Work around no more print model?

[aschuster]

Hey everyone,

 

I'm a High School technology teacher and I teach an architecture course. I've been using chief architect for over a decade and we build models using foam core based on plan prints. In order to create our roofs, we used to use the print model feature.

 

Well unfortunately my superiors had the bright idea to update our software (which I did not approve of because I knew what would happen) and the print model feature is no longer available on the newer versions of chief architect. I tried chatgpt and according to AI, there doesn't seem to be a simple way to print the roof planes properly. This is to make a model, not to just print plans, so while Chat lead me to believe there is a way to bypass this issue, the roof planes did not actually provide us with an accurate pitch. Just a top view, like an orthographic, nothing that provides a true size. 

 

Is there a way to make a 3D model without using a 3D printer? I don't have a 3D printer, but even if I were to purchase one, I have 24 students and printing the roof for each student would take forever and seems costly. How can I get students to construct their roof without the print model feature? Thanks in advance!

 

Andrew

[Chrisb222]

2 hours ago, aschuster said:

Is there a way to make a 3D model without using a 3D printer?

 

Quite a while back I saw a discussion about how to use an orthopedic camera to view a projected roof plane in 2D. Think it was @Alaskan_Son

 

Maybe try a forum search.

[DBCooper]

I think there is a way, but it will be a bit of a pain because you will need to do it for each unique roof plane.

 

Start with an orthogonal full overview.  You will need to turn off everything you don't want to see.  You can do this by putting each roof plane on a custom layer and turning off all of the other roof planes and any other layers you don't want.

 

So the tricky part is setting up the camera angles so it is looking at the roof plane dead on.  If you open up the camera dialog and go to the "positioning" page, you can enter the camera angle and tilt angle manually.  You can figure these out using math, but hey, who really wants to do that?

 

Camera angle should be pretty easy since it is just the plan view angle looking at the roof plane from perpendicular to the wall.  If you have any walls that are at odd angles, you might need to go into your plan view and use the make parallel/perpendicular tool to make the camera point at the wall perpendicular to it.

 

The tilt angle is a little tricky but you can just open the roof plane dialog and check the box for "pitch in degrees" to get the actual roof angle.  Now if you set the tilt angle to (roof angle-90), I think it will always be dead on.

 

Now you should be able to print out this view to use for your model.  Just make sure that you use the same scale for all of them otherwise you will have a hard time putting together your model.

 

 

[Alaskan_Son]

31 minutes ago, Chrisb222 said:

 

Quite a while back I saw a discussion about how to use an orthopedic camera to view a projected roof plane in 2D. Think it was @Alaskan_Son

 

Maybe try a forum search.

 

 

Yeah, I think I made a video about it several years back.  I basically did as @DBCooperdescribed with a few minor tweaks.  It's mostly just about perfecting the process and being methodical about repeating.  Can go pretty quick.  I don't recall the most efficient method of how to consolidate a single roof plane.  I don't recall putting them all on different layers though.  Anyway, the most Most notable time saving thing I would recommend right off the top though is this:

 

Copy both the Pitch and the Baseline Angle from the roof plane DBX and then paste into the Camera's Positioning fields.  There are a couple different tricks you can use to copy and paste multiple values into multiple fields, but if you're using a Windows machine and have Clipboard History activated, you can simply simply select each value from the Roof Plane DBX one at a time, hitting Control + C to copy each time, and then back in the Camera DBX, hit Windows + V to select which value to paste into the appropriate field.  

[Alaskan_Son]

Here's another method:

1. Select Roof Plane and open Roof Plane DBX
2. Copy the Pitch (in Degrees) and hit Escape
3. Re-select Roof Plane and click Convert Selected to Symbol
4. Uncheck Add to Library, check Show Advanced, and click Okay
5. Navigate to 3D>Rotation, select the axis parallel to your baseline/perpendicular to your pitch, paste the Pitch value into the angle field, and click Rotate + or Rotate - to make the roof plane lie flat.
6. Navigate to the 2D Symbol tab and either click Generate Block or select "Always".  Click Okay.
7. Click in a blank area of your plan to place a copy of your roof plane.
8. Repeat for all other roof planes.
9. Print as desired.

A couple quick notes:

• You may or may not want to save a temp copy of your plan to change the Eves Cut setting to Square, to remove Soffits, to remove Fasica, and/or to reduce oof plane thickness to help eliminate little extra edge details that might show up.  
• You can optionally just work with the Generated CAD Blocks after the fact but I'll let you figure out the nuances of that on your own if you go that route.