In Part 5 of the "10 Mistakes That Chief Architect Users Make" series, Dan Baumann dives into one of the core principles of Chief Architect: polylines and CAD lines—the building blocks of your designs.

Dan explains how everything in Chief Architect starts with a polyline, whether you’re drawing walls, stairs, sidewalks, or 3D objects. He’ll walk you through essential tools like the break tool, arc tool, and techniques for bending and reshaping CAD lines to bring your designs to life. With Dan’s practical tips, you’ll learn how to:

• Bend and break lines for walls, stairs, and sidewalks with precision.
• Use polylines and CAD tools to reshape objects and create clean, professional designs.
• Maximize efficiency by understanding the foundational role of polylines in Chief Architect.

Plus, you’ll get a sneak peek at more advanced techniques covered in the ProAcademy, where you can dive deeper into these powerful tools.

If you’ve ever struggled with reshaping objects, adjusting CAD lines, or understanding how Chief’s 3D objects interact with terrain, this video is for you. Watch now to refine your skills and fully utilize Chief Architect’s polyline magic!

Transcript:

Everything starts with a polyline or a polyline shape—Chief's a CAD program. You draw a wall. You're drawing a line, and Chief extrudes from it. You draw a step, a stair, a sidewalk. Chief extrudes the 3D object from that. So that's one of the cool things about working with Chief

So when drawing a wall, I'm drawing a line, okay? And what did I show you about lines? I just showed you if you grab it with your right mouse button, you can bend it. I can bend the line in that wall with my right mouse button. Just by grabbing it, I can break that wall just like I did the arrowhead before. Now, I could bend it back the other way. That's the CAD line in a wall. Stairs. It doesn't matter if it's going down or up. When you drew that, you drew a CAD line. It's like a white line. I'm gonna hit the 3 key on my keyboard to break it which is the same as hitting the break tool down here, I added a break by hitting the break tool, I could grab that with my right mouse button. Draw stairs going down. To break it, I use the break tool, put a break in here and bend that bottom part where I broke it, like I did with that line.

Okay, sidewalks. So if you have terrain in your plan and throw a sidewalk in, you go up to terrain, sidewalks, and roads; I'd have to be on the plan where the terrain is. I think it's this floor. Let's go to the sidewalks. Straight sidewalk. There's my sidewalk. You've got a 3D object that will interact with the terrain, acting like a sidewalk. I can break the line by going down the middle of that sidewalk to reshape it anyway I want.

I could hit my three keys and break them, and you can reshape your sidewalks really easily. If I wanted to make a little L shape, I go like that, and there's your clean line. If I wanted to, I could break this and make that a little bit of an angle. Then, I could use the make arc tool to turn that into a rounded arc. See how easy it is to do that? So that's some of the settings and tools that you use when you're working with CAD lines.

So again, everything in Chief starts with a CAD line. Some things start with a click, which ends up acting kinda like a polyline box, polyline shape, like cabinets, where you put a door and a window and a wall, they're gonna extrude that wall, and you're gonna have what is essentially a polyline shape that you can move and reshape.

So Chief really takes advantage of all the lines and polyline shapes. Everything starts with a polyline. And again, we're going to cover a lot of that stuff in the Pro Academy.

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