davidstvz

Press the ` key (i.e. the ~ key) to open the layer options and make sure both "Rooms" and "Rooms, Interior Area" are checked (make sure "Rooms, Standard Area" is not checked). Now you'll see interior footage below each room label (if a room label isn't showing, select the room and press Ctrl+E to open its object properties and make sure that "show room label" is checked). The footage is rounded up or down to the nearest whole numbers and doorways aren't included (an interior doorway typically has about 1 square foot of flooring in it). If you want the total area for the current floor, you can draw a polyline around the entire house. This is the safest way to get a final verification of the footage, but for a quick glance at the total footage as you design, you need to hijack the "living area" label. To hijack the label, you must click and edit each room which is normally NOT part of living area (such as garages and porches) and set their areas to be included into the living area calculation. Do this again with Ctrl+E and choose the first option under "living area" which forces a room to be included in the total even if it would normally be excluded. Be careful using the living area label because by default it does not include the exterior wall siding. This is probably desirable for anything but brick, but if there's any brick on the house you need to take special steps to include that. To do that accurately, you also need to know how thick your brick walls are. The default thickness of a standard exterior brick wall is 8-7/16" but my house has 9-1/2" walls (the brick ledge is bigger to accommodate more of an air gap and some underlayments). You can set the program to include exterior finishes, but then the sections with non-brick finishes won't be recorded accurately. You can fix *that* by changing the thickness of sidings that aren't brick to 0" thick (which may have other negative effects; but at least your living area will be accurate). The other thing to watch out for is that porches, depending on how you define their invisible walls, may not be calculated correctly. This is why it's safer to use a polyline.

If it's completely gone because you deleted it, you can make it reappear by running a plan check (you can just cancel the check after starting the process). I had HD interiors 2015 and used it until this year. In that older version, the label will also be moved whenever the house is changed. It's always placed below the lowest part of the house in the center. If you have done what I used to do and marked off the lot and driveway and sidewalks with room dividers, those might be counting as rooms and the label will be moved all the way below those as well.

Given the limited information you're able to provide, my only advice is to buy a new computer. EDIT: I mean, you might also try viewing windows error logs. What's likely happening is that the program is starting and immediately crashing without producing any error. A graphics card issue is likely culprit. You could try installing the latest GPU drivers if you haven't and make sure your OS is fully up to date.

What CA products will do is automatically create a sloped wall (or is that a sloped ceiling?) whenever a roof plane intersects a room. To get the roof to cut into a wall, you have a few options. Since you only want to model this one room, create a dummy first floor. In the build roof dialog, look for the option "ignore top floor". Make the first floor big enough that it creates a nice big roof. Now build your second floor room with the walls "too close" to the roof and observe how the roof cuts into the room. Now you can just play with the first floor to adjust where the roof cuts in, and model the room on the second floor as needed. If the roof slope isn't right, click a first floor walls and press "ctrl + e" top edit the wall properties. In this dialog, look for "roof" on the left which allows you to control some roof settings for any roof plane that emanates from this wall. Make sure auto-roof is still on so that the roof regenerates.

Where are you getting the "actual" measurements? Are you getting that from summing up the individual measurements along the outside wall? If that's the case, you can see why there's a discrepancy. The last measures at the outside walls include the exterior walls, while the inside measurements you show don't include it. Also the series of measures you show along the outside don't include 3 interior walls. The space marked 287 1/2" is accurate which you can observe by counting the grid spaces.

I can't help with your specific request, but cabinet volume seems like a bad way to compare the utility of two different cabinet layouts. Even if the new cabs are much taller, linear feet of wall cabs is probably still closer to what you want for wall cab utility. Extra tall cabs or a second layer might help make up for some missing lower cabs as you might be able to store some rarely used things high that used to be stored low... of course, some things fit into a 2' deep base cab that don't fit into a 1' deep wall cab. So again, volume is really a poor way to compare.

