In this video segment,
I'm going to show you the technique for remodeling projects in Chief Architect.
I'm going to use a simple bath project to demonstrate.
Let's review the steps and then I'll go through them in the software.
Your typical first step is to draw your as-built plan.
You can either import that from our Room Planner app or draw it as a new plan in
Chief Architect.
You can also trace an existing floor plan if you're working on an older plan
that a client has. Once you have that as-built created,
you then will save that project file as a remodel plan and that is the second
step to develop that remodel plan into your new design.
When you're finished with the remodel plan and you would like to overlay the
as-built on top of the remodel plan, perhaps you want to show that to the client.
Perhaps you need to show it as part of getting your permit set to show demo
walls. You can do that in the 2D view and do it with a CAD mask.
In Chief Architect X11 we allow you to use a reference display to the external
as-built plan and in X11 you can also display that in 3D and overlay it with
your remodel and as-built plan together.
Let's go ahead and open up a plan and go through the steps and discover how to
do remodeling in Chief Architect. I
have open an as-built bath. I'm not displaying the dimensions,
but you can assume that I've gone through,
measured everything that was important. Maybe you want to put in the fixtures,
maybe you don't want to put in the fixtures.
Once you have the important components of your as-built in place,
you could then do a save as to your remodel project.
If you know in advance which walls might be demoed,
you could actually go in and draw a CAD layer over the top of those walls and
show it as a demo. Let me show you how I might do that and you can take a look.
In my as-built plan, I'm going to show the walls that are going to be demoed,
removed walls out of this plan.
What I'm going to do is I'm just going to use a CAD rectangular polyline,
and I'm going to come down here. First of all,
I'm going to create a legend and this is going to represent the line style that
I use to create the demo walls. So I'm gonna, open it up,
I'm gonna make changes to it. I'm going to put an orange fill in it,
and then I'm going to write the word demo walls off to the side.
And then I'm going to use that same style of box and draw over the walls in the
plan that will be removed.
So the first step is I'm going to open up this CAD rectangular box.
I'm going to come in here and I'm going to change the line style to be a dashed
line style. I'm going to change the color of it to be an orange color.
And I'm also gonna put a hatch pattern on here. We'll come down,
select the strip style,
and I'm going to change it to be an angle hatch.
So I'll put in 45 degrees to angle that. And again,
I'm gonna use the same color
and then we'll go ahead and close this dialog.
The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use some texts and I'm going to come
down and I'm going to write the term demo walls,
the CAD box, and the term demo walls,
I'm actually going to assign those on a layer because I don't want that to
obscure my floor plan.
And I'm going to create a layer for demo and I'm also going to create a layer
set for demo.
And that way I can easily toggle those things on and off.
And then I'll use this CAD object and I'm going to trace over the walls.
So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and select both the CAD
box and the text and I'm gonna open those up and I'm going to put those on a new
layer. And I'm going to, since I've selected dissimilar objects,
both a CAD box and text, it says no change.
You can still go in, press the define button,
and I'm going to choose which layer those components go on.
I've actually created a new layer and I've just called it demo.
I'm going to go ahead and select that layer.
That way I can easily toggle this on and off as I need to.
Before I deselect these objects, you can see that they are blanked out.
That layer is not currently turned on in my floor plan layer set.
What I wanna do is I want to create a new layer set that just shows those demo
elements,
so I'm gonna go ahead and press the space bar de-select these items and I've
created a layer set specifically for the floor plan demo.
Let me change it to that layer set. It's going to turn that on.
If you look at what is turned on in that layer set,
you'll notice that the demo has been toggled on for that layer set.
Let me go ahead and close this dialog.
I now want to use this CAD box and trace over the different elements since this
CAD boxes already on the layer for the demo.
You could select it, press the copy button on your keyboard,
press paste, and then use that to trace over your walls.
If you were to build an annotation set and have all of your CAD show up,
you would then just be able to draw a CAD object.
But I'm just going to show you the simple way where I'm going to draw a CAD
object over one of the walls that's going to be demoed and then I'm just going
to repeat that process.
I'm going to paste that CAD box back over into the plan and I'm just going to
snap onto the wall. Go ahead and pull it back.
So a little bit of busy work to create these objects in here,
copy that, paste it, over the half wall for the uh,
water compartment.
And then the last wall.
Let's go ahead and use the copy and paste,
and paste this CAD box.
I'm going to pull it into this wall over here.
Those are all on a layer for demo.
If I switch my layer set back to the floor plan,
notice that you don't see them.
So this is an easy way to make it easy to switch your layer sets and if you're
using annotation sets it will put your text and CAD and dimensions on a separate
layer.
You could create a saved plan view which I've done for this video and that makes
it easy to change everything and I can just simply toggle the floor plan and it
will change my layer set and my annotations and my dimension defaults and a
bunch of things.
If you're interested in learning more about annotation sets and saved plan views,
you can watch those in a separate video.
But what we've done here is we've created a layer,
we've assigned a text and a CAD object to that layer called demo and now I can
easily show the demo walls and now the process,
I'm ready to create my remodel plan. So I'm just going to do file,
save as
and I'm going to save my as-built plan as the remodel plan.
I'm now working in the remodel plan and this is where I'll go through and make
the design choices that the client will eventually use and enjoy.
What I'm going to do now is I'm going to skip ahead and uh,
show you the completed design and then I'll show you how to overlay the 2D CAD
that we've just created for the as-built.
