Exposed Ceiling Beams Revisited--Car Decking

[Zowie]

X1: Hi all, I have a few questions about ceiling planes?

1. Why can't we turn off ceiling planes to expose joists or in this case, car decking beams? Ceiling planes remain even when unchecked in render.

2. Why in FLOOR DEFAULTS is there a checkbox for DEFAULT TO NO CEILING? Default to no ceiling doesn't seem to delete ceiling either.

Nothing gets rid of ceiling.

The Standard Workaround:
If I use the standard workaround for exposing beams: building platform to beam thickness then changing platform thickness to expose beams, I'm assuming my wall plate heights will be screwed up.

It would be nice if we could set lowered ceiling to a negative height to expose as much beam as we want for any room.

Is this workaround still the only way to expose ceiling beams?

Thanks, Zowie

[ambrozac]

Zowie,

1. The Ceiling Plane layer will turn on/off manually drawn ceiling planes. You may instead, want to turn off "Ceiling Surfaces", but it will turn off in all rooms. Materials will still reflect in the Materials List.

2. The "Default to no ceiling", probably will not generate a ceiling in a new room, and may not remove an existing ceiling (never used this). Select the Room, open it's dbx, go to the Structure Tab and uncheck "Ceiling Over This Room".

[Zowie]

HI, Thanks for your suggestion, but I don't see that it works, let's make sure we're on the same page:

I want to rid ceiling surface of fl1 and show fl2 floor surface (or just white) with exposed joists. (room with no ceiling, just joists and surface above)

Ceiling Present toggle only works for exposing a gable roof, not exposing joists between floors.

Unchecking ceiling surface SHOULD just rid ceiling surface so we could see the joists and floor surface of the room above, but it doesn't, it gets rid of the ceiling and the floor surface above when viewed from below.

My question is why not? This is a common issue with asbuilts and it's not easy to work around in Chief. In fact there doesn't seem to be any good way to show joist and floor surface of the floor above without screwing up cross section.

Thanks for checking into this with me, please let me know if I'm missing something.

Zowie.

[billemery]

Here's what I do; Build your framing, then raise the ceiling height in the room dbx by the thickness of the framing. Remember to turn on your framing layers when you view it in vector or render views.

[Tommy Blair]

Zowie,

You are probably not going to have the best of two worlds here. Yes, you can show exposed framing on both floors. Will it mess up the cross section?...yes. You would have to fix the cross section in cad.

A quick run through for X1. Build your two floors and put a roof on the 2nd floor. When building floor framing, at 1st floor tab, build framing for floor 2 and then build roof framing. You do realize that once you build framing, it stays where it's at until you rebuild framing right? Then, to see roof rafters, open 2nd floor room dbx>remove ceiling. Open roof planes and in general tab change rafter depth to 1" or whatever. Take a camera view and in the layer options for that camera> turn on roof framing. The rafters are now exposed. Do the same with the 1st floor except you'll have to go to the 2nd floor room dbx and in the structure tab, change the floor structure to 1 or 2 or whatever. Leave sub floor at 3/4". Take a camera on the first floor and once again open the layer options for the camera and turn on floor framing. This is how I do it. Yes, a cross section will not look correct but you can fix it how you want it in a cad detail.

[Tommy Blair]

I will try it your way Bill.

[Tommy Blair]

It does work that way too for the 1st floor Bill. Thanks. I think you'll have to do it my way to show the rafters of the roof.

[billemery]

Tommy,
I think we're using essentially the same method.

It is a work arround in that Chief will not do it directly; but I'm finding satisfaction in making the program do what I want it to do.

You'll notice if you look carefully, that the wall framing and plate heights work here, so there is no need to mess with it in cross sections.

[ambrozac]

HI, Thanks for your suggestion, but I don't see that it works, let's make sure we're on the same page:

I want to rid ceiling surface of fl1 and show fl2 floor surface (or just white) with exposed joists. (room with no ceiling, just joists and surface above)

You're correct, we were not on the same page. I didn't know you had a 2nd floor.....CA doesn't have floor/ceiling layers, but does leave a spacing for the subfloor, in cross sections. I click outside the building, making a room polyline, convert to a polyline solid, place into the subfloor height/thickness/position and assign it the subfloor material. If you use the Materials List, you need to choose whether to use the polyline solid, or thru the Room dbx, but not both.

[Tommy Blair]

Tommy,
I think we're using essentially the same method.

It is a work arround in that Chief will not do it directly; but I'm finding satisfaction in making the program do what I want it to do.

You'll notice if you look carefully, that the wall framing and plate heights work here, so there is no need to mess with it in cross sections.

You're right Bill but your way of doing the 1st floor was better than mine. I did a quickie plan and probably should have looked at doing the 1st floor closer.