HomeDesign724

2 hours ago, GeneDavis said:

"In a few years" unless you take on Chief with the new subscription arrangement, you will be stuck with your one seat of X12, no support from Chief, and no way to get more X12 seats for all those everyone elses.

 

So if you are really going to transform HomeDesign into a Chief house, you're gonna have to talk Mr Boss into you getting X14 and a proper machine on which to run it.  And funding to keep X14 under full support.  Otherwise this is just a lark.

We have to first be sure we can do everything in Chief before making that investment, video cards ain't cheap xD I'm sure there's something we can figure out, just have to play around a bit more.

Thanks for helping!

18 hours ago, GeneDavis said:

It would take as much effort to change the op so that Chief is the tool, as it did to build and deploy the existing setup.

Yeah I'm in charge of becoming Chief expert so I can teach everyone else in the office eventually and hopefully fully switch over in a few years (':

Mostly everything else has been good, it's just these cross sections and details I can't figure out no matter how many videos I watch or articles I read. I'll figure it out eventually haha

36 minutes ago, SHCanada2 said:

hmmm, so for your screenshot which shows the porch, you would not show the porch (how would this look?). Or you would show the porch just with the wrong roof pitch, and then another cross section with the right roof pitch on the porch but the wrong roof pitch on the house?

Oh, I just chose a random plan hahha I haven't been taught that yet so I honestly have no idea how they make the porch in the cross sections xD I'm just at a loss for how to make all this work in Chief without adding work haha

4 minutes ago, SHCanada2 said:

@HomeDesign724  how is the cross section working? you could have two pitches in the same cross section. there is only one pitch in the dialog box

 

As far as I can tell if there are other pitches in the plan, we just make separate cross sections? I don't think I've seen multiple pitches on one cross section.

4 minutes ago, rgardner said:

Well this shows it can be done but if he had his son in law write a custom macro/program to do it with the other software then obviously he realizes it is not something automatic.  But the answer to that exact question is yes it can be done.  I personally dont use his system every time as I do a wide variety of projects that it does not fit 100% of the time in which case I will do a live cross section on the job and detail it out with saved text and notes that I have in my user library to detail it out quickly.

Okay thank you, I'll let him know and hopefully we can figure it out!

9 minutes ago, rgardner said:

I highly recommend you take a look at @Renerabbitt's pro template as he has this worked out for you across multiple sections/cad details using custom macros.

Yea it's super impressive! Don't know if my boss wants to pay money for it, though. He basically just wants to know if details can be created through wall/floow etc manipulation and then maybe just zoom in and it'll show in the backclipped section for example.

On 12/19/2022 at 2:53 PM, Kiwideziner said:

Do you need to have drawn up a house before you are able to get these details??

You may be able to do all your modeling in CA for everything else and then pop out your details in your other program, then import the details page to a CA layout??

 

Just a thought

Typically we design the house first based on the customers specific requests then detail what is necessary in the cross sections/details. Ideally we wouldn't have to go between multiple programs to finish plans.

2 minutes ago, Joe_Carrick said:

It looks to me like it's actually just selecting a pre-drawn detail and editing the labels - probably using a macro.  If that detail is a dwg it could be imported into the Chief Layout.

I mean kind of? But the program still figures out what to draw based on your selections, so we're not having to edit any labels at all. That's kind of what we're looking to replicate in Chief, something we don't have to edit or redraw everytime. The detail isn't the same each time, that's why we can't just import one or two drawings, it would take us forever having to draw it in our current program and then import to Chief when there's literally hundreds of possibilities (ie someone has an 8 pitch, but the next guy has a 12, or this person has brick but the other vinyl siding).

On 12/17/2022 at 1:11 PM, SHCanada2 said:

what is dynamic in that cross section? I'm still not understanding what that represents. Is that actually the cross section of the house, and then further adjusted by that dialog box? What would a sunken living room floor look like and how would the one floor height change in the dialog box impact it? i.e. that dialog only has one floor height, what happens to a sunken living room when you change that height?

 

Are all the annotations just put where they are with no user interaction? Impressive if it does

 

 

 

 

So what happens is you input the information in the dialog box and then the program draws it for you, including the text. It was a macro the boss' son in law made before he left a number of years ago, it's pretty impressive. If there are multiple pitches, you have to make a new cross section/detail showing that it's different. As an example, I attached screenshots showing the progression of how to make the details box. It creates one detail based on all the information you click on. So it's kind of like pre-made drawings but also not...? Not 100% sure how it works, I'm still new here xD As you can see, there was nothing on the page before I hit OK, so the program drew this detail based on my selections, it decided which already made drawings are needed to make the desired end result.
But yea so what we need in order to full time switch to Chief is an easy way to create the details and cross sections so we're not wasting time adding single CAD blocks or drawing every single instance. Boss wants to just create the plan and then maybe zoom into the side and get the detail from there because details would be already input from like the wall info or something. Like saying what type of insulation is being used for example.

