Keith_K

You were right about that particular wall type, Mick. The odd thing is that it also happens sometimes to the solid grey wall you can see in my initial attachment which only has one layer (see first attachment below). Yet when I do a "reverse layers" on this single layer wall it also corrects itself. But I have now learned what to look for when it happens in the future and the solution was supplied by an end user without my having aim it at or complain about it to anyone else. Which is what I thought these forums were all about. My dimension defaults are as pictured in the second attachment below below. I wait for the wise and the experienced to tell whether they are right or wrong.

I am The Chosen One. My brief is to keep people busy. Thank you again. I haven't used any of the room label choices in the software so the calculation of total area should be OK. Well, one hopes so anyway. I can't imagine anything worse than sitting with a little calculator doing the sums for more than 100 rooms! And while I'm here...as said my brief is to keep people busy, not to correct their use of the English language It's "you'RE keeping me busy..."

Yay! Thank you for that link. I wonder why my "How to create road markings" in the help search box didn't bring it up? One would think that "road markings" would have been the key.

It is automatically generated. However I am busy with an office block not a domestic construction and would like this to read "Ground Floor" and "First Floor" on my plan. I can open the object and change it to read thus but after closing the plan and coming back to it later it has been changed back to "Living Area". I thought that maybe I could lock the object so that it doesn't change between sessions but I can't seem to find anything under what I think it might be called by the software. Suggestions please. (My topic posting roll has now come to an end. This is the last question for the day )

I might be on a roll with questions today so please bear with me. I have done the terrain arrangement and now I would like to do some road markings (i.e. yellow cross hatching to show disabled parking bays and white lines to demarcate normal parking bays). I found "road markings" in the library somewhere but couldn't work out how to use the and have gone through the manual and searched the help data base to see if I could find a way of doing this (preferable in plan view) but without success. Please guide me on the path of right... Thanks.

...yet? The problem being that when closing a plan and the re-opening it again the point of the dimension arrow has moved from the inside of the particular room to the inside of the room next to it. I raised this a long time ago on the old forums and at that time there was no solution. Support suggested that I lock the dimensions but the problem is that I am constantly changing room layouts and sizes and I have to unlock and re-lock every time I make a change. My Office Block plan currently has 106 rooms rooms with more to come and it really is a pain to have to check each one to find those in which the pointer has moved. Surely it's not beyond the scope of experts in software writing to be able to fix this or to suggest a cure so that the pointers stay in the actual room they are meant to be measuring?

Oooo! Thank you. I'll give that a go. I did find something on that 3D Warehouse place but it wasn't quite to my taste and I couldn't figure out how to change the finishes because when I opened the object all the options were totally alien to me and made no sense whatsoever.

Thanks, Katalyst. David will never speak to you again! Sorted. I'll just change the settings as and when I work on other plans so that the thing won't appear again.

...as to how I might draw this on my plan? I have created the lift shaft and a door opening but my searches reveal nothing in the available CA libraries that will help me to shove a lift into the shaft. Thanks.

,,,is beginning to annoy me. Those that know me understand that I am a stickler for neatness and order - not to the point of obsession I might add but I do like things to be tidy. So can someone please tell me how I can stop the software placing a tiny little .jpg image in my plan file folder alongside the main plan file? For the life of me I can't fathom the purpose of the picture and it really stuffs up the layout of the files in the folder. If I delete them (as I have done) they just reappear again after I have worked on a plan and it is really driving me up the wall now! I thank you.

Thanks all. I found some nice stuff and then had to search long and hard to find where Windows 7 had put it. Oh for the days of the simplicity of XP.

I didn't phrase my opening post at all well because I was in a hurry. In fact it didn't make much sense as it was originally written so I have edited it. Maybe now you'll be ab;e to get what I was trying to say.

When I am working on a plan and I open the library browser and put "brick" into the search option I can see some really interesting bricks of various colours and textures which I would like to use. For instance Beachwalk and Hartford are two which I jotted down However if I click on a wall and open the materials dialogue Library>Core Catalogue>Architectural>Materials>Masonry & Stone>Bricks>Natural bricks all I am offered are the absolutely boring ones shown in the attachment. The better ones that I saw in the library browser don't appear on the list. How can I get the nice ones into my library? Please?

This is what we see, Mick. I've had a look and can find nothing that allows members to customize the colours.

I now know why. It would have been better if I had done all the corrective steps including the final "rebuild foundation" one. Some people can be plain stupid.

Well, I was on the point of leaping out of my chair and shouting "O, JOY!", "O, RAPTURE" after doing what Anne said but decided to do a 3D persepective first to further excite me but ended up ever so slightly deflated. While the diagrams in Floor and Room default/specs show the floor level with the top of the stem wall as it should be the 3D perspective seems to show the floor rising up and shoving the walls up off the top of the stem wall. Dunno why. Size? Some say that it does matter but in this instance and as an aside, sometimes you've just got to laugh. Really. You've just got to laugh. Last night I was thinking about size issues and when I pondered the end use of the building I couldn't understand why it was so big. A phone call first thing this morning brought forth the fact that the figure of 7500 square metres mentioned in the e-mail which set this whole process off of was a tiny little typo. It should have read 3500 square metres! So you can guess what I have spent most of my Saturday doing (apart from giggling every now and again). Someone is quite lucky that I am not charging for my time.

