i noticed,last year when i looked at vectorworks architect, creating a building from scratch did seem somewhat cumbersome when compared with Chief. having said that, i can also add that one particularly annoying aspect of building design using chief lies in its automation.
for example;
if you are constructing a multi level building and wish to add addtional floors, chief uses a default settings for the new floor (structure,floor and ceiling height etc). unfortunately,not all new floors have exactly the same defaults...for example; a carpark in lower ground may have different ceiling height to the floor above, and additional floors may have different floor structure thicknesses.
in chief, this creates enormous headaches. it bloodywell keeps changing floor, floor structure and ceiling heights on the floors you have already created whenever you insert new inner walls that create additional rooms on a given floor, or insert new floors underneath existing ones. this can completely stuff up all the ffls of upper floors and to fix it is a complete nightmare. i have spent many an hour cursing the designers of chief because of this incredibly annoying quirk.
there should be a way of going into the individual floors and locking all that particular floors properties so that no matter what you do above or beneath, nothing changes within the envelope of the existing floors you have already built. also, any new rooms created on existing floors should default to the properties already set for that floor and not some random bloody default the programmers built into the software!
imagine the following...
existing ceiling height = 2400mm
upper floor structure thickness = 240mm
floor surface = 25mm
you decide to add an additional room to the existing floor by creating another partition wall. as soon as you close in the room chief sets the above properties on the new room as follows:
ceiling height 2850mm
upper floor structure = 300mm
floor covering thickness = 18mm
can you imagine how that affects floors above and below? and what if your floor surface is not 18mm thick on all other existing floors you have already drawn?
does vectorworks architect have this problem on multi storey buildings when new floors are inserted between existing floors?
