Anyone know room structure heights really well....I don't, 12yrs and I still don't.

[zowie123]

Hi All,

Once again I find myself at wits end trying to rectify floor heights--and all the floors are level.  

 

I've set default height, floor thicknesses, room heights, match properties for each floor, lock floor bottom or top, I've started from the top of the building and worked my way down, then the bottom of the building and up. I still end up with floor height anomalies--a slab floor bumped down, 12years, fighting floor height changes. 

 

I would love to conference--screen share with someone who could enlighten me as to where the issue is and how to avoid the problem. Please let me know if you can help. I have JoinMe if anyone is interested please send me your number and a time to connect.  

 

Thanks very much.  

Cheers, Barry

 

  

[Michael_Gia]

You most probably have some room definitions with varying floor structure. 

Example, living room has 11-7:8” truss-joists with 5/8” plywood and then maybe your bathroom has 14” I-joists with 3/4” plywood. (Floor finish thickness doesn’t matter).

 

So even if you diligently went through floor defaults per floor, when you change room type and the floor strcuctue of the room is different than the overall floor default then you have a real bad day. 

[zowie123]

I agree, I will check it once again.  Thanks for your feedback. 

[HumbleChief]

Barry, I've been fighting that structure dbx for 20 years and can offer absolutely no help. Post the plan and there should be plenty of help and I'd love to see what can be done.  Good luck

[glennw]

Barry,

Are you trying to do this in only plan view?

My advice is to tile a plan and a section view (with some vertical dimensions), or even a 3D view using the Cross Section Slider.

This makes it a lot easier to see what is going on with the various levels.

You can even do the editing in the section/3D view. Toggle on Select Room Before Wall in 3D to make it a lot easier - especially to see what happens when you drag a floor down, for instance.

You can use drag/Tab to move floors a fixed distance.

[zowie123]

Thanks all for your input.  \

 

Mr. Solver, Thank you for your offer to help.  I'm posting the plan with the hopes you can tell me how not to get into this quandary or how to get out of it.  

 

Three Issues:

1. The Balcony fascia disappeared on the existing main house

2. All the ceilings disappeared (trouble shooting that lead me to making sure all the walls were aligned and there were no conflicts with the floors, that's where I ran into frustrations with...

3. Floor height resolutions.

 

 

The floors heights are:

2nd FC125"

1st FC128"

Basement FC 84"

 

Thank you,

Barry x11

 

Victorian Remod and ADU.zip

[glennw]

Barry,

One at a time.

1. The balcony fascia disappeared because the wall definition for the railing consists of only 1 framing layer.

The balcony fascia gets it's material from the wall definition.

So...you can add an external cladding layer to the Deck Railing/Fence_2 and it will fill in the balcony fascia with that material (Soft Green?).

 

Or, if you already had an external cladding layer in the wall definition, you could open the wall dbx and on the Materials panel, change the External Wall Material to Soft Green.

This is what happened to the deck on the front house which uses an Interior Railing_3 wall type with Drywall as it's external layer, but the Exterior Wall Material has been changed to Soft Green in the Materials panel.

 

Make sense?

I will have a look at the other problems a bit later.  

[joey_martin]

The pre-cut studs threw me at first, but just briefly. I actually find that they make good sense. What specifically is throwing you?

[HumbleChief]

Hey Barry. Couple things. Second floor, floor heights vary between '0' and 1/8"; choose one, it will allow your first floor ceiling heights to be adjusted if needed.. Also your ceilings are gone because there's nothing spec'd for a ceiling in the couple rooms I checked. Just check the default box (ceiling finish) to get your 5/8" drywall back for the ceilings in those rooms. 

 

Different floor heights on the third floor as well. Set them all to default (match properties? or one at a time )and work your way DOWN to the basement setting all floor heights the same, if that's what you intend, then you'll at least have chance of getting your floor heights right.

 

The match properties tool has that cool new marquee select tool that you can apply properties to all rooms at once by marquee selecting them - VERY nice.

[tommy1]

10 hours ago, glennw said:

Barry,

Are you trying to do this in only plan view?

My advice is to tile a plan and a section view (with some vertical dimensions), or even a 3D view using the Cross Section Slider.

This makes it a lot easier to see what is going on with the various levels.

You can even do the editing in the section/3D view. Toggle on Select Room Before Wall in 3D to make it a lot easier - especially to see what happens when you drag a floor down, for instance.

You can use drag/Tab to move floors a fixed distance.

Barry, Glenn is right. When I have to deal with varying floor heights, it's a total must for me to tile the plan view and a back-clip section view so I can view the changes as I make them. The back-clip tool is probably the most important to for me to use for trouble shooting things.

[robdyck]

Another helpful idea is to build a template of grid lines (stacked vertically) for use in elevation and section views. Make it really clear in this template where each floor assembly is located by using a polyline with a transparent fill. Place this grid template on its own layer and copy and paste it into every saved section and elevation view for an easy visual reference.

[HumbleChief]

Great advice as always but this might be a pretty simple problem - unless I'm missing something...

 

 

[robdyck]

Nice demo of the match properties tool! I'll be using that more often!

[zowie123]

Hey thanks all you guys!  

 

Larry the video is great, thank you very much, and Glenn the Railing outer surface trick I will try, thanks!  Thank you all for your input.   I have 3 32" monitors and use crossections and plan views and every trick in the book to monitor Chief's squirrly tendencies.  

 

Larry, good to know you agree that starting from the top is the preferred methodology.  And thanks for seeing that my ceiling was zeroed out.  I must have matched properties of a room that had that off.

 

I've been doing almost exactly what you show, except I'd end up with that 1/8" either in the basement or second floor.  The 1/8 even shows up in floor defaults after I've set them to whole inches.  Please let me know if that 1/8" is still around after you've done your magic. 

