tundra_dweller

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.