Dept of Sneaky Tricks

[Allen42acj]

Converting to symbol(wall item)

If you want to make a symbol from a door/window that sits in a wall.
Start with a 1 layer wall.The delete surface tool will get rid of all of it at once.

This example is a door from Chief.
I suppressed the casings and no door knob..

[dshall]

Plywood showing in cross section.... of course a section taken perpendicular to floor joist will not show the bottom surface of the plywood. I have begun drawing a psolid 3/4" thick with top at floor level to represent the plywood. Now in cross section it will show up. I also add a ply fill to it in plan so the extent of the ply diaphragm will be defined (transparent fill so floor joist will show up). I also put it on it's own layer so if I take a framing rendering overview it will not cover up the floor joist, I simply turn that layer off.

[dshall]

Pix attached

[Allen42acj]

If you don't have ceilings on the bottom of your rafters,uncheck that box.
Your elevations will look cleaner.

And now you can see the rafters better in a render view..

[Adrean]

To render a design of a top-off view, with unfinished rooms:

• Complete and furnish your design
• Create a custom Layer Set that matches your Camera View, but with the Roof Planes, Ceiling Planes, and Ceiling Surfaces layers turned OFF. Turn on the Framing, Wall layer -- This will give a nice dollhouse view but with your gable walls and all floors.

• For unfinished spaces, create a wall type where the "drywall" surface of the exposed caviting is a completely transparent material.
• Build the wall framing. You can delete framing in areas you don't want/need it to show.
• Now Render....

[HumbleChief]

Cool, Thanks very much for that.

[sherpa_jones]

Begin by drawing your exterior walls. Select the wall that you want to slope and make it invisible. Draw a roof plane over this wall and drag the overhang to where the baseline starts. In the roof DBX, your baseline and fascia height should now be the same. Lock the pitch and adjust your baseline to the bottom of the wall, usually 0. Lock the baseline and adjust pitch to degrees, and enter 80 degrees. Enter the rafter depth you will require; note this is your wall stud depth.

Set the following in the roof dbx:
-square cut
-no boxed eaves, soffits, gutter
-no fascia, sub fascia, no trim to soffits
-materials you want

In a camera view, adjust the ridge height to match your wall height. This can be verified in the roof dbx.

Create a 3d symbol of your window in another plan by following Allen's steps in post #16 of this thread. Make sure the wall you use in this step represents the same thickness as your roof plane.

Import the 3d symbol into your plan. Open the symbol and rotate the x axis to match the slope of your wall. Move the symbol into position so the casing on each side appears to sit against the roof/ceiling surfaces. You may need to get creative to get the right positioning.

In camera view, draw a skylight inside the window and change it to a roof opening. Stretch the boundaries of the opening until they are hidden in the window casing.

Draw an invisible wall along the ridge of the roof plane. With the new room definition, remove the ceiling.

That is it!

[Allen42acj]

I am posting this from one of Warren's

I prefer, for several reasons, to keep project logs separate from other project documents. There's an old trick for turning a plain text file into a log. Create a new text file. Type .LOG on the first line (case sensitive), save and close the file. Each time you re-open the file, a new line will be automatically started with time and date already entered.

I generally access logs from desktop shortcuts, but occasionally add in a text hyperlink on the first floor plan.
__________________
Warren Hirsch

[Allen42acj]

From Doug parks..

All the features of X1 are there.

We have simply filled out the matrix of possible views so that orthographic views are available for perspective.

There are two ways to zoom and they can be compared to what happens in a digital camera.

Field of view zooming is the kind of zooming you get when holding your camera and using the optical zoom. Panning by moving the camera is similar.

The other form of zooming is similar to what you get after you take your digital photo. Or for those that are a little older "dark room" zooming. In this form of zooming you are really just magnifying the picture that was already taken. Panning in this mode is simply moving around looking at the scene.

The second form is what we find most customers prefer and is therefore the default.

This explosion of options is probably a bit confusing to get used to, but there is no reason that you can't get the same results as X1 and there are a bunch of options that you didn't have in X1.

The distortion you are seeing is simply how perspective works. While we could prevent you from zooming out to see that we feel that it is better to err on the side of allowing things rather than preventing them.
__________________
Doug Park
Principal Software Architect
Chief Architect, Inc.

[DougM]

Good one Allen, works excellant......once you get the spacing and line weight the way you want it, look great.

[Allen42acj]

If your making details for your library,add the scale you want to send it to layout at under it.
Adjust the layout box to hide it if you want.
Saves time trying to figure out what size after..

[joey3032]

I have posted this one before...but, when doing electrical schedules, if you use the appliance outlets from the library, they will show in the schedule with the information pre-filled in the description box rather than just adding them to the other outlets of similar types.

[louis]

A sneaky way to use textures.

http://lfcompany.com/louis/chief/Wallpaper_border/

This video was first posted in 2002.

[DougM]

Louis, I use the same method for doing tile work. Works great.

[Allen42acj]

It matters where you click on a dimension string to edit it.
If you want to change where you are getting the dimension from, adding a new point or changing the length of an extension.