tundra_dweller

Thanks for sharing @Steve_Nyhof. I still haven't decided on the best way to set up plans for walkout basement foundations and showing grade on elevations, this is good food for thought. The majority of basement foundations I do are walkout/daylite, and the majority of them are not uniform from one end to the other, they are typically on lake lots with very irregular terrain in elevation and shape on the shoreline side. I am also on the fence about which floor to put the foundation on. I've tried doing a couple with the walkout level on floor 1, and it does make sense to have the frost walls/footings on a separate level, but I still find myself doing a lot of dragging of the frost footing walls at stepdowns, and using room dividers to create rooms to try to change the footing depth is a PITA. I'm probably doing it all wrong, but I've never seen any definitive help content or guidelines on the best way to set up for foundation on floor 0 and walkout basement on floor 1. So I usually go back to putting the basement level & foundation on floor 1 and using a layerset and saved plan view for the foundation plan to filter out everything but the footings & foundation walls.

Thanks @para-CAD for sharing all the content with your fellow users. There's definitely a lot of knowledge and insight here that I didn't have before.

Same here. Still annoying to see all the time while working on the project, but not very high on the list of fixes/improvements I'd like to see for the software.

I don't think there's a legit fix for this, only workarounds. I haven't run into this in a while, I find myself designing away from mulled shaped windows, and mulled windows in general as much as I can because I know how much Chief's mulled window function is going to annoy the hell out of me. Off the top of my head there's a few things that may work, try using a lintel for your top casings, or turn off exterior casings and use a molding line or shaped material region instead. If you find a fix or a better workaround, please do share.

Great point...I forgot that you can't break & shape soffits.

I would think the soffit tool would work well for this if you don't need to show framing for it. Drop section of soffit in the room, resize the perimeter as needed, open up the soffit dbx and enter in the height/thickness you need. If you need to show framing then using a custom ceiling plane in the center of the room with a lower height might get you close. Or putting a room divider around the perimeter of the room and spec'ing a lower ceiling height in the center "room". I think the soffit tool would be the most simple and clean method though.

You are figuring this out in the best way possible, that is working through it and learning as you go. Nice work!

No but I wish some version of it would appear on the edit toolbar whenever an applicable object was selected, would save a lot of clicks.

@Userkn If you're using one of the later versions of Chief you can add purlins as a roof structure component, and I would assume it will adjust your overhang positions accordingly. I haven't used purlins on a plan yet, and I think it's only been an available option since maybe X14 at the earliest.

Interesting, I've heard of quite a few cases of Nahimic causing problems with Chief and other software. It came preinstalled on my Lenovo gaming desktop and it's never caused me any grief with Chief or other. About 95% of crashing/performance issues I've had with Chief have been Nvidia driver related, but they've been pretty stable for the past year or so.

I've run into this a few times and I always just end up building a truss in an area where it works, lock the truss envelope and copy the truss as needed to get the point across in the plans. Or sometimes even make a separate temp square building the size I want and lock the envelope on that truss and copy it to the actual building. Parallel chord trusses seem to be especially fussy. Where I am the truss company will end up doing detailed shop drawings anyway so I don't usually try to get my truss details down to the knat's ass level of detail, but more refinement of Chief's truss building functions would be much appreciated.

@BenLondon It looks like you probably used interior railings to create your deck so it's not actually a deck "room". You should be able to open up your deck room and change it to a deck. Then check the ceiling height of the deck room to make sure it matches the other rooms under your roof, and then make sure the roof and flat ceiling over room boxes are check. I think this would take care of it for you.

@ElkRivers You're probably going to have to play around with the recessed to wall and jamb/frame settings on your doors & windows. If they're set to recess to the sheathing or main layer (options tab in door/window dbx) then I believe that will change where the ext. casings build from. Or you could probably make the casings thicker too. If you're able to post the plan someone could probably give you a better answer.

You have to go in to each wall dbx materials tab and change the exterior materials to the siding you want. Even though the wall types have the material you want, I think using the material sprayer at some point to change the wall materials will override the wall type materials, or something like that.

Yeah it's really strange. Anytime you see roof baselines a foot away from the ext. main layer you know there's going to be problems but this is automatic roofs and I don't see anything that would make one end different from the other. There's got to be something but I sure can't find it.