I hope I'm explaining this okay?? Thank you everyone for being so helpful!!!

On 12/16/2022 at 9:42 PM, Joe_Carrick said:

If you want "Live Details" try this:

• Create a Cross Section (Vector Render Technique)
• Save it and rename as desired
• Open it for Edit in the Project Browser 
• Set Clip Lines (Horizontal and Vertical) and check "Display"
• In the View, move the Clip Lines to crop the Detail
• Annotate the detail - some things can use referenced labels
• send to Layout (at desired scale) and use the built-in macros to Label the Detail

When anything is changed, the Detail will automatically correspond to those changes.

 

You might need to play with the Defaults to get the annotation sized correctly for the scale of the Detail(s)

Thank you, I'll try this today!!

40 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

X14, and you May want to check your email for chiefs new subscription model, you’re going to be priced out of new software soon if you don’t keep with the SSA. Just letting you know in case you weren’t aware.

maybe time for a new computer

surprised to hear that your machine won’t run x14… are you sure?

whats your machine make and model?

Same honestly, I just started this job three months ago and I'm shocked at how many old computers are still here xD The one I'm working on is ViewSonic, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4570 CPU @ 3.20GHz   3.20 GHz, 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor.
I can't even run x13 on here, a popup comes up saying the video card is too old and the 3D models won't generate ):

19 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

I have something like this in my pro plan template..see 330 seconds in

 

 

Thanks I'll have boss man take a look at it is this only for x14 or will it work on x12 which is the highest version that'll work on my computer?

15 hours ago, SHCanada2 said:

 Are all of those arrows dynamic, in which if you made the basement 10', they would all move up/down with the change in height?

Yea for the most part whatever we put in the dialogue box will be drawn on the plan. It's not completely dynamic like Chief is, but for instance the roof pitch will change depending on what we input. 
I just brought up the text boxes for you to see, they're not what I input for the actual plan drawing I sent.

22 minutes ago, solver said:

Could you post a couple of screen captures of these details? Maybe you could make, or link to a video showing how this works?

 

With Chief, all the information is built into the model. 

Yea absolutely! Just posted some down below. Let me know if you need anything else!

Thanks everyone for replying!!

I attached an example of what our details page usually looks like, as well as the text box that we have to input all the information to create each details as well as the cross sections. Because it's so simple in the program we already have, we need something similar in Chief.

There's a very specific way my boss wants our plans to look and what he wants included in the details page. In our current program (a dinosaur called CADVANCE99), there's a macro where a text box pops up and you input the details (also for cross sections) for the specific plan, such as if there's R30 insulation in the walls, if the outside has vinyl siding/brick.etc, the rafter & joist size, floor to ceiling heights, etc and then the program draws it all for you. I've been searching nonstop for 2+ weeks for various tutorials, videos, articles, even called tech support but no one is really giving me a straight answer to if there's something similar to what we have in CADVANCE that can be replicated in Chief. My boss doesn't want to switch over to Chief if we can't figure out how to auto generate the cross sections & details to his specifications. Chief is 10,000% more efficient than CADVANCE, but the ONE thing that CADVANCE seems to do better is this super easy and simple way to make the details and cross section pages. We can't use CAD blocks since those are canned, we need them to basically be like everything else in Chief that auto generates and whatnot.

Please help!! I'm about to give up.

Would definitely be interested in learning how to do this too. We struggle with getting realistic plants. So frustrating!

Thanks Mark, that's really helpful too!

Thanks for the tip, that should be helpful. I use Ray Tracing all the time, I don't mind if it's a little slow, but I do need to Ray Trace plans with good quality. Just wondering if slightly older cards can still work.

CPU: Intel Pentium III Xeon

Processor    Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E8500  @ 3.16GHz   3.16 GHz
Installed RAM    8.00 GB (7.87 GB usable)
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Video Card: GeForce GT 610

Just to be clear, I do plan on upgrading, but the "recommended" video card (RTX 3080) is quite a bit out of my comfort zone, will version 13 run on a PC with the RTX 3070 or even the 3060? The older cards are significantly less expensive.

I've been running CA X12 fairly well on the machine I have (the only issue is that it runs a bit slow), but I have nothing near the recommended hardware requirements for X13.The upgrade is kind of pricy, is it worth the added cost to use the recommended hardware? What is everyone else using?