tundra_dweller

Glad to help. I've done the same thing before. 

Do you have another set of stairs drawn on another floor but at the same elevations as those stairs?

Are your stairs set to be open or closed beneath? It's strange they would be doing this regardless but might be worth seeing if it makes a difference.

7 hours ago, Alaskan_Son said:

I think the method posted earlier by @robdyckwas a better solution for many (if not most) situations...

I agree.

Just to follow up, tech support did not find a solution for this case. They recommend framing the walls with a flat ceiling, selecting "Retain Wall Framing", unchecking "Flat Ceiling Over Room", then build your trusses.

There may be a possible fix in a future release.

42 minutes ago, GP202256 said:

I did everything and thanks, the only thing that did not happen was the flat seat at the truss bottom after rebuild.

Okay good, hopefully that gets you close enough for what you need. The flat truss seat thing could be because of X15, truss framing in general seems to work better so far in X15. 

I should mention that I made those adjustments in X15, but it should work the same in prior versions of Chief.

If all you want to do is close that gap and you don't care about the ceiling height being correct, you can open up that wall and select Balloon Through Ceiling in the structure tab.

If you want the lower slope of the ceiling planes to match your room ceiling height, open up your ceiling planes and select radio button to lock pitch at 6, then enter 109 1/8" for the Bottom Height of ceiling planes.

Then you probably want to open up each of your trusses and select the radio button for Force Truss Rebuild if you want your trusses to have a flat seat to sit on the wall.

I had this happen and I just copied my X14 libraries into the corresponding X15 folder.

After that my X15 libraries were populated, and I got the little update icons on most of the library folders. I then hit the "Update Library Catalogs" button and everything updated and seems good now.

Not sure if this is the best way to do it but it seemed to work.

Yes it is. This and the automatic dashed lines below grade are massive improvements for exterior elevations.

1 hour ago, Alaskan_Son said:

I'm going to call this the Chiefer Paradox.  A situation where you can't achieve Requirement X with the tools given (or at least without putting in more effort than is desired) so you change your approach to alleviate that requirement altogether.  If the requirement was alleviated, was it really ever a requirement at all? 

This is perfect 

I have submitted this to tech support, will post updates in this thread.

Up until today I still wasn't sure that the problem wasn't just me missing something. I'll take a look at the process for submitting a bug to Chief and do it, unless someone else wants to or already has.

I can confirm that the behavior is the same in X15 beta, although the new "Heel Height" feature in the roof DBX seems to work very slick, thanks Chief!

On 2/19/2023 at 3:37 PM, SHCanada2 said:

I believe the limitation is restricted to heel heights  below a certain VSD and/or related to pitch. If I take the above plan and build the roof with "raises from ceiling height"  24" above ceiling, it works, but 12" does not. 

Strangely enough, this seems to be the key right here. I just started a new project with raised heel scissor trusses and decided I'd try setting the roof envelope up for 14" truss heels. No issues with the wall framing, it behaved just as I would expect it to! Whether I pulled the ceiling plane out to the exterior of the wall framing or left it at the interior made no difference, it worked either way.

So then I figured I'd try and back the roof envelope down to a 12" raised heel and bang, my wall framing shot up to the roof baseline. And doing that really seemed to mess with the software, because after that the formula of "Desired Heel Height - Vertical Structure Depth = Raise Off Plate" amount no longer produced the roof baseline where you'd expect it to be. The wall framing would behave like it's supposed to once the heel height changes from 12", but the math no longer worked for the heel height. Eventually I got the heel height back to within 1/16" of 14" by zeroing the ROP out and starting over.

So yeah, something weird going on with the software with regards to 12" heel heights with sloped ceilings, but knowing this is going to save me a lot of frustration going forward. Should probably be using 14-16" energy heels anyway.

I put a 0" thickness concrete material for the floor finish of those rooms.

Room Spec-->Structure-->Floor Finish-->Edit

I don't have an 18x24 layout to try with, but if I take a 24x36 layout sheet and tell it to print at 18x24 sheet size in landscape mode with scale set to "fit to paper", it will print an 18x24 sheet just as it shows in the print preview. This is with an HP T210 using 24" roll paper.

Probably not much help to you, but it sure seems like it should print an 18x24 layout to scale without having to manually trim your sheets.

I know when I switched from Windows 10 to Windows 11 I had all kinds of problems getting my plotter to cooperate as far as orientation & size, ended up having to roll back to an older HP driver and uninstall some of the HP software (print preview I think) that the HP support page said I was supposed to need. Good luck, I feel your pain.

