Trouble With Attic Walls In Gable Within A Gable, And How To Expose A Truss In Gable End

[Fun2Learn]

Hello everyone. I have been doing more experimenting with Chief  (before I try to do the same with Softplan to decide, hopefully, which to buy.) I am pretty comfortable now with the very, very basics. However, I can't seem to find any info in the CA  "help" topics (and I googled on this forum, too) on how to:

 

1. Show an exposed truss at the end of a porch gable.

            I couldn't find any trusses in the library other than the framing ones, so I thought I'd try there first. I went to the attic plan and tried to put one in and tried to click and unclick everything in the box that might let it show up, but no luck. It is still invisible in 3-D.

 

  2.  Where could I find  a nice-looking truss for exposed applications? Would I have to make it up with moulding parts? I saw a bracket in the "columns" library that I thought might work if I could enlarge it, turn it sideways and duplicate on both sides. I couldn't even figure out how to turn it parallel with the gable end! I assume you can't import items (like from sketch up) with the trial CA, or can you?

 

3. I am having trouble with the attic walls for both these double gables (a smaller gable within the larger gable). At first they were fine when I did the usual ceiling over the porch. But when I eliminated the dropped ceiling over the porch and opened up the gable end of the smaller gable, the attic wall from the larger gable was still floating inside the porch. I went to the attic plan and tried to fix it, but it did not work. I tried shrinking it manually in 3-D but that didn't work well. I ended up now with the one attic wall completely deleted, and not sure what to do. I ended up, by mistake, manually stretching the back attic wall, and you can see that the "bump out" portion of the house now has a ceiling exposed to the elements! 

(This is based off of an existing house that has a poorly designed, "wimpy" little  porch -- I just had some ideas for a front porch that I wanted to try just to give me a project to practice on.)

 

Any ideas how to fix this? Thanks so much.

 

I have so many more questions, (as you can see, I couldn't get the porch slab to cover the foundation wall completely and have a funny lip there) but I will post those separately.

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[tommy1]

I usually just use a polyline solid in an elevation for the exposed truss. Here's a quickie example.

 

[Kbird1]

Trusses are auto generated between a roof plane and ceiling plane , so pretty easy to draw once the Roof is built , they build to the presets in the Build Framing dialog >Trusses , you can make all members 6" ( or as desired).

 

You may need to turn on Roof Trusses in the Display Options if you are not seeing them ..you need to do this in each view eg plan, elevation,3D , once on , they stay on till you turn them off.

 

check the Knowledge base (KB) there are tutorials there I used ....  videos are only if you have SSA I think? but Scott Hall has some on ChiefTutor too I think.... 

 

yes he does ...http://www.chieftutor.com/scotthall2/

[GeneDavis]

I'll bet you want a timber truss in that porch gable, and to do this, you will need to manually build it with solids of some type.  The roof trusses auto-generated by Chief are not what you want.

[DRAWZILLA]

I have taken a truss as a template and changed the members in size to do this. There also is a "timber truss 1" in the lib.

[CJSpud]

Chief will only "auto-generate" a roof truss as you do it "manually" by dragging (from eave to eave or ....)  while in roof truss mode and, as noted by others, when you have a roof present.  Once you have one truss drawn, it can be copied as needed for your plan.  Individual trusses can be altered to be end trusses (gable trusses); setup for energy heels, dropped gables, etc. in the dialog box for the truss.  But you probably already had all that figured out.

 

For "open trusses", I do as others by creating them with polyline solids.  I also custom create the connecting plates with Chief's CAD tools per the engineers spec's.  Although these may be shown in 3D camera views, the details of how the plates are to be built are shown via CAD details for each different plate required.  Here's some CAD details for an open timber truss for a recent project: