Chief Architect Q&A - Designers Show #103

Sometimes it's fun to not have a topic and play it by ear. That's what we'll be doing in the next Designer Show.

Whether you are a seasoned architect looking to maximize your utilization of Chief Architect software or an aspiring designer eager to discover the possibilities it offers, this Q&A session will provide valuable information and practical tips to take your designs to new heights.

Watch the recorded live stream below and prepare to be captivated by this exciting episode of the Designers Show, where we unravel the intricacies of Chief Architect software and explore its transformative impact on the world of design.

wow or or we're on time for once hey everybody Dan's not here so we're on time that's awesome oh he's gonna love that yeah how do you love that we're on time oh that's funny Norman what time is it there in New Zealand what time is it in New Zealand it's got to be like in the middle of the night they're not New Zealand they're like yeah Norman James says hi from New Zealand Donuts okay yeah there he goes down well everybody dance off getting smarter today him and Kevin are getting smarter so they're gonna have lots of lots of fun stuff yeah they're out at a conference um kajabi conference that kind of ties into Dan's push on on marketing which we'll talk about a little bit about that today um so the the website service he uses to host his stuff to you know manage all of his email handlers all he's at a conference for that particular website which is called kajabi so you know we should pull up a link to that but I'm not sure if he's got an affiliate link for that but well the job is an education site so that's where his website is and all of his classes are listed on it so if you have an education program you run a program like kajabi is one of them okay it looks like you're in a classroom right now I am I'm at my school um it's it's kind of unfortunate that um the schools being one of the buildings is being totally remodeled and they put the architecture and interior design in cods we're out in a parking lot you know we have the most ugly environment and that's what we do for a living so you know my new location will be much prettier than this nice in a parking lot John's up in the woods somewhere it looks like and I'm out in Costa Rica right now so yeah and we all have internet problems that's why I'm in school so I don't have internet problems yeah oh there you go um so I'm gonna address this real quick we've got to mention from Bill Murray Murray Murray and uh I've been seeing this question pop up a lot and I think this has a lot to do with how we're sharing our data and our security and analytics through our various services that we use and I just wanted to take a couple minutes just to talk about this because I've done a couple things to kind of limit my phone calls and and it's really helped out so one is I have a bunch of Alexa devices in my house and they control all my Lighting systems and so I had to go in and figure out how to turn on off the settings that share my voice data with Amazon because when it shares with Amazon it's not just Amazon they then sell it to other companies as an auction believe it or not and so before you know it whatever I talk about in my own home gets pushed to me through an ad almost immediately so since I changed that particular bit of data Alexa no longer shares my voice data and I get a lot less calls and ads placed that have to do with something I just talked about in my house so that's one part of it okay so how do you do that I'll back up I just Googled it I Googled you know simple enough Google how do I stop sharing data with Alexa there you go I don't want ads from Alexa so so that was one part of it next part is I did the same thing for Siri and I even turned off active listening I use an iPhone in past I've used in Android both of these have these Services where it's you know you you say Hey Google you say Hey Siri it will pop up well I turn that off and I just stopped the active listening all together so that was step two um step 3 is a little more complicated and I decided that I don't want anyone calling me that's not already on my that hasn't contacted me before via email through my website so and everything else sends to voicemail and my voicemail now says I have a filtering service on and so if I've never spoken to you before you've never emailed me before you're getting sent to email voicemail and I will review it and I'll get back to you soon as you can it's very a cheerful message and so I use the service called zapier and I automated a process where anytime someone clicks on contact me through my website it asks them for their phone number as soon as it asks them from their phone number zapier takes that data puts it in my contacts so if you've emailed me before you're in my contacts list which means if you call me your call comes through if you if it doesn't uh in an iPhone I have it set to don't ring don't vibrate if um if it's not someone that's in my contacts which is great I don't get bothered all day by my phone buzzing and my phone making noise so it's a couple that's a little bit more complex but I love it um I get distracted so easily so my phone ringing all the time really distracts me so at the end of the day I go check my voicemails or midday I go check my voicemails and there you go it's really smart that's really smart so there's another way to do this is use Josh don't use Alexa and Siri because they're Josh is um agnostic it's a different company oh no no so ebony is an amazing designer out of no no I'll tell you about Josh so let me talk about ebony first first of all ebony is an amazing designer out of I think you're in Virginia right um but she's has a Remodeling Company and she's brilliant and she met with my students at cabizz and I thank you so much and they still talk about how amazing you are ebony so thank you um Josh is owned by is a different voice activated system I'm surprised you don't know who this is um but it's a super cool um voice system and with Josh you can my house is is controlled by Josh it's Josh AI you can look it up and it's um he's agnostic so he's not linked to Amazon he's not linked to Siri so he's um he's separate on his own own system but the owner of Josh still does not keep any voice activated things in his bedroom he still will not have them in his room in his bedroom or his kids bedrooms any of that what but the problem is you know bedroom let's that's well you know you talk about things in your bedroom anyway oh that's funny um so the other thing that I'd mention is we're in our industry we're going to get targeted ads because we talk about things that you know we're searching things we're posting things that have to do with our own industry so you're going to get ads back about I I get ads all the time in personal emails all the time about rendering services and I'm like I don't need a rendering Services I'm selling that service so it's just because I I'm posting about it I'm going to get targeted for that the other day and I just looked at the business and like two days later I got an ad from it on my Facebook yeah yeah didn't say it or anything I just drove by it yeah it's kind of crazy yeah well the ones that I love are the ones who call about I'm giving you a loan and that you're done in bad Bradstreet numbers are so high that we can give you a whole bunch of money those are the ones I love I probably get two of those a day and that's yeah I've also heard that it's a good idea to not this I don't think this is a great idea but I've heard um that don't put your cell phone on your phone number on your website but that just seems counter-intuitive you know make everybody email you but whatever yeah it's always crazy let's Choose Your Own Adventure and Choose Your Own Adventure I think it's blocking as much as you can block that helps right yeah nice yeah um let's see I'm gonna shift gears I'm going to go to um Dan said I get to sell stuff so I'm gonna start showing you some of my systems brief and maybe that will drive some questions there you go we should probably talk first talk about the summit coming up exactly so the wait list is people are actually signing up yeah yeah people are already signing up so we've already got a few RSVPs so if you just go to chiefexpress.com it's going to be on our main page right here um so it's right there ready ready for you to see ready for your look at hey there I am click on the link there's going to be some details there we've already got some RSVPs this is going to be one week only it's a it's a 10-day week yeah um two weeks this year was a little little long so one week only so it's going to be and I think we've got some more spots for that week is that true it's limited to 30. yeah we're accommodating 30 students okay so there you go so this is going to fill up fast um we almost filled up 30 students for two weeks last time so this is going to fill up really quickly and we're probably gonna have a lot of returning people that are going to jump on this no questions asked so make sure to get in there take a look at it um you know Dan has um a time payment plan set up if you want to do it that way so you don't have to pay for it all at one time um but you can put a deposit down to hold your space and the schedule is actually nice um it's 10 days so it's longer but we do have some off days scheduled so you can actually get out and see the ocean I think I saw it once in fact I know I only saw the ocean one time um but it'll be um it's a really very very immersive so those who have not attended um it's immersive for classes it's for learning we discuss business we discuss um it's not just Chief it's Chief plus so it's it's really really really an immersive fabulous program and if you're even considering it and you want to talk more about it you're welcome to reach out to any of us about it um or um you know talk to Dan so check it out and sign up if you're interested I think I saw yeah I am I've I think I saw that there's five full days of training a formal formal training and the other days are you know grab us grab a friend that you met and go at it yeah people were working well Renee does not sleep just for those of you who don't know this Renee does not sleep so he is on his computer which one almost 24 7. and it's crazy like you it's it's amazing people were up working on their working on things all night long it was it's it was a lot of information it was so much fun it was fun the food was great and um it's a beautiful environment and the rooms are lovely and um you know the people were okay but you know no the people were great it was fun we had a great time so consider it I'm not saying like the few questions coming through so if somebody wants to ask a question no there's no Chief questions let you know your car warranty is expired yeah thanks thank you Justin my last car in in 2023 I mean 2013 or something uh uh all right and so what was our next one we had another little little blurb on here from uh from Jan Oh I know with that event from jolene's coming up here let's take a look at that so if you click on the store on the site you're gonna see this Skyrocket your lead generation and we started talking about this in the last designer show and I gotta say I've I've implemented a few things that we've talked about with Jolene and my analytic data is just skyrocketing since then so there's something to this the phone calls are coming in it's nice so if you you've got a slow period focus on this and this I think this course is um price low for what it's offering in terms of return if you follow some of the stuff that they're talking about in this particular course I think you're going to get a lot more traffic to your various sites be it social be it a website what have you so I don't know to me my business model wraps around you know future projections I want clients that I don't necessarily have or I don't necessarily reach and some of the stuff that she'll talk about in this course that's going to get you there jolene's easy to work with she breaks it down in a really easy way to do it but she really helps with your marketing and um you know if you think you have too much work now wait you know remember 2008 your marketing needs to start when you're really busy so um if you don't want to experience as bad of a crash and you know when the economy starts changing our work changes so you need to focus on your marketing you focus on your marketing when you're doing really well so it's a good option very true I'm going to go over something that that is brought up a lot I have a particular workflow that I use for changing floor Heights I see a post here and it's talking about you know going a two-story building with a basement and go through the table that shows the Heights and floor thicknesses and touch base on the important numbers now we can talk about that but I'm going to skip past that and go over a few methods for changing your floor Heights and just start by I'm going to create a dividing room here just so we've got a couple different rooms to work with and maybe I'll make like a stepped foundation and then let me go ahead and build a new floor and on that lower floor I'm going to go ahead and make this a bearing wall so I'm just going to open this up and in the structure panel you can see right here there's the structure panel I'm moving down here and I'm going to click on bearing wall and so if we get back into our perspective view well we've got a two-story building and we in fact do have Foundation underneath now I'm using a 3D mouse I talk about 3D mouse every once in a while but it really is invaluable for working in 3D if you like to work in 3D and I'll show you a couple tricks for setting your floor Heights now anytime you click on an exterior side of a wall so the exterior envelope of your building if we hit tab or enter that's going to get us to select our exterior room what our exterior room actually is is our floor default so I clicked on the first floor exterior wall I dubbed and then we get a little tiny at a handle it super small little edit handles if you can see that now if I drag this edit handle up I'm going to start to drag I'm holding my mouse while I'm dragging while I'm dragging I'm going to click tab or enter it's going to bring up this dialog box I want to make sure that I have polar checked that's going to tell this that I want to move by a specified amount in the direction that's listed in the angle so I was dragging that line up 90 degrees and so I want to increase my floor height now this is floor defaults by two feet by default my floor default is eight foot on floor level one so we're moving this up to 10 foot and we'll just show you how this works I'm going to go back here I'm going to look at my floor defaults we'll look at our first floor floor defaults and you're going to see here in fact we did change the entire Floors floor defaults by two feet so very quickly every room is going to fall into that 10 foot plate line now and that's because you're on the outside of the house adjusting it that's going to change because you're on the outside of the house adjusting it okay yes now we didn't do anything with the second floor second floor is still at eight foot it just bumped up okay so if I hide exterior facing rooms we're going to see that floor platform change let's go back a level here we go we see that eight foot height now you can do it when you use this method right here is which is in 3D and I believe we're in camera view options and we are hiding camera facing exterior walls okay while I'm doing this it's very easy for me to get up close to this and kind of click on my outside siding profile line so I can still move floor defaults even when I'm hiding interior spaces so what's interesting about this method is I'm going to click on this wall I'm going to Tab and I'm going to move this up two feet what did I do here well I didn't move the overall floor height I actually just moved this room I can move this other room separate from that and notice that's a little bit of a glitch with that um hide facing interior walls a couple levels so this should be a stepped condition but I might need to break those walls in this case and you would have to okay okay oh I went back a little too far I'll make this a bearing wall again so Renee you're you feeding mouse that you're using which I've I played with it a little that the reason why I don't have it yet and that's the reason why I have such a hard time doing any editing in 3D is because I don't have the 3D mouse you can't do it with a regular Mouse um not quite like this and there's a few things that you absolutely cannot do without the 3D mouse there's some added functionality and I and I don't have a list of what that functionality is but there's a few instances where I'm like you absolutely it's impossible to do this with a regular Mouse so there's all um conditions like that okay I'm going to click on this Foundation Room now this is a foundation room and if I drag this down say 36 inches it's going to turn off my automatic build Foundation but I've now just created a stepped Foundation system so same thing I can tab into a room drop it down three feet and there we go we've got a step condition so really easy to do this in this method as opposed to getting into all the room and structure dialog boxes for me this is graphical it's easy for me to understand it represents really well okay and add to this what Justin says here 3D snaps and elevation snaps that's a big one that is a huge benefit of having the 3D mouse we have snaps in these views so it's it's very easy to snap things on the Fly especially in 3D it can kind of roll around and snap things to a particular element here we have to have a wall under the um someone's asking about Sun angles and absolutely not they got to pay extra for that I typically compose my shots just based on what I want to look um the best shot but if someone wants an accurate representation and it happens I get a client every once in a while that says we don't get sun through that window I'm like okay I'll fix that no problem and what a joy that new drag Sun tool is um again this is another thing that I think just benefits from having the 3D mouse setup is I get to kind of pan around with the Sun as I pan around with the room and kind of get my shot exactly the way I want it very quick to get this to look the way I want it to so so while we're kind of gathering questions right now I'm going to just go over real quickly um I've got some new updates in my Pro Plan and I'm really excited about them in there I'm going to be releasing another version of that very soon so I um I sell a set of templates and there's a standard plan in the Pro Plan they're not inexpensive but they also have thousands of hours into the development so there's a couple of reasons why and I wonder is which uh is I've got a whole new set of macros built into my cabinet labels so that when I use them with my kitchen tools for instance I can paint a double drawer base you're going to see here the Pro Plan actually knows that this is now a true two drawer base and so I'm using some typical naming conventions for um for cabinets that we might see from your cabinet vendors so when I place an upper unit it's going to be placing you know according to my naming convention and this is not quite ironed out yet this is showing that that's a full height cabinet and shouldn't be but um when I place dishwasher it's automatically going to change the dishwasher if I place a garbage pull out it's gonna go ahead and tell us that that's garbage if we shrink that down to a certain size it's going to know that it's a spice all out so I'm doing a lot less for labeling this makes a huge difference for me in places think it's going to know that I've got a sink base now so this makes a huge difference for me I don't I don't like typing so I'm starting to build out things that handle typing for me and another thing that got some really kind of new look and feel for schedules and so I've got some schedules built in that are all macro driven that might look a lot different than what you typically see in the schedule from Chief Architect so I'm giving a lot of data in my schedules and I'm going for kind of a horizontal look with an elevation and it's giving a bunch of additional data including what my opening sizes are and my drawer sizes are so we're getting a um we're getting into some specifics that might help your cabinet vendor if you get that specific with your cabinet plans are you working with custom shops or are you are you most of your project well you're you don't do the build part you just do the design right I do I'm custom shops and modular so okay um I kind of cater to both and then I've I've overhauled my window labels as well so um they will point to what room you're in um they even look to see if you're in a remodel workflow if you have your default Windows set with the correct energy values that prefix that says e for existing disappears automatically so in this case I'm showing that I've got old windows with old energy values but if I were to come in here and open this particular window and get into our energy values and let's just say for argument's sake I'm going to set these to 0.2 you see that window label changes on the Fly so it lets me know in a remodel workflow what's existing what's new and then we go look at my windows schedule and this is built out again with a lot of data elevation with the arrows it shows us our label archetype it'll even show us what the material is interior frame is versus exterior frame it'll show your rough opening sizes your header that we specified whether it's egress or not what the glazing is and this is all built on a macro system so getting into some pretty advanced stuff in here and then for those that haven't seen it before I'll just spend another two minutes just talking about my my stackable details stackable details this is a great idea from Ken the design guy who was at the summit he pointed at me to this detail I have a bunch of details that will easily um stack meaning that you can trade them out in an elevation View so let me just do a new layout and I'll get to a blank page on this layout um this is the magic magic sauce yeah now this is a stackable detail so every one of these is just an individual detail but drawn in a way that they line up so that if I hit my you know re-link layout box and I point to say a raised curve for instance that just lines up with the other detail no problem there so we're we're trading out a full section very quickly I can even get to a two-story three-story four-story sections just by adding in new stackable details and linking them and all these details all these parameters are driven by kind of like a graphical user interface that I built which is this page this may look overwhelming but you know as I move a leader say from this guy right here that's pointing to this insulation to an R20 bat fill that's going to immediately change all of my details to that designation so very very quickly orientating a full cross section in all of our details necessary so if you're doing details in-house um go check out my Pro Plan it's a good system it works really well that's brilliant just open it again and there's a bunch more stuff in there too it's a bunch of good stuff a few people have on on this show all right so what do we have uh John what would we come up with well there was a question that back to that question about setting four Heights and stuff just doing it from the standard uh from the standard view yes okay and I guess I'd want to know more about what the question is there is a million ways to skin this cat it's just there is there's so much you can do in here um and I mean I like to start with floor defaults I don't particularly go through the room structured data boxes that much I get in four defaults I do it so much that I have a button on my toolbar if you don't have a button on your toolbar get into our um floors and rooms in default settings so edit default settings floors and rooms and floor levels this is where I always start if I'm designating a structure for a project and so we can get into our first floor floor defaults here and then go through this and set it according to your project needs right and the main ones to mirror we're going to get into floor structure and maybe this is you know 14 inch TGI so we're going to change that framing to my choice and so now we've designated this as a TGI you need to see if it's should be detailed as insulation or not um we can talk about the cavity value of that installation or not I drive this from a macro system but you can easily do this from this section right here and when you set these up according to your specifics and we're driving everything from those defaults you'll see here now my room when I get into that structure tab you see this is set to default so if we open this up it is in fact that I joist that we just set and that's coming from the floor defaults so that's why I like to drive everything from floor defaults if you do that you're going to run into a lot less problems um we're going to talk about how Chief Architect views platforms and walls as a builder it was natural for me to come in and think how tall are we framing that wall but in fact in Chief architecture it's more like we're looking at what's our plate height what's the envelope height of that particular room how are we defining the room the room will then designate the Wall height so it's a little bit of a of a different approach in thinking so we're looking at our platforms so if we have some strange artifacts when we're designing in Chief Architects it's usually has to do with platform intersections meaning that our envelope isn't fully conceived and conceptualized in a way that Chief can handle so we want to kind of take that back to defaults and if you are running into some graphical problems and you're having some conditions that you can't solve for and you're deep into a project I always tell people don't forget to look at the edit area tool so we get into edit edit area we can edit area all floors when we do this we can draw a marquee around our entire structure and from there we can copy so from that copy we can take this into Chief's default residential templates and a nice trick about that is it may point out some problems with your default settings very quickly so and that's a place to play around with it you can play around with it in that you know duplicate file if you will and I encourage you to go back in and let's see what was the method for setting all walls back to default I think reset defaults or yeah reset to defaults there you go and so we've got flooring Heights we've got ceiling Heights we've got wall top and bottom Heights I'll tell you more often than not when I run into a problem from someone else's plan it's from the wall bottom Heights and wall top Heights where we've manually edited some kind of Wall height so I'd say that's a last resort when we're working in Chief Architect I would encourage you not to edit a wall height unless it's a stepped Foundation that you have to manipulate specifically for some Terrain right okay and then get accustomed to you know learning the build Foundation dialog box this is a big one kind of getting in here and let's say click around play around um if you have a particular condition you're trying to solve for I go ahead and post that we could tell you how to do uh a hanging floor platform I have a video out on my YouTube channel recently that was talking about a hanging floor platform off of a notched Edge in your foundation stem wall so there's some videos we can do for you just let us know what you need in terms of your floor structure we can get into it but there's a million different floor structures from all different regions of the world so we could bury a show in that topic alone a few a few are you able to address Mike's question that Dan sent us um that's a tough one I'm not very studied in the material list I know that has to do with our cut list so let me get into it real quick let's see if I can can handle this so calculate materials for all floors I'll just go ahead and do that real quick and we're talking about um let's do it different let's do it let's draw the draw house with like an 8 12 pitch roof on it and put the rafter stuff in a schedule and look at it that way right okay I'm gonna read the question you guys so everybody understands so the question is if you draw a building that's 30 by 20 the span is 20 feet with 16 inch over um 16 inch what's oh I'm sorry overhang probably okay that's what I thought it was and frame the roof with Rafters in the framing schedule under length Chief gives a value that is way too large I wanted to use Chief to create cut sheets but the length value is not calculated by the run the span Ridge times two or divided by two can you comment on Chief's framing info and what ways I can work the systems to get accurate or results so here's something funny I don't think I even knew there was such a thing as a framing schedule oh there is uh so let's see let's build all Framing and yeah it doesn't look like mine even sets this to report to a schedule you have to add the rafters to it but yeah a good framing schedule going now we've got your framing schedule and let's just pull um a line length on maybe one of our longest runs here is 200 inches okay and then we're seeing that these don't report correctly is that right correctly in the schedule this is going to report their length according to their pitch so it's going to be longer than what we're seeing no no that's not it's doing even more than that it's measuring from the from the opposite side of the ridge to the outside of the sub fascia I would have to dive into this off off of a live show to kind of get into this because I've got a lot of questions already um is that right there that right there is reporting 241 inches that measurement is completely wrong that measurements that's for The Ridges for the hips but that's not right either there's no way they're that long well let me do this I'm going to well I didn't expect it according to his house so I know I know I'm going to convert this to a fixture okay real quick and then what I'll do is we'll just place it in plan this is a good way we can even test it and then I'm going to rotate it so right now what's a what's an 8 and 12 pitch in degrees I have no idea I can't think it's like 30 something will you just type it in 8 and 12. oh I need to move it in the Y EP in X there we go in the X and I'm going to reconvert this to a new symbol and place it and now I'll tell you how long it is yeah it's correct it's reporting correct it's 244 inches for which one that's the full length so I just took that rafter and converted it to um a symbol and that was this that was this length and then I flattened it out and converted it to the symbol again and reported its length and it was 244. so um yeah see what Mike says on here well I didn't I didn't build his exact structure making your building 20 by 30 and and try it see what you get with an 812 pitch okay 16 16 inch soffit overhang so 20 by 30. yep and it's got an 8 and 12 pitch yep again and so this one showing 163 inches and he's saying it's saying it's 143 and 5 16. yeah it's really hard for me to process on the fly like this I'd say Mike send me this and we'll address it in the next show because we'll get a chance to play around with this and get all your specifics Mike so he knows how to get a hold of me yeah um because I'm going to flounder if I sit here and try to figure out exactly what's going on that's okay it's totally cool hey look at this I got a promo thanks Vicky foreign cool um what other questions we have in here see any metric templates I'm working on it man I'm 75 throw on a metric sample I don't think anyone has a metric template uh it's really challenging but hey if you want a metric template please talk to me because I don't know how you crazy people build and and that's where I'm missing data but um I have my same Pro Plan templates built in the metric templates and they're three quarters of the way complete and I am never motivated to touch them so contact me directly please you know we have two people here from one from Australia and one from some place in Africa and I can't remember I I apologize I'm sorry I missed where he said he is and somebody from the UK I mean it seems like they should have a template um you know maybe that's a help a place that they could send it to you and and get started working on creating something okay yeah please just you know I don't build in metric and I don't build in in the regions that use metrics so a lot of the things that I'm held up on right now is I don't know what's common to be able to be able to address it so it has all the tools and settings that I have except for the building itself the building elements itself so um Richard made a comment here and this is an easy one to address John you want to talk about this I don't know exactly we'll let you keep going Renee we're here to support you so he's talking about can we can we drop a keynote in here and then you know designate its number and yes you can and it's very simple actually all we're going to do is this is a note specification dialog box and we're just going to take this text above line here and and this is it so we can we can take this and and designate it as as anything that we want so maybe this is going to be a D3 or something like that so that's designated as D3 let me see if that does in fact correlate with the schedule I've got a keynote schedule in here and you can see here it did in fact change it in the call out in my schedule so that's me overwriting the simple schedule number and while I have you let's talk about a couple things here um we can let me get into a schedule that has a little bit more information into it like me hold on so Renee so since you set that that one keynote set at D3 well the next One automatically put go to D4 or do you have to always override them that's a great question let's just see what happens if you copy that note copy that note and then change the information and it will do it right change the information show me let me just do a little test here and that's going to show two and then let's do something else three so in this case it's not quite uh just copy copy your D3 note and place it in another spot and change the information in it well so I put D3 as an override but you could put d as a prefix and then drop in that object specific simple schedule number and this will go back to an ordering system but another thing you can do is you can always reorder from the schedule itself so I can click on this and we have these little tiny edit handles here and we click and drag that it would reorder if we have these following the conventions so in in terms of this is following a convention right now simple schedule number so if I move this up the stack you can see it automatically changed to one so you can set your prefix and then you can reorder from the schedule itself and that's the proper way to do it is just add your prefix in front of the existing macro and that way every time you pull in that keynote you're staying consistent yeah exactly that's the way to do it and then you know of course you can write in your own macros I'm getting into more macro stuff so you can do something that's more advanced if you need to match something very very specific I know certain regions of Texas are really crazy with their page labeling systems and and requirements so I've had to work with someone on that we have some weird jurisdiction that actually has their own page label requirements it's yeah nothing like I work in three different counties and this one County likes their labels totally different it's the weirdest thing because nobody does it it's just so bizarre that they're so neurotic about it so it's absolutely neurotic about it see you should reach out to grespe he's from Zambia and the other gentleman the other person who said they're from New Zealand they'd be able to help you with that metric thing because they actually understand it we're just Americans we don't understand metric I don't feel like building that system out but I will I just need the encouragement well if people will buy it from you Renee it's ready to go you know yeah that's that's going to be a lot of people going why the heck do you have that door frame like that we don't do that here and like okay shoot sorry gonna be a lot of updates the first month um so I had this question come up I have um speaking of to kind of like limit my um need of tech support I built out a Discord server and that is very overwhelming to a lot of people but I'll tell you there's a lot of automation built into it and it's turning me into five me's so I'm I'm really enjoying that oh maybe we'll do a little segment on it on another show um but part of that is that someone posted some questions about schedules in that Discord server and we have a lot of here's a here's a cool crazy thing I know we've been talking about AI in a couple of the past shows um I have chat gbt plus I pay for it and I have some robots that I built into Discord and I have loaded the chief architect's manual X15 manual into my website somewhere and I have chat GPT look at that page and it will now answer me correctly for X15 questions um Kevin does is that is that Kevin yeah the Kevin trance who bought you didn't you didn't know we have a bot named Kevin transu um he's a smart he's a smart guy Renee you are a scary person you are a very scary person where is he here he is this is the Kevin trance you bought there he is right there they're so funny so funny yeah he does a lot of work for us so yeah I can now answer questions from Chief Architect using a robot it's really cool um and so I had to answer a couple questions for me I'm having it write macros for me it's it's been it's been really enjoyable um so one of the questions came up how do we order our schedules in a certain way and there's a couple tricks to this say that we want to in this case I'm going to add a room as a designation to this door schedule which I should have that in here anyway so let's add room name in here and and we're going to move it up the stack just in case you're not familiar with the schedule dialog box um the add button in the center here that will add items from available columns to columns to include in your schedule remove will remove those columns you can add anything from those available columns and rename them and we'll just talk a little bit about going Advanced on this every object in Chief Architect has an object information panel okay so if we open this door up it has this object information panel in this object information panel we have the ability to create the new field let's just create one okay I'm going to name this Kevin tran2 field now if I put some data in that field which is the field value here he's awesome I'm going to press OK I want to get back to that door schedule and in available columns to include we're going to see very quickly that we have Kevin Transit field we can add this and maybe that custom field was something internal to indicate what we should be inputting there like input how awesome Kevin Transit is here and maybe what we actually want to say is how awesome oh you can rename it at that point we can rename it at this point so how awesome reports there and it happens to be that that was an exterior door that reports my windows schedule but it would have shown how awesome awesome yeah if you schedules and customizing your schedules and saving your schedules in your plan view you're wasting time it is amazing my schedules do all the work for me it's like I'm designing and it's automatically filling up I yeah just remember to charge more it takes a lot of time and it's built in automatic here so say that I have um I have my we didn't get the room in here did we oops we went back a level get that room name in here this is a common thing where I want to sort this by a room name let me designate a few room names here it's just so we have something to differentiate so we'll get in here by the way if you guys have never used style palettes before I've been pushing this for four versions now and chief hasn't fixed it um style palettes do not currently spray in the room and type which would be an awesome way of never having to open a dialog box instead we could just click on a room type name and click on the room and it would automatically change the type we can't do that they haven't I've been the only one that's ever recorded it so go bug Chief about it please because I'll build a tool set for you for free that'll that you'll love so we got bath dining and unspecified so I want to organize this list first off I want to organize this based on the description okay and in this case I might change description to type who knows and we know how to do that now so I want to organize this based on description so let me go ahead and get in here and automatically sort by okay and I'm going to choose description so what's this going to do let's press OK and get back into it it switched the order before that pocket door is at the bottom now it's at the top okay now the room name it's interesting that it's grouping bath dining together what on Earth is that oh because it's sharing rooms a door schedule is a poor choice here well move your doors just move them to the other walls that's easy to do yeah poor choice okay bathroom specified there we go so we are organizing by pocket door description because we did that first there's an order of operations here now let me open it up and I'm going to change this to room name ascending because hinge stores H starts before P why why would it put pocket doors first who knows it doesn't matter because I had a descending so it's okay got it okay and I should probably build the schedule out to be far more robust so we can see a clearer example of what I'm doing but if you do um your one designation first it will order based on that then if you do your second day signation it will keep the order of your first designation and then split it up and order it by room so if you have um 10 objects say it's a cabinet right in your bathroom it's still going to organize by type in this case so maybe we have a um a cabinet schedule where we want to organize by type where it's base cabinet then wall cabinet then full height cabinet we can then reorganize that by room it will still keep the type in order but it will then sort by room name so um that was a question that came up it's just an order of operations thing you do one before the next you have to shut down the schedule in between every new designation of ordering gotta run new puppy Duty that's cute I've been doing a little bit of work on this uh rafter length thing being wrong in the schedule and it looks to me like what it's doing is giving you the overall length of the piece of lumber you need to create that rafter okay and is there any fix in that in terms of the schedule or do you have to change your Violet does it correlate with the buy list somehow in the cut list it would yeah since it's Dynamic now yep okay it I I haven't been able to find a number yet that correlates with the actual link like along the top Edge what what you would use to cut that and have a plum cut on both ends I haven't gotten that figured out yet but so the mic's not I think Mike just left but I think so what if we changed from um a Cutlass to an actual list and then does it report correctly would be my question what do you mean an actual list um meaning in well change your uh what's it called what's it called the tools section here I I'm not in the material so structural member reporting if you change from your linear length to your cut list or Pi list does that change the schedule would be my question probably would so there's kind of there's your answer in terms of the schedule that doesn't really help in terms of a material list that then is separate from different from the schedule though kind of interesting which we should talk to them about that oh by the way there's something um what do they used to call this the users group meeting the annual users group meeting but it's actually um Chief architects annual event let me see if we can get on the chief talk page and get into their announcements just show this real quick what do we have we have well I figured it would be in here somewhere before we close out could we could we just talk real quickly about what Norman James and Justin ball discussed about the 3D mouse the connection well um Norman asked that he has a 3D mouse plus and he wants to talk about customization of the axis and the buttons please and Norman and Justin ball responded that there's a link download in the chief forums for the 3D mouse have you seen that um oh well someone shared someone in the symbols and content well actually I don't know about um are you saying in the forums or at Chief arctic's page he says in in Mouse there's a link download in the chief forums for the 3D mouse okay so what I did note I don't know where that is um I guess a good search might help but I do know that in the symbols and content section someone was nice and gave up their config file so this gets you some pretty good setups this isn't my setup um my setup is far more complex but this will get you some Basics that might really be nice for you so we've done a lot of this this leg work here and I I think he's has this bound to