And I'm also gonna show you how you can display that for the 3D view.
Okay. Well I've finished the uh, design. I'm pretty quick at this apparently.
And uh,
the client loves this new design and if you want to show those demo walls that
we just created,
that layer still exists in this plan and you can see where those demo walls were
that we removed or extended out.
And that's just controlled through that same layer set that we created,
the demo layer that we created for the legend,
and then using that same CAD mask on top easily shows where those demo walls
were located. And that's just a matter of showing it in the layer set. And again,
I've kind of used a saved plan view to quickly show things on and off so you can
hide that.
Beginning and Chief Architect X11 we've allowed the reference display to reach
out to an external file.
Reference display you've typically used to display the floor above or the floor
below on your current floor and super impose it.
The new reference display can reach out to an external file.
Let me double click on the floor indicator in my menu and let's open up the
reference display options.
Currently my reference display is set up to be in the current plan,
which is the red indicator and it's on the automatic floor and the reference
display set is the layer set.
I'm going to choose the as-built plan,
so I'm going to browse out to the folder where I've saved my as-built plan.
We'll select that plan,
notice that the as-built plan updates here,
floor, I'm gonna use the same floor and for the layer set,
I'm going to change that.
I've created a set just for the as-built Shell.
That's only gonna show the outline of the walls.
You can really turn on anything you want,
but I'm going to just show the display of the walls and the fixtures as well.
Now I want that to be below the main display of the floor plan,
so I'm gonna move that down.
So the floor plan will display on top and then the reference display from the
as-built will be super imposed below that.
Let's go ahead and close this dialog and now you can see the as-built plan.
I have that layer set to be a slight orange.
I've turned the layers on to be dashed lines and like I'd mentioned,
you can turn all the things on and off that you want to display.
You can toggle the reference display F9 on your keyboard and that will
superimpose that just by turning that on and by turning it off.
I'm going to step back for just a moment.
I'm going to reopen the as-built plan that we were previously working on.
In this as-built plan,
I built a layer set specifically to show the as-built shell and this is what it
looks like. This is a layer set. When I changed my saved plan view,
it changed my layer set to this as-built shell.
If you were to explore what I've done in this layer set,
you'll notice that my walls are a hollow dashed orange line,
as are my fixtures, my cabinets,
all of those things are in this layer set. So those elements that are turned on,
if I sort this,
you can see what's turned on and what color I've used for this.
It might be easier to sort this in this direction.
So all of these things that were important to me that I wanted to display,
I don't have everything turned on in here such as footings,
but things like our interior fixtures, I changed the color,
set it to be orange.
I changed the line style to be a dashed line style.
That only applies to this set of layers.
So when you switch your layer set back onto the floor plan set,
it looks as your normal plan that you'd like to see,
or if you have your kitchen and bath layer set turned on,
then it has those layers turned on.
So going in and creating a specific layer set for the as-built allows me to now
super impose that.
I toggle over to the remodel plan to super impose that and it's not overwhelming
in the design.
That's a new feature that we've started implementing in version X11 and you can
easily use that. We've also implemented it in a 3D view.
Let's take a look for the 3D view.
I'm going to use the perspective floor overview camera.
So this represents the new remodel project that we've created for the client and
now I want to super impose the as-built in 3D.
What I'm going to do initially is since this is not yet built,
I'm going to toggle this view on to the glass house view.
Then just like we did in the floor plan view,
I'm going to go to the floor indicator and I'm going to double click on the
floor indicator and this is the same reference display interface that you see in
your floor plan view. I'm going to come down,
I'm going to browse out and I'm gonna grab that as-built plan that we previously
used. It's already in my recently used list.
Typically it will use the same layer set and you can choose between the standard
rendering and the glass house rendering.
Now you're going to notice in my background I have glass house rendering on the
remodel and you see dark thick lines around the edge surfaces.
In the reference display you don't have that same dark edge line.
In this case,
I'm going to go ahead and use the standard camera view and then we'll toggle
that on.
So I'm now super imposing the as-built plan into the remodel plan that doesn't
yet exist and now you can see, maybe it's appropriate to show your client,
you can rotate around and see the difference in what the design is going to look
like.
And you notice that we bumped this wall out maybe four feet and this used to be
space for the garage,
the closets now extended and maybe this is something that will help the client
better appreciate and see what the new space is going to look like.
This can be toggled on and toggled off the same way you do in the plan view,
I was pressing the F9 to toggle the reference display on and off.
That tool you will also find in your edit menu on the side,
you can toggle that on, toggle it off,
and now you can super impose that in your 3D view.
Back in the plan view, same concept.
You can toggle the reference display on and toggle it off.
You can control what layers are being displayed.
If you go back in to the reference display,
you can actually edit the layer set for the as-built and you can choose what you
want to turn on and off.
So if I wanted to turn those fixtures on and off,
you could come in to the fixtures, easily come in here,
toggle that layer off,
and then you'll notice that the fixtures now disappeared.
You could do the same thing for the tub platform and the cabinets directly
through the remodel plan. So the reference display,
again,
beginning in X11 allows you to reach out to your as-built plan or another plan,
you may be using this display option A, B, or C,
allows you to super impose these elements,
either in your 2D view or in your 3D view,
and allow you to help your clients or the building contractor visualize exactly
what you're after.