Designing a building on skids

[llucas]

I want students to do a 4x4 skid, 2x6purlins with 5/8 CDX plywood as the floor. How do you start out without doing the foundation?

[MikePreble1]

Set up your floor system for the main floor, "0" level to be the 2x6 with 5/8 subfloor.

Draw the "house"

Don't need a foundation. (One of the "out of the box" notions of Chief is that what you draw is only a bunch of lines. It's not a house. It doesn't "need" a foundation. There's no gravity on the screen. It won't fall down.)

With that in mind, once the house is drawn (walls, windows, roof, doors, things inside, etc.) then, if it were to be built, you'd want to set it on something.

4x4s can then be drawn using the polyline solids, or CAD lines converted to polyline solids, etc. Just getting the 4x4s right would make for a nice lesson or two in class. Once the students get the hang of it, then they can start to use polyline solids, and CAD lines converted, to do a pile of things, such as build the entire building with polyline solids (a bit over the top, but certainly something that could be useful. A nice exercise is using plan view and 3D in combination to see what's happening.)
Mike

[llucas]

Thanks for the help on this, Mike.

[Tommy Blair]

As long as you don't need to frame the 1st floor floor joists, you don't need a foundation level.

[MikePreble1]

I added a foundation to this house (but I left it blank, so that Chief would recognize there was a foundation level, which then gives it the information to build floor framing.)

I then added polylines to make the three shapes. The ones on the right and left were drawn in backclipped cross section and then stretched in plan view.

The post and footing in the middle were drawn in plan view and the heights/dimensions (and the round shape) were all done in plan view, along with changing the materials of the post.

I then took a rendered overview and deleted some surfaces to show the framing I had built.

Mike