I'll dive into this again later when I have a little more time, but after following the steps you laid out I still can't get the wall tops to stay put even with the bottom of the ceiling planes extended to the exterior face of the wall framing, and with the truss bearing walls' radio button selected for "Stop at Ceiling Above" at the structure page. I am still using the "Trusses (no Birdsmouth)" setting in the roof dbx, maybe that's part of the problem.

Thanks again for taking the time to follow up on this, I'll mark your post as the solution as soon as I get it figured out. I may have to call in and talk to Chief support to iron it out, which I suppose I should have done in the first place.

Thanks Gene, I feel better now that I know I haven't been missing something totally obvious all these years.

Yeah that's the difference between how we're doing it. You don't have the "Trusses (no Birdsmouth)" option checked in the roof preferences and you are leaving the "Automatic Birdsmouth" option checked, with your roof structure set so the vertical structure depth matches your desired heel height.

I guess this is the solution, but to me it's not the logical way it should work if you're using trusses.

6 minutes ago, GeneDavis said:

Here's my plan.  Where's yours?

Test truss.plan 3.93 MB · 0 downloads

I'll take a look at yours, I attached a plan to my OP but here is another one.

As far as I can tell I'm not doing anything differently. I agree that neither the trusses or energy heels are the issue. I think it has something to do with the sloped ceiling and the fact that the roof baseline (energy heel) is higher than what Chief thinks it should be for the roof structure size, but that should not matter for trusses in real life.

If I turn off auto wall framing before I uncheck "flat ceiling over this room" then all is well with the wall framing, the top plate stays at room ceiling height.

I'm using the OOB plan template in this case. I have my roof build preferences set to "Trusses", auto birdsmouth unchecked with a positive value entered for "Raise Off Plate" to reach my desired heel height in combination with the vertical structure depth. I leave the 3 1/2" roof structure because that shouldn't matter for roof trusses. Maybe I have to set the structure depth so that the vertical structure depth matches what I want my heel height to be and leave the "Raise Off Plate" value to zero.

test plan 2.plan

My ceiling planes are set to room ceiling height, so that isn't the problem either. Everything works as expected until I frame the walls with "flat ceiling over this room" unchecked.

Thanks guys for taking a look.

Everything set up the way I want, room height 9', roof baseline 12" above top of room height, sloped ceiling planes, looks good.

Roof trusses built, they are sitting right where they should at room ceiling height with a 12" energy heel, still looking good.

Then when I have Chief frame the walls, the top of the wall frames to the roof baseline (the top of the top chord of the truss) instead of keeping the top plate at room ceiling height. The trusses don't change, they are fine. It's just those sidewalls that want to build to the roof plane as if no room ceiling height or manual ceiling planes exist. 

Like I said I must be missing something, but even if so, it seems like this aspect of the wall/roof framing in Chief could be improved. I'll just keep using my workaround and move on.

Well I guess I'm missing something then, because as soon as I uncheck "flat ceiling over this room", whether I have any roof trusses drawn or not, my wall top plates jump up from the correct height (room ceiling height 9'), up to the roof baseline height (10'), unless I lock the wall framing before unchecking flat ceiling over this room.

Thanks para-CAD, I've definitely mined that thread for info in the past.

I have no problem getting what I'm after in energy heel trusses with flat ceilings (bottom chords), I only run into this problem with raised heel roof trusses that have sloped bottom chords to form vaulted ceilings (typically called scissor trusses around here), and I believe parallel chord roof trusses cause the same behavior with the wall framing.

This is mainly only bugs me in that I'm trying to create an accurate model with minimum extra CAD work to be done in section view. 

8 minutes ago, GeneDavis said:

What's the problem?  I want to frame efficiently with regards to available materials, so I am going with precut stud wall heights that are right for the sheetrock modules.  That's 8, 9, and 10 feet plus the 1.25".  So there is my room height.  And that is where walls will frame to, every time.  Reframe, and they frame up to those 97.125, 109.125, or 121.125 tops.

 

So, room heights.  Set them and forget them.

 

The heel height for the trusses is either determined by energy, meaning something like a 12" rise, or by structural engineering, meaning what minimum it's gotta be to handle load with span.  I'm always working where the ground snow load is about 100 psf so I have a truss engineer on speed dial for scissors in that second category.

 

So there you go.  Your room height for your ceiling plane base, and your heel height for the baseline height of the roof above.

Sure, that's how it should work and does work in real life. The problem is Chief's framing the walls so that the top plate of the wall ends up at the roof baseline rather than at the room ceiling height, as shown in the pictures. The actual room ceiling heights and truss heel heights are inconsequential, Chief's wall framing is the issue.

Not a real big deal, I was just hoping that someone knew of a way to force Chief to put the top wall plate where it should be in these cases, at the room ceiling height with the bottom truss chord bearing on the top plate, without a convoluted workaround.