The camera view snapshots for PDF are based on the resolution of your current camera view. The resolution is limited by the resolution of your physical screen. So with create view from PDF, you're never going to have all that great of an image. The image is identical to using default settings for export picture. If you want much higher quality, you'll need to export picture and increase the default resolution to something higher. Try 4k for starters (3840x2160). Also, you may want to export as .PNG because .JPG files use lossy compression which can also look blurry when you zoom in. I don't see any options in HD Pro to change the compression ratio for the save process. PNG uses lossless compression, but it will take a lot more space for 3D renders (takes very little space for plan view exports though). After you have the files you want separately created, you'll need to use other software to incorporate them into a PDF. Be careful however, as that software can compress images during its own import process.

I had the same problem rotating a "closed" geometric shape (a cube) in the 3D view. I was trying to create simple brick ledges for my windows.

Assuming this feature is in 2020 version, if you create a 3D perspective view then click the menu "File -> Export" you'll see 3 options for exporting 3D models (DAE, STL and chief 3D viewer files). If you export a DAE file, it can be used with TwinMotion which is powered by a popular 3D engine used in video games called Unreal Engine. It definitely produces more complex lighting and shadows (based on lights and shadows you've set up in HD Pro). You can download a trial version for free (which I think has unlimited testing use; you're just not supposed to use it commercially). If you need to buy it, it's only a couple hundred. You can search on this forum, the other chief forum (chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com) and the Internet in general for Twin Motion info. I don't know too much about it myself yet. I'm sure there are other programs you can load the exported 3D files into, but Twin Motion is what I hear about the most.

Rotating the plan view only changes the way you look at the plan... it's like as if you held your head sideways or rotated your monitor. So when you copy and paste from one plan to another, it's as if nothing is different (because nothing is different). Rotating a simple 1 story building with automatic foundation and roof in 90 degree increments shouldn't be a big problem, but generally you should rotate the plot plan not the building. Since your garage and house are on separate plans, you'll have to rotate or redraw one of them. So how do you rotate? To rotate objects within the plan rather than just your view of the plan, select an object and look for the triangle "handle" associated with it. You'll see several square handles for changing width and depth, the one in the center for moving an object and the triangle will be off to the side. Grab the triangle and drag in a circular motion to rotate in 15 degree increments (which is controlled by your angle snap settings). To rotate an entire structure, make sure all layers are turned on then drag a selection rectangle around it to select all, and look for that same triangular rotation handle. It's as simple as that. Then copy/paste. Note that if your selection includes a sun angle, copy/paste will be disabled until you deselect it.

That is all we can do sometimes. And I didn't think it was you for what it's worth.

Note there is at least one thing in HD Pro that you cannot copy/paste: a sun angle CAD line. If you select one as part of a large group, the copy/paste option will be disabled for the whole group until you unselect the sun angle, or make a new selection that doesn't include it. So if you ever notice that you can't copy/paste, that could be the problem. EDIT: I need to disable notifications for votes. Why would anyone down vote this?

Can HD Pro automatically generate an angled exterior brick window sill? I know I can create one manually if I need to using geometric shapes.

The laptop looks fine. You have an SSD (getting a normal hard drive is the biggest mistake people still make) and plenty of memory and GPU power. Bigger and higher resolution display is nice, but it makes the laptop harder to move around. If it's just making a short trip from office to car, car to house, then maybe upsize. If you're going to lug it around for longer walks, maybe not. Personally, I would get a nice monitor for my primary work locations (and maybe keyboard and mouse) and just dock it, so the screen wouldn't be a major concern.

Actually, the countertop polyline is working really well so far. I just made an orthographic full overview and am viewing the roof top down and dragging the counter edge until I can just barely see it. I have it set at 8 feet above the attic "floor" (which is the top of the finished ceiling) to account for joist and rafter thickness. This is good enough since it doesn't have to be exact.

I want to mark the areas in my attic which have 7+ feet of clearance from the top of the joists to the bottom of the rafters. I can think of some ways to do this including manually measuring in elevation views, but that would be slow. Another idea: I could use a custom countertop set at a height of 7 feet above the joists then adjust the edges in 3D until they just touch the roof rafters (then trace it with a normal polyline). Can anyone think of a better way?

