Welcome to the Chief Architect Bachelor View Project on the floor plan.
In this video, I'll cover the process to create the plan and layout template,
draw the exterior walls, and define the wall types, add the dimensions,
and then send a scaled view to layout sheet to begin our construction documents.
Let's go into the program and get started on the project.
I'm going to begin this video by creating templates for both the plan and the
layout files.
Chief Architect includes default templates for you and as you become familiar
with the program,
you will want to customize and create your own template that has the typical
things you use when you begin a new project to save yourself some time.
I'm going to begin with the layout template.
I have the completed project open and as you can see in my project browser,
my typical construction drawings has 22 pages.
I want to use this layout as my template and remove all of the client or
project-specific information. The feature, save as template,
will allow you to selectively retain or remove items.
I will typically retain CAD details, page tables,
and text, and then at the bottom,
I'll set this as my new template for all future layouts.
I'll save this file in my templates folder.
I now have a new untitled layout open and I'm going to save this as my new
layout for the project for this video series. Now for the plan template.
First,
I'm going to change the saved plan view to the one that I typically use when I
begin drawing walls. In my case,
I'm going to use the floor plan saved view. Now,
using the save as template, to remove and retain items,
I will typically retain CAD details, schedules,
unused layers, line styles, and walls.
I'll be sure to set this as my default template for all new future plans and
then I'll save the file in my templates folder with the new untitled plan open.
I'll save this as my plan for this project video series.
With the new templates created and my project file saved,
let me start by sharing my process on space planning for a new design.
A space planning tool is available in Chief Architect to assist you with laying
out your rooms and positioning them for the new space.
You can use this space planning assistant,
which will ask you a number of questions and then lay out the rooms that you can
arrange in any manner that you'd like.
You can also use the tool for space planning and place individual rooms and then
you can use this to rearrange things.
One of the things that I've done is I've taken these rooms and I've actually
created my own variation of space planning with typical room sizes that I will
use, my garage size, my bathroom size, my kitchen size,
and as you zoom in a little bit,
I've turned on the label for the information and also the length of each side
and then this helps me when I position my rooms.
For the project that we're going to be working on,
here's what I've done is I've taken these rooms and I've arranged them in an
order that would match the client's expectations and I've also done that for the
floor below and how to lay out those rooms.
Let me begin the process by drawing the exterior walls.
It's basically going to follow this shape. I've created this shape.
You may be able to see a gray outline and I'm just going to use the exterior
wall tool here and quickly kind of trace around this and this is going to form
my exterior walls and then we'll place the dimensions.
When you're finished drawing your walls,
you can use the automatic dimension tool and place,
your automatic exterior dimensions.
Now note about these automatic dimensions that I like to share is underneath
your defaults you can make some adjustments to your automatic exterior
dimensions. In my case, I am ignoring the interior walls. Of course,
I don't have any drawn yet, and then on locate objects,
you can control if you want to go to the wall dimension layer,
wall serfaces maybe if you're an interior designer and then if you want to
dimension your openings,
I've ignored both the openings and the interior walls to create a clean exterior
dimension to just the main walls. Of course for this video,
I traced over an existing footprint and so my dimensions are actually perfect
for these walls. Let's take a 3D view and see what the space looks like.
I usually like to use this perspective floor overview that doesn't show a
ceiling. Now in this view, if we rotate around,
you can see all my default materials that came out of the template plan.
I want to go ahead and begin the process and change some of the wall types.
I'm going to begin with this little pop out right here.
I'm going to hold my shift key down and then I'm going to rotate around.
I'm going to grab these three exterior walls, use the open button,
and I'm going to adjust the wall type in here.
I've got a number of walls that came with my template plan and one of them is a
seamed metal six wall.
I find using this approach is better than changing the wall materials just by
spraying it from the library. It gives you a little more control,
especially in your 2D plan
view and then you can set up a wall legend and that will differentiate those
wall types. Now for the next wall changes,
I'm going to go ahead and select the sidewall, the front wall,
rotate around just a little bit. By the way,
I'm holding my alt key down and my middle mouse to do the rotation,
so I remain in a selection mode. Now that I have those walls selected,
I'm going to open them up and make the same type of change.
These will be a pony wall. I'm going to set the bottom wall to be stone.
You can set the dimension layer of that and then between the two different
materials right here, I'm going to set a sill cap in there.
You'll find that setting over on the wall cap.
I'm just going to go out to the library. I'm going to search.
I know which one I'm going to use. It's the sill 03, using that profile,
I'll also set the dimensions of it.
I'm going to go ahead and set the width of it to be 1.5 that will extend out
past the siding as well as seven-eights, and as long as I'm in here,
I'm going to come over to the materials on that sill cap.
I'm going to change that to be concrete. I'll search my plan materials,
come down, find a concrete color and make that change.
Now the final couple of walls,
I'm going to make the change on will be this sidewall over here in the garage.
