Chrisb222

Totally depends on the situation. In most cases I can control everything through the dialog box enough to satisfy. Railing walls are tricky and took me some time to wrap my brain around... and still wrapping... In your particular case manual placement may work better since you might not want the railing itself inset into the room so much.

The outer edge of the wall width setting is also the edge of the platform/room/foundation. Your wall width is 3-1/2" but your column is 12" so the column will hang over the edge. Widening the wall width will pull the columns onto the floor. Alternately, sometimes it's better to set columns manually. Your Railing Wall has only one layer. This forces Chief to build the "platform" (floor structure) out to the edge of that layer, which results in having no layer to cover the floor structure. There must be another layer to cover the edge of the platform, outside the layer you're instructing Chief to build the platform to. Even if you place another layer in the Wall definition, it needs to be in the Exterior section so that layer can drape down over the platform area. Try a Wall definition something like this: This probably won't give you exactly what you want but it should get you on the path.

As Mark said, changing to the other Interior Railing wall type works, but just to explain why the Copy doesn't work, look at this picture: When you "Build Platform" to the outermost wall layer, that outer wall layer material can no longer extend down to cover over the platform space. Since you have no platform built yet, you see nothing, because the platform is interfering with the wall layer material. The other Railing wall type works because it's set to build platform to the Main layer, "Fir Stud."

Oddly, when I add any random corner point to the common edge of either ceiling plane, the corner instantly falls into place correctly...

Michael, great videos, thanks. I tried rectangle method four times last night using my template with no luck. This morning I thought, there must be a problem in my template (which has been true before with other things), so I tried it with the CA Residential Template, still no luck. Then, noticing that your videos were produced in X10, I tried it in X10, and had no problem. Something is happening in X12 on my end, that when the two planes are both made into triangles the corner where they meet gets screwed up (see pic). The corner is fine when they're rectangles, and after making one plane a triangle. It happens only after they're both made into triangles. I wanted to see if this happens in X12 with you too, or tell me what I did wrong. Test file attached. Groin Vault Test X12.plan

Similar thing happened to me last week. Opened a plan and a layout, all the links were broken for no reason. Had 20+ dialogs telling me files not found, then the layout was mostly blank. I closed the plan and layout without saving changes, quit and relaunched Chief, opened back up and all was restored. Please report back what you find out from tech.

I don't think it's a room lighting issue. Look at the three columns, the one on the right is a different color. I've had that happen too. For example several cabinets all the same material, but when rendered in PBR one of the doors is the wrong color. Weird.

It's not an error it's a temporary point. Do I get a prize?

Did you check that the layer "Framing, Floor Joists" is indeed on in the views where they're missing, as Joey suggested? By default, chief has that layer turned off in elevation and 3D views.

I'm more concerned about where you go when you get to the bottom of the driveway, OP pic.

Yep that worked! Thanks

Is there a way to prevent polyline solids that touch and share the same plane from changing to appear as one? Each connection within the three circles shown are individual PL solids (2x4s), but in 3D vector views and elevations they lose the separating line. I'm wondering if there's a way to force the program to show the lines. I can do it by creating a tiny gap between the solids but that's a little tedious. I tried converting to a solid but no help. Thanks

This is how I do it. Lower window label Y offset is -12", uppers are -48" and yes my window schedule has the sizes and controls the labels.

Good luck!

Did you turn off Temporary Dimensions?

I just manually drag the extension out to the callout border. If you have a long string of windows, you can copy/paste the new "Gap Form Marked Object", or use "Apply To All" if you have other extensions at the corners.

Dimension to layer was set to studs. The software introduced a thickness to the house wrap in spite of it being set to zero.

Those lights are typically because the model has no roof and/or foundation. Did you try playing with Interior Ambient setting in the Standard Rendering - Techniques dialog?

Or change the HW thickness to 1/8" and the air gap to 7/8"

Or if you want to leave the HW just change that dimension's primary format smallest fraction to 1/1.

It's not 15/16 it's 49/50 and it appears caused by the housewrap layer in your wall definition, which is set to 0 but evidently has a 1/100" thickness. Delete the housewrap layer and it dimensions like you're expecting.

Yeah if you're trying to use the Material Painter, that ain't gonna work. Corner boards don't have a texture, only a color. The way I get ONLY the color of an object to match another color is using the Adjust Material Definition tool, click on the corner board, and use the color eyedropper to pick up the color I want. See the first pic, which is from a Mac OS but you should be able to translate it to PC if that's what you're on. The color still won't match exactly because the siding is various hues, but trial and error will get you close. See second pic.

Another great way to find answers, in addition to what has been posted, is a google search restricted to the chief website. Put this search into google, it will search all of the chief architect website INCLUDING this forum. I use it all the time: site:chiefarchitect.com [YOUR SEARCH TERMS] You can also perform a google search of only the forum using this search: site:chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com [YOUR SEARCH TERMS]

Ugh, so no easy way. Thanks for the suggestions but I think I'll make a "Suggestion."