No, the ceiling height and wall height doesn’t change. The eaves, fascia and soffit are at the same height in the two sections and continue seamlessly where the roof changes. This seems to be the purpose of having the 9/12 “skirt” at the bottom of the 12/12 section. It means all the eaves are formed from 9/12 roofing and can connect seamlessly.

I did and just got the reply. They've said that manual roof planes are "best" in this situation. Apparently there is no work around aside from what I've already done.

I'd like to do a hip roof with pitch changes along a single exterior wall. Can this be done without manual roof edits (using wall directives, or roof baseline polylines, or some other technique I don't know of)? I've attached an example image of what it should look like. The ceilings are the same (9') throughout. The low roof is 9 over 12 and the higher part has a 9 over 12 skirt around the edges to match, then changes to 16 over 12 starting 0.5" from the baseline. As you can see, the 16 over 12 section has 4 main roof planes (plus the skirt) but the 9 over 12 section intersects the higher section and has only 3 planes. I've tried making this in 4 different ways and the last two ways almost work. 1) If you try to simply split the long exterior walls in half and give different pitch directives, the auto roof chooses one of the two pitches and ignores the other, so this doesn't work. 2) If you make two roof groups using a room divider, you end up with two entirely separate roofs (two points; the lower hip roof isn't joined to the higher roof because it's in a separate group). 3) If you make two roof groups as above and make roof baseline polylines, you can change the interior pitches and cause the lower roof to intersect by overlapping the interior portion of the roof baseline polylines. Set the 9 over 12 section to "against wall" and the high section to 9/12 and 16/12 to match the exterior walls, and manually intersect them by moving the "against wall" baseline into the higher roof. This works except the lower roof extends into the attic of the higher roof which isn't ideal since I'd like to visualize the attic space properly. 4) If you manually create two separate baseline polylines in the same group via copy/paste, you can set the separate roof directives as above, but since they're in the same roof group, if the outer lines are flush, a single pitch is chosen for the wall again (just as in case 1). If you separate the baseline polyline edges by a fraction of an inch along the exterior wall it creates separate planes as intended, but it creates a discontinuity along the eaves that you can see in the 3D view (pictured) and it causes the shingles over the 16/12 hip to extend all the way down whereas they should stop around 0.5" from the baseline.

In case anyone is interested, the documentation for RBL (Roof baseline polylines) is much better for chief architect than for home designer pro. Here’s a good instruction page and a training video I found: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00543/utilizing-roof-baseline-polylines.html https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/706/roof-baseline-polylines.html

You may want to attach the plan file to a post. Someone will load it up and fix it or offer suggestions.

Here's the plan. RoofBaselines.plan

I can upload a plan either late tonight or tomorrow morning. You don’t really need elevations through. Rooflines should all be at the height required by 10 foot walls/ceilings, except the front “stoop” which has a 12’ ceiling and roofline to match, and the section between garage and stoop which is at 11 feet. Roof pitches are all 9/12 except (assume the top of the plan is north) east and west facing planes are 12/12 over the garage, over the front stoop and over the main body of the house (so back porch is all 9/12; and the section connecting garage to house is 9/12). Also, the 12/12 sections I just mentioned all begin with a 9/12 pitch for about 18 inches before switching to 12/12. The top down view of the roof I posted is accurate except doesn’t include the 9/12 at the bottom of the 12/12 sections. I’ve since added that using the upper pitch feature. Really though, just make a a long rectangular “house” with two different roof pitches along the same wall if you can. That’s the main thing I’d like to see if it can be done.

I guess what’s odd is that they set the bounding box to 30” wide by default. But some people will want more space and codes could even change. I wish the toilet object was simply it’s actual width and there was another method for establishing clearance.

Oddly, the width and depth of toilet objects includes some space around the toilet. For simplicity, I just set mine to 3’ wide to represent the width of the space I want for my toilet. You could use the tape measure to measure the actual toilet and shrink the size an inch or so at a time until it actually matches a real toilet. Then you just need to be careful to make sure the space it sits in is the size you want.