kylejmarsh

Thanks Michael! I had no idea it was so easy - only 40 simple steps! lol guess that's the Chief way sometimes

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.

Yikes I can't believe they put windows with horizontal panes in an otherwise well-done dormer.

Can't believe I missed this so long ago but the Thermal Envelope data is a nice feature. Would be even better if it could be linked to a live schedule instead of an export. Anyway my question is how can we get a 'clean' export of the data? Right now it comes in with the units attached to the numbers in teh spreadsheet and that's a real PITA. Not a biggie but one of those 'I wonder why' things

Just set them up in your template off to the side and move them up when you want them. Then they're already set the way you want them, and already synced to your template layout file. Done and done. I have three for each direction:

A lifesaver! Worked like a charm.

- B/W didn't help it - The former layout prints no problems (but it was from a while back so could be other issues) I ended up moving it over to a new layout file and prints just fine: Now here's the test: Turn on the watermark and what happens to the print? (save it first!) Looks like it works just fine...

Having issues exporting a layout set where the file exports a blank looking pdf. However if you inspect the pdf a bit you'll see that the text is there, but everything is just white. Here is a pdf with the issue: Plans - Evangelista - Estimate Review - Sep 5.pdf It's a small file so I assume only the text is getting added to the pdf not the vectorwork or the live views. Also should know: - Other layout files plot just fine, it's just this one .layout - Relinking the model to a different one does not help - Sending it to printer instead of pdf creates a blank sheet - Previews in print dialog show as white - I had played around with adding a watermark to this layout, which is the only thing that is different than usual (from what I can tell) Any ideas on what could be going on? Plans - Evangelista - Estimate Review - Sep 5.pdf

Agreed the plant images are basically unusable - even the multi-poly trees are not good-looking enough to be worth bogging down the model. I've been doing renderings in TM but even there they don't have many of the big trees around here - Maples, Oaks, Hickory...

One thing that should be addressed is that Chief should offer a standard 'Master List' with dang-near everything on there. Would be great if they hosted it on their website (with some kind of disclaimer obviously) and updated it every season or so. Problem is that all framing should be already on there (beacuse we're not creating anything new like that) and a basic window, door, etc. etc... just a 'ballpark' type of Master List would be excellent because I could export it and give to the builders just for gut check type measurements. Maybe we should crowdsource a Master List together here at the forum. Would be a lot easier if we had all of us pricing things and adding them to a list than one of us chasing down prices for every part of our project like a General ...

Here's how you can make some nice looking demo elevations with red dashed linework. Start with demo layer having the dashed + red linework style. Then go 3D to vector view - and try to turn off the 'color' of the wall textures. Problem is it turns off the linework red color too, which you want to preserve: My hack is just to turn the 'material color' to white for the textures on the existing model: And the final result is pretty nice: Then you can send this to your layout view as a static image -> Or you can coordinate the demo elevations, which now look like this: Final product - demo elevations with dashed, colored linework showing demo areas: Does anybody have an easier idea? There could probably be some changes to the software to allow for 'plot lines' views with colored + dashed linework (or maybe there already is?) but currently this seems like the best way to do it. Kyle