In this country they seem to do the SIPS first then the brick. My idea is to do the SIPS and the pre-stressed concrete walls (tied as per regulations) and floor right up to the roof. Then by adding the concrete roof and the windows and doors to make it weatherproof work can carry on full steam ahead on the inside of the building without having to wait for bricklayers to do the skin. It will save a heck of a lot of time and money. Well, I think so anyway. I had an interesting reply from Anne in Support last night: "I see the issue with the non-default Floor to Stem Wall Top height in the middle building, and I think that the issue is how you set up your Floor 1 Defaults. Specifically, one of your images shows that you checked "Floor Supplied by the Foundation Room Below" in your Floor 1 Defaults dialog. Although they are available in Floor 1 Defaults, the "Floor Supplied by..." and "Monolithic Slab Foundation" checkboxes should NEVER be checked by the user. If you specify and then generate a Monolithic Slab Foundation, they will become checked by the program - but that's different. Leave those boxes unchecked and let the program do it." I only saw it late and had a query regarding her mention of the Monolothic Slab foundation because I didn't have that but specified a stem wall with footings. I have just logged in and found her reply to my query and this is her suggestion of what I should try: "To get the type of foundation that you want, build a Stem Wall foundation with Slab at Top of Stem Wall. So, delete your foundation, uncheck the "Floor Supplied by..." checkbox in Floor 1 Defaults, press F12 a few times (the shortcut for Rebuild Walls, Floors, Ceilings), and then rebuild your Stem Wall foundation - this time, check "Slab at Top of Stem Wall" in the Build Foundation dialog." So I am now off to give it a try. Hope springs eternal, as they say.

Good morning. Apropos... - "By the way, Mick..." You are no doubt quite correct regarding the wall layer issue causing the non-alignment of the foundations. I realise that CA products are written around construction methods in the USA where a vast amount of domestic construction is timber frame and different methods elsewhere might, in some instances, not be compatible. This plan uses SIPS walls between brick exterior cladding and pre-stressed concrete walls in the interior. Therefore for reasons of aesthetics I have chosen to have the interior concrete wall as the main layer. In this way my plan looks neat and tidy without all that strange diagonal "bleeding" that doing main layers 'properly' causes**. Therefore I am not complaining that the foundations don't automatically align with the walls and am quite happy to do a bit of dragging. ** Maybe, one day, we will have the "Wall butts different wall" option which is the subject on the Suggestions forum.

Interesting. I deleted the foundations as suggested and the problem of the Floor to SWT disappeared. By doing that deletion I got new Floor 1 defaults but I am happy with them However I also got new Floor 1 Room Defaults where a wrong check box seems to be checked. This shows when I check the specs for each room but I don't have the time right now to see whether checking what I deem to be the correct box (and please correct me if my assumption is wrong) will be accepted or just revert to the incorrect one when I click out of the room. Apropos the non-aligned automatic foundations, Mick, this is what they look like. Using the "Align with the floor above" option doesn't work and I have to manually drag the foundations to align them. Good night. I'm off to bed now.

I did what Katalyst suggested, checked each room and found a corridor that had been set as a deck. As I said I don't use that facility so I am at a loss as to understand how it happened. That problem has now been corrected. Mick - I think the foundations were auto built, yes, but I had to use the Reference Floor>Reference display thing to drag them into alignment with the walls of the first floor. Regarding the wings - there is one main block of three floors and two side wings of two floors which will eventually be connected to the main block by means of a 5 metre corridor. The plan size is currently 2.17MB. (See attachment). As mentioned I am reluctant to make the connection until such time as the current problem has been solved. David - I opened a ticket with Support on this as you suggested earlier but never got an e-mail as I used to to say that Support had replied. As they are usually extremely quick with their responses I logged on to Support to see whether my ticket had actually been sent and found that Leanne had actually replied two days ago. However she doesn't seem to be able to open the link I provided to this thread as she used to be able to do when I linked the old Home Talk topic to a ticket so that everything didn't have to be repeated and I also seemed to have managed to cock up the creation of the attached zipped file. As is my wont. So I am trying to send her that info again.

As I tried to explain thinks as best I could and from the first two responses thought that I had been successful I'm sorry you think that I'm all over the place with this thread. I have checked the room specs above and below floor 1 and now find that the room below (Floor 0) now also has the incorrect floor to SWT default and will also not allow me to correct it. Floors 2 & 3 have the correct defaults. As I don't usually use/set room labels I can't understand why any of them would be called a Deck but I will check them all. Thank you.

Mick - I raised the question of size with Support when the issue occurred the last time and they made no comment so I assumed that it wasn't an issue. David - I have tried your suggestion to force the software to accept the defaults to the point where my knuckles ached from pressing the mouse button but it still refuses. Interestingly I remembered something Leanne said on the old support ticket along the lines of having too many round objects in a plan sometimes caused problems. So I changed the toilets in the men's restroom to a different shape and Lo! The settings for that room corrected to what they should be. Suitable encouraged by this I did the same in the ladie's but sadly didn't get the same result and all the other areas also still have the incorrect floor to SWT height. Tech Support will probably weep when they see a ticket from me but...

Success! Thank you. After fiddling around for a while the penny finally dropped that the toilet enclosures in your link can't be sited in the middle of the wall as they were in the attachment to my opening post but have to start in a corner so that the last cubicle can have a second wall. Tada!

One thing that I have noticed with this new forum is that there is never as many people (now that I can see the info again) logged on or browsing as there used to be on the old forums. Also the number of topics started per day is far less.

I have to click twice. Clicking on the first sun icon (on the left) brings up the second and it is only then that I can select the default sun.