Unlock the Hidden Power of Chief Architect’s CAD Tools

When using Chief Architect, it’s easy to overlook the depth of functionality in its CAD tools. On the surface, they may seem basic—lines, arcs, circles, and squares—but the true power lies in the Edit Tools. These tools unlock advanced capabilities that let you modify and refine objects with incredible precision, making Chief not just a design tool but a robust CAD program that simplifies complex tasks.

In this second video of our "10 Mistakes Chief Architect Users Make" series, we focus on how users often underestimate these CAD tools and miss out on their full potential. Learn how to harness these features to create, edit, and fine-tune your designs effortlessly, and discover why Chief Architect stands out with its intuitive approach to design and 3D modeling.

Stay tuned to learn why patience and practice are key to mastering the 1,300+ icons and features this program offers. Plus, don’t forget to check out the all-new ProAcademy launching in January for structured guidance, live Q&A sessions, and more!

Transcript:

This one gets me because people get frustrated and go, what the heck's going on here? And I like to tell them, let's talk about this stuff first.

Laying out the buttons that represent creating a building, I just talked about. It's the CAD program and Chief creates all these little icons. that look like you're drawing buildings, walls railings doors windows, cabinets, electrical stairs. you're getting tools that represent things in a building and they program these tools with lots of child icons, child functions.

And they also allow you to add those things to your plan with very little knowledge of CAD. You start clicking and placing. That's one of the beauties of Chief, and you can start making money with it immediately. You don't have to take classes for three weeks to learn how to draw a line.

That's one of the things that used to drive me nuts about CAD. AutoCAD, or the programs I used when I was getting into CAD. Chief made that almost brain-dead simple.

The CAD tools in Chief, even though they look basic, typical things you would think of CAD are lines and arcs and circles and squares.

They look basic, but the power in Chief comes from the edit tools down here. When you click on something, you get different tools to edit the object or objects that you've clicked on. And when you click on those tools, you can really do a lot of things with it.

That's part of the process of this and that's what makes Chiefs such a powerful program. It's the way you can edit things, draw what you want, and then edit it into exactly what you want. it works really well. It's really cool. 3D modeling capabilities of course, you hook four walls together and poof, you got a 3D room.

You can put windows doors, cabinets, in there. So again, you've got all these different elements coming together into one program that make it a bit to learn. high quality rendering capabilities. You've got the ability to create layout pages so that you can, start assembling all the views in your plan.

So you can present your documents any way you want we've got amazing linking within the layout page now that we never used to be able to do. So that's really come a long way. we've got the schedules, material lists, you've got macros, you've got so many other things going on in this program that it really takes a bit to figure out all the stuff that's in there.

When you look at Chief right now there's over 1, 300 icons. That's a lot to learn. what do all of those different little icons do? What are the functions of those icons? There is a function for all of these that once you learn them, it's oh, that's cool. So that's a big part of Chief Architect. Don't beat yourself up. Be kind to yourself. Give yourself time to learn this thing. You will get better each time you draw another plan.

Coming January, I am reopening my ProAcademy. We're gonna be doing a whole bunch of new things. We're gonna go twice a month. We're gonna have live meetings Q& A session I will have some structured classes planning sessions where I'll fix or explain plans talk about hotkeys templates business topics.

I'd like you to go to chiefexperts.com or Chief Experts Academy and join the waitlist. Now, if you're already a member of my Pro Academy, you don't have to do this.

You will be grandfathered into what you've already got and you'll be good to go. if you're not part of the Pro Academy, I would love to have you, on our wait list. I'll keep you informed so join the wait list.

I'd love to get you on that so I can keep filling you in on what's coming with the Pro Academy. I've been doing it for a long time and it's got a ton of content we're going to be adding a lot more.

Take Your Chief Architect Skills to New Heights!

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Be part of the all-new ProAcademy—launching in January 2025! With live Q&A sessions, structured classes, and exclusive content, ProAcademy will help you master every aspect of Chief Architect at your own pace. Join the waitlist now to get early access and be the first to experience this immersive learning platform!

Don’t wait—take the next step in your Chief Architect journey today!