the keyboard specifically yeah he does but it will still import all of these radial menus and you can assign them to whatever other device that you have so that's helpful because he even loaded in the logos um I'll show you when I'm here there's other ones in there when I have okay nice some other people shared it that's really cool yeah um this button right here brings up that that GUI where I can edit my settings and then from here I hit buttons from here I'm going to designate what each button does you're going to see here my f key it does a custom radial menu so I did a new radial menu from that new radial menu I built out a radial system here when you go into designate one of these sections I'm just going to do a new one for something I don't care about here maybe this menu item here so I'm going to do a new radial menu okay I'm going to either make it four sections or eight sections if you're on a Mac you only get four sections sorry you should go get a professional tool like a PC and be nice that was a question that was a question whether or not the space mouse works on a Mac and you're saying it does work it does work limited yes it does work but um it it has a little I actually find the interface on the Mac to be much nicer I'll give you that but it's limited to four sections currently so as opposed to eight positions um so I'm gonna instead of typing a shortcut I actually like seeing a graphic if you type in a shortcut it's going to show that shortcut in the radio menu as text if you want to see a graphic you'd have to do a new macro which you can just type in new Necro okay you click on new macro this is where we're going to designate that macro I'm going to enter in some things here maybe we'll just do you know a wall tool or something like that and then we have this section right here it's got like a little icon if I click on that it's going to bring up a bunch of icons that are built into the driver package for the 3D mouse but if we want to custom mic on we can click on custom icon at the top we can do some dragging and dropping now here's where I might choose a file from Chief Architect itself and if you're in a Windows platform I actually don't know where this lives in Mac we went over this a number of times someone would have to chime in to tell us where to find it but we're going to get into program files in this case is where the resources for chief live and so then I'll click on Chief Architect X15 and there is a folder called resources and under resources here's a folder called buttons so here's where we can quickly choose our wall icon and there we go and so now this is loaded up as a button position for this particular item now I'm going to do a macro where I am typing out whatever my corresponding hotkey is in Chief Architect and keep in mind this can do very complex macros which means I can hit my k key and then I can add in a delay if I wanted to in milliseconds where maybe I wanted to wait a whole two seconds and then I can add another command like of you something like that so press save I'm going to close this out and the next time I hit my menu key in Chief Architect you can see here there's that wall now what happens here is I don't need to click on this radial position I can drag my mouse right past it and it's going to enact that hotkey right away so the muscle memory takes over then it becomes very quick and easy for me to draw a door draw a window and I have a system where I can draw a different type of door by holding a couple modifier keys so very very quick to eat and easy to use this and I'll just add to this that I use this system in my Chrome Adobe Photoshop every software that I use Windows Explorer you name it if I've got an Explorer File open I have um the macro system targets based on what your active window is so it will automatically switch profiles based on what your window is so very cool fabulous fabulous for this one Renee if you can change the Marine attached orientation of the axises okay um I set my SketchUp up to match my chief because I originally started using my 3D mouse in Chief so I switched all my parameters and SketchUp to build exactly the way I do achieve and it is a big retraining of your mind your motor neurons to figure that out so yeah um you gotta you got a one month road ahead my friend along those same lines there's been some uh things on Facebook and stuff about Dimensions not snapping to the right spot yeah it'd be a couple of things it could be you're using your point-to-point tool don't use your point to point use your end to end the other thing is if you're an AutoCAD user in the past AutoCAD places the point when you click down on your mouse and Chief places the point when you let go of the click so I had a I had a guy in a class one time that was having that trouble and it was pretty obvious what he was doing so if you're a past AutoCAD user just be aware of that that when you click down on your mouse with AutoCAD it places it when you let it up on Chief it places it want to play some cabinets in this plan and just um Show an example a bunch of the same cabinets in the plan and throw a little filler in here and then nice design Renee right in front of the door too that's great high quality design uh I see a lot of people all they do is they just drop a countertop in here and that's the kitchen yeah oh no no that's totally fine I get it there's a reason why you hire a kitchen designer right there exactly it's nice yeah so there's a reason I have my cabinet defaults right in my toolbars they're right at the top here you know because very easily I can switch to a bunch of different cabinet defaults depending on what I want to do you can see here when I pull my wall elevation it automatically switched to that cabinet default and that was set up in my camera views so um it's easy to hit my manual Dimension tool and drag a line here and I'm going to pick up everything that I want and then I like to snap this to the base here and then hit my tab or Enter key and just add Plus 18. so that everything was uniform and then in my layout I snap all floors to floors and all my Dimension strings line up with each other and that works beautiful sometimes I'll copy this Dimension string and drag it down and hit Tab and hit another 12 inches and then this is my first offset and I might clean this up and you can sometimes very easily clean this up just why I might copy this again bring it up here and just drag this back and then change the dimension default to something else so a bunch of ways that you can do Dimension very quickly and get what you want I'm going to switch a second show that again Renee show that again please I will in just one second I'm going to show you I switched from manual Dimensions to end to end but we're still using the same Dimension default so I can just quickly drag my leader through here and you can see here it's getting the full end run I'll snap it to this draw it down hit my tabernator key there's my 12 inch offset so very quickly I got an overall run and I got these individual component runs so super easy to Dimension this way all through the defaults and you change it based on what tool you're using so locate manual versus locate and we've got different designations here and so I always encourage people to put their active Dimension defaults into their toolbar so you can get to that buy customized toolbars and we're in elevation view here so this is where I want it to show up and we can type in the term active and we're going to see active Dimension defaults control when we drag this into there we go we've created that new toolbar