You can manually generate trusses for your designs.
You may find you want to draw a few trusses for a section view or to help
your truss manufacturer better understand your construction needs.
If you choose, you can manually truss your entire design.
The trusses in Chief Architect will not be engineered to any particular specifications,
and that must be performed by your structural engineer or your truss company.
For the truss example,
let's create a basic truss and then we'll move on and create an energy heel truss.
The process for creating a truss begins with the properties when you define when
building the roof.
Let's look at truss framing for this sample project beginning by building the
roof. Underneath the build menu,
I'll come down to roof and build roof. For this project,
I'm going to go ahead and turn on the automatic rebuilding of roofs.
You can see that the pitch for this roof will be eight and 12.
Immediately below this is the option to use trusses.
I'll leave the roof overhang at 16 inches.
For the roof height raising and lowering it.
When I get to the point where we're going to use the energy heel,
we will come into the automatic birdsmouth cut, uncheck that option,
and we'll use the raise off plate amount when you're using trusses.
Let's go ahead and build the roof.
You can see the roof planes have built in the 2D view.
If you're following along on the video,
note that my saved plan view is currently using the framing for the roof,
which is optimized for the roof framing.
The next thing is to come into the roof framing tools.
I'm going to draw a roof truss right across the middle of the design.
I'm going to use the back clipped cross section camera so we can take a look at
exactly the way this is in a section view. In the section view,
you can see that the roof truss actually bears right on top of the plate.
If you want to go through the steps to build an energy heel truss,
where you get a distance off the plate that you can use for insulation,
let's go back into the build roof dialog and take a look at the settings that we
need to make the adjustment.
The first thing I want to do for the energy heel is underneath the area where
the automatic birdsmouth cut was, I've unchecked it.
That allows me to raise off plate.
Notice that there is a raise off plate above here.
This will generate a small framed wall in the attic.
And if you're using trusses,
you want to make sure that you're using the area down below the automatic
birdsmouth cut. And for this example,
I'm going to go ahead and raise this off 12 inches. As the roof rebuilds,
you will then need to go back into the truss and force it to rebuild.
A couple ways you can do it. Click on the truss.
In the lower edit menu is a little framing icon that says build
framing for the selected object. If you click on that tool,
it will rebuild the truss.
You can also open up the truss and there's an
explicit operation to force the rebuild.
As I rotate around in the dialog,
out at the end I want to make sure that I don't have a cantilever truss.
To make that an energy heel truss,
you're going to see one of the options in the truss settings is to force the
truss to be an energy heel.
There's several other options that you can come in here and use for your
trusses. Specifically,
I want to make sure that this is an energy heel truss using force rebuild,
and that will regenerate the truss to have a 12 inch off plate and allow me to
get the insulation in for the trusses.
Let me press the spacebar to get out of selection mode.
You can see now that the truss has the energy heel,
and now I needed to go back into the plan view,
and we'll use a multiple copy and finish placing all the trusses for the design.
Back over into the plan view.
I want to use the multiple copy tool and rollout the trusses in an increment of
24 inches on center.
You can use a framing reference marker where you want to begin the
rollout of your framing. You'll find the framing reference marker,
it's not required, but it does sometimes help,
underneath your framing tools.
And I'm going to come down and I'm going to place a framing reference marker
right on the right-hand corner of the design.
You can then take your truss.
There is a option to move this truss to the framing
reference marker.
That will adjust it so that it's exactly in that two foot increment.
I can then use the multiple copy tool and slide these trusses out.
They should then align up exactly where I want them using that framing reference
marker. Select the uppermost truss. Use the multiple copy tool.
Typically for the interval for the trusses,
it should already come loaded with a value of 24 inches on center.
If you're using something different,
open up the multiple copy interval and specify that distance that you want to
use. So go ahead and slide the trusses out on the two ends.
And then I want to take the two trusses at each end and mark them to be end
trusses so that the webbing is a vertical fashion.
So I'm going to hold my shift key down, grab the two trusses on the end,
use the open function in the lower left-hand corner,
and I'm going to choose the option to force them to be an end truss.
You can see the webbing is now vertical.
Let's take a 3D view using the camera specifically made for framing,
using the perspective full framing overview camera. In this view,
you can see all of the trusses that have been placed.
When I use the stick framing option,
it will fill in the fascia and other framing elements such as the lookouts
for the remaining framing,
so stick framing and truss framing can compliment one another.
Before I go in and do the stick framing options,
I want to take the two end trusses, the very back truss,
and the very front truss. I'll hold my shift key down.
Double-click to open them up.
I'm going to mark that these trusses are reduced gable truss.
This will lower it slightly so my outlook framing will sit right on
top and cantilever over the top of this end truss.
Now to create the stick framing, we'll come into the framing tools,
click on the build framing tool. On the roof panel,
I'm going to come over and I'm going to mark build roof framing.
This is going to use the framing information that was used to create the roof
itself. Some of the things that we'll ignore since we're using trusses,
underneath the roof layers, you'll see the structure at 11 and a quarter.
If you click on this, if I were going to be stick framing only the roof,
it would use a two by 12 to frame that. Since I'm using trusses,
the truss information is on a separate panel. You can see there is a top,
bottom, and webbing chord information.
These values are what generates the truss in this option.
And when you build the roof selecting the truss option,
it will use these values. On the roof panel, I'm going to come down,
you'll see all the roof information for the framing.
This was used when I generated the roof.
So typically if you're going to change it here,
it may get ignored because you want to use this when you actually build the roof
and set it in your defaults.
With the build framing option turned on for the roof stick framing,
we'll use the stick framing and generate the remaining framing.
There may be some elements such as this ridge rafter.
You may want to remove those. Any of the framing, you can manually override.
Click on it and remove it or adjust it as you need.
You can find all the roof trusses for this project underneath of your project
browser. Underneath the CAD details is a category called truss detail.
You can double-click,
this will open up all the trusses that you have in your design.
You can also manually edit the trusses in this view.
The layer typically is locked.
You need to come into your active layer display set,
come down to the truss itself,
and you can then unlock the truss and make manual edits into the webbing
and other information.
Be a little bit careful in here when you're doing the editing,
but you do have the flexibility to edit individual members in this view.
Just be sure to unlock the layer.
Trusses can also be modified for the envelope in a section view.
As I return back to the section view,
tap on the viewport for the truss itself.
Use the break tool. I'll put a break in the truss itself,
pull it up. You can modify the truss.
Trusses will follow the envelope of the room.
Notice that typically the room comes in with a flat ceiling.
The bottom chord is typically already set to be flat.
If you've drawn in a sloped set of ceiling planes or tray ceiling tool,
the truss will follow the envelope of both the upper roof and then the ceiling
that is inside of the room. And then using the cross section,
you can click on the truss envelope and make modifications that you need to
for specific trusses. Also, when you double-click on the truss,
there is the option to lock the truss envelope so you can use this to copy trusses.
Notice it's already checked because I modified the envelope by clicking on
the viewport and modifying it.
That wraps up this video on roof trusses. To learn more,
including information about cantilevered trusses,
please see our other videos as well as our built-in help file.
Thanks for watching.