tundra_dweller

Here's a problem I run into often as at least 80% of the projects around here utilize roof trusses for a majority of the roof framing, mostly with energy heels, many with scissor trusses.

Using Chief's roof truss and ceiling plane tools to create scissor trusses with energy heels generally works well, but when the wall framing is built, it will build the top plate at the roof baseline height instead of the room ceiling height. Checking the "Flat Ceiling over this Room" in the room dbx will fix the top plate issue but of course you then lose the sloped ceilings. Deleting the ceiling finish material in the room dbx will get rid of the flat ceiling, but the custom sloped ceiling planes will not show unless flat ceilings are unchecked. 

So now the wall framing shows incorrectly in section view and material lists, and the auto story pole dimensions will pick up the top of plate at the roof baseline height. You can usually manually drag the dimension to the correct top plate height and then manually enter "Top of Plate" or whatever in the corresponding story pole marker segment. Not ideal.

I have a workaround for this (that is also a PITA) that entails framing the walls with a flat ceiling first, then checking the  "Retain Wall Framing" option in the wall dbx's, then unchecking flat ceiling and building the roof trusses. This is fine until something changes in the walls that would need to be re-framed, you then have to change the ceiling back to flat in order to auto frame the walls or else they will re-frame to the roof baseline, so on and so forth.

It sounds like there are changes coming in X15 for framing with roof trusses, hopefully this behavior is also addressed. I'm just wondering if I am missing something, or if anyone out there has a better way of dealing with this in the meantime? Sample plan is attached, Thanks.

TEST PLAN 2.zip

One way to check is to repeatedly use the "delete surface" tool to in elevation view until your top plates are visible, then drag your dimension to snap to the top plate.

Assuming the corresponding wall is at "default top height" in the the wall dbx.

It could have something to do with your roof framing, I know when I frame a roof using scissor trusses with raised heels Chief will always built attic walls between my top plate and roof baseline and the auto story dimensions will only pick up the top plate of the offending attic walls. The only way around I've found to get the framing correct is to frame the walls with a flat ceiling first, and then retain the framing in those walls before adding my sloped ceiling and creating the trusses. Which is always fun when a door or window gets moved later...

2 hours ago, SHCanada2 said:

I assume geodetic? Have you been able to verify it against a surveyed point? how close was it? Because of it was accurate then that could eliminate the need to laser level measure.

 

And if the GPS position measurement was accurate to the inch, then that would be the ticket as one could just walk the property with the apple watch on a 5' stick

 

Now someone just needs to make a device that can be mounted on a stick and with the press of a button would simultaneously record the elevation & gps data along with an option to tag it with an audio recording, for example press button and speak "shoreline high water mark at northwest corner of property", and move on to your next point. Would be sweet.

I'll get back to you in about 3 years on my take on this one, but it would be really cool to see what some advanced chief users would do to for an as-built model of this!

I have this one, not exactly the one you're looking for. I'll see if I can find where I got this symbol a while back, I think they had other models available.

BILCO DOOR 58X97.calibz

1 hour ago, Chopsaw said:

I have messed around with a very similar situation of a wall framed on top of a couple of courses of CMU that looks really strange in a framing view without the concrete blocks visible.

 

Ideally you would assign the things you want to show in a framing view as framing but that just leads you into a huge mess.

 

I think I ended up making a duplicate that I could put on it's own layer which could be turned on and off as necessary.

Yes, and another situation is when you use stepped pony walls for a walkout basement foundation and end up with solid 2x walls in 3d framing view, or no wall with the foundation wall layer turned off. I'm sure there are workarounds but I haven't taken the time to try, and I haven't embraced the Floor Level 1 basement method at this point.

If it weren't for the Chieftalk community I would be much more likely to look at other software options. To me this community is an absolutely invaluable part of using and learning how to use CA to its full potential.

The support, help documentation, and videos that Chief provides are adequate and an important tool for figuring out the basics and then some, but the tips, tricks, and workarounds that the regular contributors on this forum provide have been crucial for learning to use CA more efficiently with much better end results (with a long ways to go) than what I was doing before I realized what a goldmine the Chieftalk community is. Many thanks and much gratitude to all the veteran contributors out there for sharing your hard earned knowledge and work with the rest of us!

That being said, I keep my SSA current and plan to keep doing so, but I don't love the subscription model that most software and even hardware seems to be heading these days, It seems like it usually ends up being a net negative for the end user. I understand the reasoning behind it for software, especially from a smaller company, but if things get too crazy I like to think I'm never too old to learn a new system.

Yes! This drives me nuts daily. Same with habitually pressing the space bar between commands in the cabinet dbx which apparently repeats the last command and usually splits an item that I didn't want to spilt, and then of course can't ctrl-z it to undo in cabinet dbx.

It looks very similar to this product: https://www.bridgersteel.com/flat-panels/shiplap

As for recreating the material in Chief, I'm not savvy enough to advise on that at this point, but I know it can be done.

Also see this thread:

Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but with a little modification to the macro Levis and Solver provided it shouldn't be too difficult to get what you're after.

I see that Amazon is releasing a similar product later this month called the Kindle Scribe. It looks like it'd be a little cheaper by the time you figure in the cost of the pen & case. Although you'd have be tied into the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem to use it.

I like the idea of a digital notepad with the look and feel of paper, I'll be keeping an eye on how these compare.

On 8/11/2022 at 11:51 AM, Dermot said:

We released an update to X14 (24.2.2.1) yesterday that should correct the issue with the program "freezing" or "locking up".

 

Please note that you may not receive an automatic update notification right away depending on your preference settings and when you last ran the program.  If you would like to get the update now, you can find it along with the update notes here:

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/updates.html

 

If you continue to experience any problems in X14, then please contact our technical support team:

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/

 

 

Thank you!! This update seems to have cured the freezing problems I've had with X14.

I had zero issues today with Chief open in plan view and at least one 3D view, plus a web browser and adobe acrobat, a situation which would cause totally random freeze ups before this update. Much appreciated.

I had the same experience when I upgraded to X13 last week, though my GeForce GTX 740 video card would get me through for another year before investing in a new PC. It turns out the shader model on my card is only 5.1 so it does not meet the 6.0 requirements. I found a GTX 1050 for a fairly reasonable price that I could get quickly. Installed that yesterday and everything is working great now.

It looks like you are probably having the same experience with the GTX 770.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gtx-770.c1856

Look at the "Graphics Features" section and it shows the shader model as 5.1. The shader model cannot be upgraded on a GPU.

So the "Max Shader Model" info in the X13 video card status dialog is not necessarily accurate for the Nvidia 7 series GPU's.