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Your perceived tone and language is pretty consistently combative and aggravated, and I am not entirely sure that you want me to engage...I notice an old post from Eric the Solver saying the same thing..for the life of me I still don't know why you were attacking me in another thread. I suppose I should qualify myself. I am one of the more popular trainers in twinmotion, I used to have a tutorial series that twinmotion used to promote for what that's worth to you. We aren't necessarily comparing apples to apples. For reference this is what I consider a good exterior render which was done back in 2020, nowadays my TM renderings all have ai enhancements so this is one of the last ones I have that was all TM. It takes longer than 20 minutes to apply the grass and load all of your secondary maps like bump and roughness and normals and AO as well as establish cameras and emitters and rotating the backdrops and sun settings. If we are just talking about rendering what you import..sure, 20 minutes. Regardless, even at 20 min, doesnt that add up? Interiors, well, all of the maps at 100 textures def takes an hour. I'm not trying to relate a contract model, I am asking you what your time is worth, I don't bill by the hour either, but my target margins do equate to some rate that is substantiated by how much TIME it takes me. ok so what is 20 hours worth to you? This statement alone has me scratching my head as to why you aren't using premiere as it would cut this down substantially..and then truly you would switch from an aggravated customer to an overwhelmed one by the shear amount of time saving tools we have access to in the professional line. When I start drawing, my condoc is 75% complete in Premiere at 12 different sheet sizes and title block styles. All of my schedules are done, my cameras are done, my details annotations all done. Working in 3d to model a 3d building is a lot more efficient then relegating yourself to sheet space. I also recreate models from CAD drawings, and I am considered to be one of the fastest technicians in this software. I really don't enjoy making such statements, it just feels like gloating, and that's not my intent, but for example, you have to open a window dbx to designate the height in plan view, whereas in 3d I can change the height location and width of the window without ever opening up the dbx, which is much faster and more efficient. It's a heck of a lot faster then working in a vector view and I get to spin the camera around instead of opening elevation after elevation. Yes there is a z fighting issue, it is easily fixed in the premiere line, and I imagine this is a regional detail, ordering a window with shallow frame and no jamb extensions and wrapping the drywall back to that frame. I've never seen it, which is probably why it is so slow to be addressed. Shoot a message to dermot dempsy on chieftalk..that's his code. In the meantime, I am happy to make you more sill profiles , just drop in the cad for me to reference.

Its really easy to replicate. In HD pro 2025. Draw an external wall or room, any wall doesn’t matter. Increase the wall depth to about 400mm from center. Place a window, with external casing. (70mm) recess the window frame by about 150mm choose any default 2025 sill/shape profile and recess it. Bam z-fighting.

@Renerabbitt Ah sure, maybe I should give you some training in Twin Motion then, because I can import, setup and get about 6 fully raytraced Exterior images in about 20mins, if I need to. IF I faff and take my time with one interior scene/picture, then yeah it’ll be about an hour too. I don’t bill per hour. I quote engineers, architects, surveyors, carpenters and interior designers ahead based on their plans as they need a fixed price to in turn pass on to their clients. There is no way I could charge per hour here, I’d be out of business. No one here pays per hour unless you’re a gardener, cleaner, child-minder etc and/or only doing a 2–4-hour job. So yes, I completely disagree. I’ll provide a quote based on what I can see on the CAD plans as well as fixed eta timeline. (About €400 for a TM Exterior, 6 pictures ) of an average 1800sft bungalow house. If I asked for anything more than that, I’d be told to go fly a kite. I’m pretty much already pushing the top end of the scale and it taken me years! It’s only because of my level of accuracy and attention to detail that I’ve got this far. You want to talk about work flow…I spend on average about 20 hours, PER JOB, “fixing” Chiefs’ holes and gaps with soffits, wedges, slabs and shapes thanks to the obnoxious wall, railing, and fence snapping; manually building window sills because they Z-fight, manually building dormer windows because the auto-floating dormer doesn’t work with 400mm cavity walls, manually building roofs with barge/verge walls, manually building skylight shafts, manually building corner windows and doors, manually building gutters, downpipes, building objects in SketchUp and importing them etc. And the terrain controls in chief are an entirely different kind of joke. THAT’S where my work flow problem exists!! Then…. Just when you think you have everything technically patched up… you switch to PBR… and all your ”patches” light up like Christmas trees because Chief cant “rasterize” in PBR properly. I'd probably turn off 3D dimentions if I could, makes no difference to me since I work off real CAD plans and elevations in CAD "Are you sure? because it did fix it on my HD2026" Apologies, your sill does work and fixed it in 2026...but now cmere, you’re blatantly admitting there was a Z-fighting issue otherwise you wouldn’t have had to “fix it” without me posting any futher details. Without "your" sill, the problem still exists in 2026. I appreciate that you took the time and thank you, but unforntunately, like I said Pro 2025-2022 is the issue, not 2026. Ill let go of my distain for this software when it actually works.

