dcscca

We're planning to re-roof our house. The new roof will have 4 1/2" of XPS rigid foam insulation and plywood added to the roof assembly in certain parts of the roof. The XPS and plywood will go above the roof sheathing, so in the sections where this material is added, the roof assembly will be 4 1/2" thicker than in the rest of the roof. Is there a way to model roof thickness on a per roof plane basis (or at all)? I looked at the roof plane dialog box but was stymied. Thanks very much.

Thanks again. Not sure why the negative height doesn't work for me for wall lights. A difference between HD 2015 and 2016, perhaps? I tried several of the core library Wall Lights on both a Room Divider and a regular exterior wall - when I try to specify a negative number as the height, it just pops back to the default height instead. (When I specify a non-default positive number, it moves to the light to the expected height, so it's not that I'm using the wrong specifier in the dialog box or something.) I don't have a Level 0 in my plan currently - that may work, but I am OK for now with the current solution of using a cabinet-mounted light instead. Thanks for the help!

Eric, I tried that just now. When I check the box for "Foundation Wall", I can make the wall go below 0", but even so, the program won't let me specify the height of the light below 0".

BTW, does anybody know how to get rid of the light that emanates from nearby windows - in this case the two downstairs front bedrooms behind the yard? I've tried manually turning off those room's ceiling lights... taking lights out of the rooms... keeping the lights in the rooms but setting the lumens level to the lowest setting... putting blinds on the window... even putting a huge soffit behind the window to block any light coming from the room. Nothing works... the windows still glow as though light is pouring out of the room. How do I get rid of that??

Thanks, Eric and Mick. I tried the invisible wall approach, and it almost worked, but I wanted the lights placed lower than where the program considers 0" and the bottom of the wall, so it didn't quite work. Whenever I tried to move the light lower, it ignored my command and "bounced" the light back to a positive height value. In any case, after talking to the landscape designer, since we are adding lighting into the wall at the last moment, after the CBU base has been constructed, it will be easier to use a mini-light-bar placed under the wall cap. I was able to use an under-cabinet light to model this - results attached. Thanks again.

I'd like to add in-wall lighting sconces to my terrain wall (similar to what's shown in the attached pic), but when I try to use any of the core library's wall lights, it says I can't add the light to my terrain wall, because wall lights can only be placed on walls ("real" walls, I think it means). I saw in the Chief Architect help database that in Chief, wall lights can be copy/pasted to a User Library, and then edited there to allow placement relative to a floor, without requiring a wall attachment. However, this function does not appear to be available in Home Designer - not even in HD Pro 2016. Is there any workaround other than manually adding/specifying a light source and then separately adding a non-functional architectural block of the appropriate size/shape to the same location? Thanks for any ideas.

Awesome! Downloaded and installed the library... love the materials. Thank you :-)

Thank you to the posters above for the materials provided here, and to the previous posters in that linked thread for the tip about the metals in the Formica library. Super helpful!

Thanks again, Mick - that trick about how to place a fence on top of a fence was exactly what I needed. Thank you!

Mick, thank you so much for your efforts - and great job, those fences you made are gorgeous! I tried to install them from your .calibz, but my HD Pro 2015 won't load them :-( ... I guess you must be using the HD 2016 version? I bet others will like having those models, in any case... and if/when I upgrade to 2016, I will import those for sure. In the meantime I created something that is not as elegant but more or less works (pics attached)... I did use your earlier suggestion to manually input several of the components instead of trying to get the built-in Fencing or Railing functions to do it for me. I used a soffit for the top rail, and the horizontal cylinder from the Geometric Shapes library for the cables. My result is not as elegant as yours, but I think it's nice enough to help the neighbors visualize what we'd like to do for a new fence down the property line.... Thank you again.

Whoops - the "attached pic" wasn't quite so attached in that last post. It's attached this time.

Anybody have ideas how to model this wood and cable wire fence? (see attached pic) I've failed completely so far. I tried checking the pony wall button in the Wall Types tab of Fencing Specification and defining the upper and lower portions separately, but my choices seem to have no effect - I don't get a two-part fence to play with. I also tried using the Railing feature rather than Fencing, thinking I'd insert the cables separately after creating a railing /fence with an open space between the top of the panels and the top of the posts, but I can't figure out how to control the post height independently of the paneled section height. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Hi Moxie67, thanks for that idea. That almost works except that, as you said, you can't specify the soil depth independently. Also, I was unable to make the two boxes come together in a true "L"... i.e. the edges of the boxes still showed through where the two beds intersected, when I forced the two boxes to overlap or sit adjacent to each other. But I will keep those raised beds in mind for other modeling needs. Thank you :-)

Thank you all for this info... The walkthrough function in my HD Pro was completely not working until I found this thread and installed the xvid codec. Now everything works perfectly.

Thank you, Mick, I like your idea too. I played with both suggestions, then eventually ended up using a terrain wall in the desired shape, filled with a dirt-textured soffit, topped by plant images. Thanks again.

Thank you, David - super helpful for others, too.

Thank you, David - I was not familiar with those boxes in the "shapes" library. Very useful! Appreciate the help.

What is the best way to model an L-shaped planter box such as the one in the attached photo? I want to make the box a certain height, say 30", and fill it with soil up to 24", then install plants on top of the soil. This seems like such an ordinary thing to want to do that I'm sure there must be an easy way to accomplish it, but everything I've tried has failed. When I tried to use the built-in "Box Planter" in the core library, I could not change the shape to an "L"... Even when I settled for two of the built-in Box Planters at right angles to each other, after I tried to fill them with a Garden Bed of height and thickness 24" (using Terrain -> Garden Bed -> Polyline Garden Bed), the whole planter box floated in the air starting at 24" (even when the garden bed was entirely inside the box). Ideas? Thank you!