Again, hold my shift key down.
Then to rotate around without going out of selection mode,
I'm going to press the alt key,
hold the center mouse button down and rotate around. Again,
hold the shift key and grab those walls. Go back into the wall types,
change the wall type to the seamed metal siding and then real quickly on the
backside of the house I will change this wall to be the same pony wall and I'll
just skip through that real quickly. Now with all the walls changed,
I want to go through and take a look at the wall schedule that I'll be using
actually as a wall legend.
Let me clean up my old existing plans that we began the project with and I like
to use the project browser. It's relocated off to the right-hand side over here.
Let's open that up.
The template plan that I saved included all the schedules and the way that I
like to have them formatted. You'll notice that I have a wall legend down here.
Let's go ahead and open this up and we only have three different wall types in
here, the siding, plank siding, the seamed metal six siding,
and then the pony wall that consists of the siding and then the stone.
These schedules can be customized if you open this up,
the available columns that you can add are on the left and then the columns that
I currently have are on the right, I have the 2D symbol,
which is the wall outline that you would see in 2D and then I have the wall
upper and the wall lower to cover those pony wall styles.
The process I use to create my construction drawings are to typically start with
a floor plan and then move on and create maybe a site plan,
the kitchen and bath, the roof, the framing,
all those components and as I finished those I like to send them to the layout.
I'm at the point now where I have enough progress with the wall schedule and the
floor plan that I'm ready to send those out to the layout.
I'm going to come back up and open the layout that we started the video with.
I'm just going to come down to my recent files and open that layout plan up.
If you zoom into my schedule of drawings on page six is where I typically would
put my main floor. Let's go ahead and click on the page number.
Go to page six and this is the page that I'm going to send that floor plan to
and I'm going to send it at a scale of probably a quarter inch.
It's come back over into the floor plan we've been working on.
I use saved plan views to manage the views and how I send those out to layout.
You can see the list of my saved plan views.
I have several that I typically use for my plans.
You can always come over and access these and open up many plan views
simultaneously. Just like you can open up multiple camera views simultaneously.
If you were to click and open up the object for this plan view,
let's just explore it here for a minute.
These plan views will save your settings for you. Currently,
I don't have my plan view locked to a specific floor.
You could if you wanted to zoom into a specific floor,
you could set the zoom factor. I don't typically save those,
but if you're working on a bathroom you might save that zoom factor.
If you wanted to show the watermark, many of my plans,
I will save the watermark.
You can upload your own company image and use that as a watermark.
If you're going to link the plan view to the layout,
I typically will link those. How you want to control your wall display.
Notice that for our pony walls we do have a few of those and I've got my walls
to display the upper and the lower and then the save options on how these save
plan views work.
One of the more important aspects of the save plan views are the selected
defaults. These defaults are made up of dimensions,
text, revisions, call out markers, notes, and arrows.
These selected defaults previously to X12,
we called these annotations sets,
you can control exactly how your defaults are going to work for each one of
these, how your dimensions will work, what they'll be dimensioned to,
what layer they go on, and the same is true for all of the other components.
For saved plan views, you can control which layer set you're going to be using.
Here's my layer set for this one and what the current CAD layer,
if you're going to be drawing any CAD elements on there and then a reference
display setting. If you wanted to set the floor above, the floor below,
maybe you're doing an as-built measurement,
you could reach out to another plan and you can actually set up many different
reference displays so you can superimpose those over this different view.
These saved plan views have several settings that you can take advantage of.
To send this floor plan to the layout sheet, underneath the file menu,
I'm going to come down to send to layout. Typically,
it will default to the page number that you are on on the layout.
You can change that to any page that you'd like, how you want to send it,
send the entire plan view.
That's the extent of all of the objects in here versus the current screen.
Current screen is an image.
Be careful with that because that's not a dynamic changing thing.
That's just a snapshot or an image of the view and then, of course, the scale,
quarter-inch and let's go ahead and send it out there.
I like to position these on the layout sheet can hold your control key down and
have flexibility. The way that moves, it'll override bumping and snapping.
Notice that I've already got text for the floor plan.
If you want to move that around,
have existing floor plan notes that came out of the template.
Here's the space for the wall legend.
Let's go back into the plan that has the wall legend set up to send that out to
the layout. We use the same process. Send it to page, six-quarter inch scale.
Typically these will come in right in the center of your page.
I'll go ahead and slide that over in here. Let's zoom in.
I typically like to have a larger font for the wall legend.
Let's go ahead and pull that down so that it crops it out and then as the number
of walls change in the plan, as we add the interior walls,
you'll need to be a little careful because this came in and it's already cropped
and that will grow,
so typically I'll just make that quite a bit larger knowing that additional
walls are going to be added. That completes this segment of the floor plan.
As we move forward, I will be adding the doors and windows.
This plan will evolve in the interior walls. In the next segment of the video,
I'm going to focus on the roof portion.