within this toolbar configuration and so what I was saying was you can copy any Dimension string and drag it to wherever you want and it's going to place arbitrary points now but you can pull this Dimension string with that continuation handle which is this guy right here we got that and I think X12 that continuation handle we can pick up additional measurements my Dimension defaults are set to be very precise so you have to be within six inches of something to be able to pick up anything and I do that on purpose I don't want to pick up a bunch of additional elements the string has to be within six inches the string has to be within substances yeah so I'll just show you my Dimension defaults when I pull manual Dimension and I drag it down here it's not picking up anything and we'll give you the use case of where that is so like the out of the box dimension defaults for chief if I drag the manual string through here it's going to pick up that wall cabinet and all these base cabinets all in one string and we'll show you why that is I'm going to open this Dimension string change the dimension default and then we'll change our let's see it's been a while since I've done this reach right here so our reach designation and so I don't remember what out of the box is but I bet you it's 24 inches it's 24 inches yeah yeah so now when we pull that same string through here it's picking up everything under the sun right so I like to be accurate with my Dimensions I don't like to pick up a bunch of additional stuff so I have mine set to six inches makes a big difference so we could drag that continuation handle backwards and then now we get in tight with that 3D mouse this is another you know nice Venture for that you can see here it's not grabbing anything same thing if I bring it back through these cabinets and drag it backwards again and then drag it forwards now it's picking up all those cabinets quick and easy way to Dimension cabinets right here well you need to spend time going through what your dimensions are doing you have so many options and when it comes out of the box Chief has practically everything clear you know everything's selected you have to go through and break things out you absolutely have to I mean make the dimension lines work for you yeah let's see what was this one I think we got time for one more question you guys want to talk about anything before we close out well edit has a question but this is a big one her question is how to design a pull out shoe drawer underneath the stairs that's that's probably bigger than what we have time for or yeah um a pull out shoe drawer under the stairs um okay let's see if we can I mean it's gonna take us 10 minutes so let's say we've got a set of stairs I'm just going to click stairs and one click will automatically send that to the next level right and then I'm actually going to um just break this to show that we're breaking it I've got a little bug flying around my ear I'm going to break it and actually let's just make it a complete break let me go back a little I'm gonna use that brake tool we're gonna use that complete break uh Richard if you want to want us to answer this can you give us a little bit more information yeah I was curious about that one too um so either I'm gonna draw some walls underneath my stairs and I'm going to return them on this break and then all I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of fake it till I make it if you will you can just put a doorway in here put a doorway on this wall and then put your shoe cabinet and maybe you have somehow you've downloaded something that represents a shoe cabinet that places on the back side of a of a door so here's my doorway I'm just going to limit this to whatever the size of that shoe cabinet is and pick it up off the ground and then we could you know designate that it has no Jam or no casing um and then maybe that has no sill as well or maybe it does and then place your cabinet within here and the trick with the cabinet is that you you need to have some kind of accessory by the way if we're not used to this yet this is my new favorite thing this is my customer request so happy they gave us this select Nick side very easy to select in 3D that top or bottom side of this cabinet to rotate it although it looks like they didn't give us the bottom side there funny this is where Carlos yes this is uh this live stream is on Renee's site and on Dan site and on YouTube yeah it's everywhere you'll be able to find it yeah we're we're everywhere everywhere kind of scary but wherever um so I kind of you know got this in place the last thing is that we're going to edit that face item on the side it's the same thing yes yes same process put a door um if you're trying to angle the shoes your shoe shelf that's a different story you're gonna have to build a very custom Cabinet if you want to angle a shoe shell um that's a different show I do that from a window I build a box from a window and apply it to a cabinet and that's a that's more advanced but um if you're just looking you know to add a shoe shelf to a very Square element and then add an angle window above it to represent a cabinet you can get away with that um but this is where I would get into that front size back pick my door drawer and specify that it has a door back insert and maybe you can add in if you really want to get clever you can add in some kind of pull out shoe system here or what have you we don't have to go any further I think you you hit the point on that one so edit you should actually really reach out to we'll we'll event we'll have to do a show sometime talking about how Renee uses windows and doors it is absolute magic that is something that I learned at Summit and it was crazy Renee you'd be amazed as I I have taught my students using your system on how to make a custom fireplace but you know obviously not using your tools and they're like oh my God who knew that you could do that it was it's amazing Renee does everything with Windows and Doors it is amazing what he creates so and it come to come to Summit you'll get Hands-On learning how to do it it's crazy yeah we get into a lot of really cool stuff at the summit crazy stuff I can't even list we're gonna have to figure out some way to tabulate it all because we got over we went over so many things oh my gosh I will answer Richards and then we've got to close The Showdown but um if Richard if you change your camera view options from a live view to plot lines then you can do a point-to-point snap on your floor to your floor okay and if you want it live just switch it back to live after you've aligned them so there you go that's a real quick answer for that one perfect okay oh for this one yep sweet that went by fast it's fun good thank you guys are we gonna invite Dan back I don't know that we need to I don't know I don't know well he does he does have the thing yeah he has to send us the link you guys it is his account yeah no dad will be here next time um just to remind people if you're interested at all in making your business successful look at joining the marketing um program that Dan is doing with Jolene it's totally worth your money it's totally worth your time it will change your business structure I highly recommend it and then if you're even considering Summit check it out and um start thinking about it because it will it was a blast and you learned a lot and you got to hang out with these great guys so it was really fun and it's only eight months away I know it's coming out and it's filling up yeah cool all right have a great day okay everybody take care have a good weekend