling. In order to do this 'correctly' the stair must widen by the width of the wall (4" or so) in order to cap the lower wall. In all my years I have never figured out how to do this. It's probably something simple that I'm missing but does anybody know how to widen a stair mid-run to make this detail accurate? I'm tired of phoning it in with 3D solids.

I assume you have different layersets defined - at a minimum you'd want one for your plan view (with the electrical turned off) and one for your elevations (with the electrical turned on). There are other items you may not want turned on for the elevations, for example the cabinets. Maybe the interior fixtures, interior furniture, etc. turning these off can really speed up the rendering of the elevations and make your drawings faster. Learn to use the layers and it will make life good

For band-boards and other accent trim like that I almost never use that molding tool. Much quicker to use a 'wall material region' which I set up as my exterior trim material. You can set default depth to 3/4 or 1 and then just draw them right on the wall you want. You can even draw them across doors and windows and they'll automatically cut themselves.

Chief allows you to 'export thermal envelope data' which may be helpful. Look in the File > Export > menubar. There's also an 'export to rescheck' in there which may be useful as well.

Its shouldn't be slow. I've been working with Mac + Chief for a while and I've got just an M1 MBP with 16 GB and chief works great, especially since x15 update. x16 has more bugs/crashes but it's not slower.

Sync your hotkeys so all the major items you usually use are available from the left-hand home row. This allows you to keep one hand on your mouse, and the other on the keyboard, without ever needing to look (or minimally) at the keyboard. Remap your tools like this: the most used tool goes with the easiest keystroke. That way, the tool you call-up the most is assigned to the letter 'F' (to me this was the easiest keystroke for my left hand). The command I used was actually the 'open object' command, because as you know we do a lot of opening dialogues in Chief Architect. Continue through your tools and pair them with other easy to reach commands. All the left hand home row is easy (ASDF keys) and T and G, V, C, and simple shift-modified versions of that are doable with the left hand. To make my map I made a spreadsheet with the easiest keystrokes ranked, then I ranked my tools based on how often they got used, and then I paired them up that way. I believe my 'text-arrow-note' is under the D key since I use that a lot. I also created a 'paste in place' for the V, which helps me easily move objects between floors and keep them in the same area. So that's my suggestion - if you haven't remapped your hotkeys yet go do it. Last thing - print out a list or better yet draw a graphic of your new layout to keep next to your monitor for a while. Good Luck!

I used to be able to just mull them up and it would get rid of that center piece of trim - however it seems like that doesn't work anymore on X16. The real question is why cant' we specify horizontal panels the way we can specify vertical panels? This would solve the issue immediately. I have provided a graphic for the chiefs at chief to study and implement.

Guess it's time to update to the official release. Thank for letting me know. Are we getting a gui update next?

Makes selecting the correct layerset very confusing and tedious - this list used to be sorted Alphabetically

Anybody else getting this? Not a major issue but they've introduced this new Table to X16 and it's chopping off the names of the framing members because the column is too skinny. I'm unable to make it wider in the Mac version, though I can adjust the other column widths. Wondering if it's just me or if this is an issue. Makes me wonder when they'll let go of these dialogues entirely? Hopefully the plan is to give us a modern interface where we can adjust things from live info panels in the sidebar instead of clicking through these dialogues all day. To me that's the biggest issue for Chief at this point, everything else seems to be running pretty well on the backend for this new version so maybe the interface update comes next. Kyle

Yeah I'm not sure you can do that - I'm sure there's a way but I've not figured it out yet successfully. I just fire up the elevation point tool and place new ones where the surveyor shows them. Also make sure you set the Label of the elevation point to the 'elevationf' so that it displays it's actual elevation.

I basically shoot like 10 measurements the first time I go out just to get an overall shape that I can mock up. That and a few pictures do the trick for the first set of concepts (why spend more time than I have to at that point) along with the county data which shows the basic footprint of the house. I just use that to get the concepts going. Then once I have the client signed up for more than concepts (actual construction drawings) I'll go out, bring my computer with my rough chief model, and measure it up right there. You just need to know what's important and what's not. I know how deep a cabinet is. I know what a 6' slider is. I don't need to know the size of the windows in that bedroom way over there that we're not touching. Etc. Etc. to get started anyway. Check your room dimensions, check your ceiling height, get some nice straight-on pictures of the walls in the room you're working in. If you can't come up with a concept that you like and that the client accepts why measure the whole house and burn a bunch of time? As for tech, I've tried a bunch of stuff but most of it is more pain than it's worth. I mean, we already have chief architect, how much easier do you need it to get?

Nice

Sometimes you can bypass the Rescheck requirement by citing the code and going with the 'perscriptive' option which requires a certain minimum insulation/windows/etc. In michigan there's an option on the energy compliance sheet that you just check a box and you're good. If you have to do some exporting, I find (on a mac) that you can just export the 'thermal envelope data' and plug it into rescheck online version and it's pretty simple.