Hello @DesignerRyan Creating new layers is a feature available in our flagship program Chief Architect Premier. Also in Chief Architect Premier you have the ability to Reference plans. This allows you to overlay your as-built plan under the new plan to see where changes occur in both 2D and 3D. This video demonstrates Referencing as well as some other remodeling features. More information about the differences between Home Designer and Chief Architect can be found here: https://www.homedesignersoftware.com/chief-architect/ Let us know if you have any questions! Best, Phillip Chief Architect Software

I do however Thank you for your effort to answer my question. Greatly appreciated. I love the software. Much, much easier to use than Revit and does about the same job.

Well it bugs me because it's not consistent. The lines show up on some foundation walls but not all foundation walls. When the lines appear on some walls but not all walls it's confusing. And, I don't build foundation walls with a specific brick ledge. I simply but brick at the top of the wall.

go to tool bar: TOOLS click: DISPLAY OPTIONS Turn off from view BRICK LEDGE LINES They only show up when you have brick on exterior. Not sure why it bugs you since if you have brick they will make a brick ledge to support and get proper drainage.

It's the same for any of the Home Designer versions. You mentioned 24 in your post

My signature is old - I'm using Home Designer Pro 2024

Not in the Home Designer product. You'll need to upgrade to Chief Architect for layers. This discussion has come up many times. I always just draw an as built plan, then copy it to make the changes for the remodel

Does anyone know if I can create layers in any of the Home Designer Pro versions? I'm using 2024, but can upgrade if they have added this. And if not, does anyone know a workaround for solving my need: I do a lot of remodels. I would love to be able to layer my as-built plan under my new plan with my changes so I can see (and show clients) where we started as a base of comparison.

This is crazy. 8 foundation walls are clean. One foundation wall shows a brick ledge. WTH. Someone needs to be able to answer this problem.

I understand that it's likely a brick ledge line but I don't want to see the line. Other foundation walls have a brick ledge but they don't have the brick ledge line. WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

how do I turn off brick ledge line?

LOL ok, that narrows it down lol. Nope, it's a foundation wall, no pony wall.

Thanks Rookie. That's what it was.

that looks like foundation wall so it could be brick ledge of some sort.

FOR SOME REASON SIMILAR WALLS HAVE AN ADDITIONAL LINE. WHY? WHAT IS THE ADDITIONAL LINE?

You have "color" turned off in your 1st screen shot, and "on" in the 2nd. Look at the little house image in the right side tool bar.

Thanks for the response Scott. It's just the regular Plan when you are designing, that no longer shows shaded walls. (see screen shot). If I go to Print Preview, it shows the shaded walls. (see other screen shot) I'm just trying to get the shaded walls back in standard Plan view. I don't know what I did to make them un-shaded. Any other ideas?

Did you check the option to print in color?

Just adding to my question above, when I go to Print Preview, the walls are shaded like they originally were. Get out of Print Preview and they are no longer shaded.

@Renerabbitt Thanks for looking. I'm sure there's ways around this, gonna have to keep digging. I have been using the "save as" for both plan and layout files. It would just be faster & more convenient to be able to select them from the pop up menu. This is the craziest software I've used to date. I've watched videos on older versions of the software as there aren't that many specifically on HDPro 2025. To see that certain features were available previously, but then they take stuff away later. Trying to follow along with tutorials & Tips/Tricks videos is almost impossible when things are removed. As awesome as this software is & could be, it's frustrating (I'm assuming on purpose) to to know there are things that are so simple that have just been disabled to make things harder. PS: I watched your comparison video and it looks like you've poked around in HDPro2025 a little bit. It was awesome to see what someone that has tons of CA experience can still be impressed with the functionality offered by the cheap version of the software. Maybe one of these years I can afford Chief, but until then I'll just keep playing around in this version as it's pretty much paid for.

I just upgraded to Home Designer Pro 2026, and created a new plan for my son and daughter-in-laws renovation project. I was using Print Preview and Print to PDF so I could send them the plan. Now all the walls are no longer shaded. When I created the plan, exterior walls were darker gray, and interior walls were lighter gray. I can't figure out how to restore them to how they were when first created. Does anybody know a way to do this?

It does seem as if these options are not available in HD2025, only HD2026. In that case simply gut a project and for each new project make a copy of your gutted project and start from there