 

I'm going to try once again with fresh eyes and the new found confidence that it should work.

 

Thanks again for sharing and proving that with enough diligence and workarounds perfection in Chief is possible.  

 

Cheers, 

Barry

 

 

 

[HumbleChief]

25 minutes ago, zowie123 said:

Please let me know if that 1/8" is still around...

Seems to be holding OK with the steps shown in the vid but no guarantees that it will hold and I've seen MUCH squirrelier behavior from Chief.

 

Also see Micheal_Gia's post above. I checked your plan and it looks OK but sometimes a room def structure will over ride a floor structure, "then you have a real bad day." Good luck,...

[zowie123]

I see where it was going wrong, the ceiling finish unchecked was throwing off all the numbers.  Akk!  Has ceiling..damn.  Thanks again for your help.  Cheers, B

[HumbleChief]

Just now, zowie123 said:

I see where it was going wrong, the ceiling finish unchecked was throwing off all the numbers.  Akk!  Has ceiling..damn.  Thanks again for your help.  Cheers, B

Nice when a plan comes together...I almost never know what I screwed up but somehow struggle to a solution. Glad I could help...

[zowie123]

Somehow one ceiling got unchecked and I must have replicated it with match properties, the exponential downfall of match properties:)  Note to self, don't work more than 12hrs a day.  

[Ridge_Runner]

1 minute ago, zowie123 said:

Note to self, don't work more than 12hrs a day.  

I hear ya on that one!

[Richard_Morrison]

On 2/20/2019 at 6:25 PM, zowie123 said:

12years, fighting floor height changes. 

"Hi, I'm Barry. I'm a Chiefaholic." "Hi, Barry...."

 

I've got my twenty-year chip, and the structure DBX is something that I still struggle with all the time, too. I appreciate the improvements in X11 to try to help (which is the first time in many years that improvements have been made in this area), but it really shouldn't be this hard and non-intuitive after all this time. And this isn't even a split-level! Some setting, buried a few DBX's down, is unchecked and is screwing up everything, or a wall is just slightly out of alignment, or you really need an invisible wall under the one above, or a default got checked or unchecked (there's a default for that?) and it's going to consume hours of your time trying to chase the problem down. (After cussing, I start thinking I should have started this project in ArchiCAD if it's going take this long, and then the next "easy" project comes along, and I optimistically think, "What could possibly go wrong with this one?" heheh) At least, that's the way it feels. The "room-based" approach is Chief's biggest strength and also its biggest weakness. I have never had such a love-hate relationship with any other software.

[Michael_Gia]

+1 Richard

 

The lure of Chief is its efficiency in how fast you can go from your client’s floorplan idea scribbled on a napkin to a Camera View complete with floor finish and mouldings, right in front of his eyes. Also cabinetry and how quick you can whip up a kitchen, live is another big advantage of Chief over Archicad.  

PBR or even the Standard View in Chief is just good enough to make using Archicad’s rendering pointless in as far as it would take to get a similar render. 

 

I also have to include Archicad’s insane inability to select a wall and then click on a dimension to change the wall’s position. With all of its power and seemingly limitless capabilities it still doesn’t have editable temporary dimensions!

wtfffff.....

 

These features are the “crack” that Chief offers, that keep us coming back. X11 has some great improvements. 

 

...in my opinion. 

[TheKitchenAbode]

2 hours ago, Richard_Morrison said:

The "room-based" approach is Chief's biggest strength and also its biggest weakness.

 

Just might be another reason why CA should allow us to "lock" rooms, at least one would get a warning/notification if something was going to change.

[HumbleChief]

3 hours ago, Richard_Morrison said:

... but it really shouldn't be this hard and non-intuitive after all this time. ... I have never had such a love-hate relationship with any other software.

The structure DBX has to form the basis of everything that the program revolves around and is near impossible to change in a meaningful way. I've learned to live with it but not how it is designed to work. I've railed against its design and function for years, created videos showing absolutely inexplicable behavior yet it remains both the bedrock foundation and the Achilles heel of Chief.

 

There's so much crazy in the structure DBX I think it just goes unnoticed over time. If you go to the foundation level of a mono slab there's a check box for "roof over this room" - I rest my case.

[SNestor]

I don't do a lot of "split level" homes...or even homes with all sorts of level changes. Just not that popular in "flat as a pancake" Indiana.  But...none the less, I don't find the structure DBX that difficult to work with. Oh...occasionally I've wanted to take a stick of dynamite to the software...but, mostly it works and I can figure things out.  I doubt there is a piece of residential software on the market that doesn't have similar issues.

 

Actually...the stair tool is what normally brings out my frustration with Chief.  Again in X11 the guru's at Chief throw us a little bone of improvement with the hope that it'll keep us happy for 2 more years.  And...it probably will.  I'll just design ranch homes...

[HumbleChief]

12 minutes ago, SNestor said:

I don't do a lot of "split level" homes...or even homes with all sorts of level changes. Just not that popular in "flat as a pancake" Indiana.  But...none the less, I don't find the structure DBX that difficult to work with. Oh...occasionally I've wanted to take a stick of dynamite to the software...but, mostly it works and I can figure things out.  I doubt there is a piece of residential software on the market that doesn't have similar issues.

 

Actually...the stair tool is what normally brings out my frustration with Chief.  Again in X11 the guru's at Chief throw us a little bone of improvement with the hope that it'll keep us happy for 2 more years.  And...it probably will.  I'll just design ranch homes...

I think Chief's structure DBX just fits in to some people's brains and the logic is apparent. Others like myself find the logic baffling to say the least.