MikeMike

Thank you David for the pointer! I did try some 3D trees from there, but what I've found is that they are so complicated that they really slow down the rendering (I have a gaming laptop that's pretty powerful so I just think that those models are designed for a different purpose). What I have been able to do is use a plug in with Blender that creates leaf-less trees, export them as Collada, import them in to HD Pro, and that seems to be working for what I need (which is to forecast where the shadows will fall from the tree).

I'm running Home Designer Pro 2019, and my home is in a pretty wooded area. I'm trying to plan out the effects of how these trees will cast shadows on the home (affecting the interior light during the day). All the trees that are in HD Pro are 2D, and don't cast shadows. Has anyone tried building tree objects in other 3D modeling tools (like Blender)? If so, had any success?

When I set up my cape style roof, the rafters are generated so that they are resting on the top plate. I'd like to have them resting on a 2x4 that's been nailed into the 2nd story floor (or, if that's not possible, on the floor itself). It seems like I need second story wall that only consists of a bottom plate. Is that possible?

Thanks Jo_Ann - that worked dandy. The real house has 3 gable dormers, but those are being replaced with a shed dormer with two wider gables in the shed dormer, so I don't think a picture of the real house would help. Now that the main roof lines are correct, I'll give a try at that.

Here is my attempt at the bump out using auto roofs. The roof on the bump out has an inflection in the slope that I didn't add (at least not on purpose). When I created the first floor, everything looked great. When I added the second floor and then made all the walls on the front side of the second floor knee walls, so the roof would drop down onto the first floor walls in the front, that's when that weird roof line appeared. OMT-A-1.plan

Hi all - I'm using HD2019 Pro, and am having some problems creating "complicated" roofs. The project I am working on is a remodel of a 26x36 cape with a full shed dormer in the rear. (12/12 roof front and 5/12ish roof back). In the front is a shed dormer, running about 24' all the way right side of the house, with two cable dormers in the shed dormer. To the right of the existing house will be a 26x28 addition, with a 4' bumped out gable on the front of the house. The shed dormer will continue along the back until about 4' of the end of the house, where the roof will return to 12/12 bearing on the first floor. I spent pretty much most of yesterday trying to get this to work, but all I have is a mess on my hands right now. I couldn't get auto roofs to work correctly. I tried manual roofs, but couldn't get the hole in the roof right, or the interior ceilings right. What direction should I proceed? Should I be using auto roofs or manual roofs? (or something else?)

Hi - I'm trying to design a garage that attaches to a breezeway that has a full basement where the floor of the garage is halfway between the basement floor of the breeze way and the breeze way floor itself. I've tried to make this work using the structure tab of the room specification dialog, but no luck. When I tried to specify the absolute heights, I get a warning about negative ceiling height. Does anyone have an idea on this one? (Sample Plan attached). garagetest.plan

I have a similar lot, except reversed - back to front elevation decline, with very strong slopes on the sides of the house, and a driveway cut into the hill approaching the house from the road., and have experienced similar problems in terms of terrain mapping. From what I can tell, HD works best with *lots* of information. That's not surprising. Computers make better decisions when then have more information. The problem I've found is getting that information into HD accurately - *for my type of terrain*. If I had a square lot, and the back was level, except elevated above the level front by 4' - it would be easy to enter a lot of information about my lot. I'd enter two elevation regions and be done with it. Not a lot of data entry, but actually a huge amount of information in that data. I could replicate that with elevation lines, but I would need to enter quite a few of them to get the back and front yards flat. I could also replicate that with elevation points, but I would need even more points than lines. So, I don't have a square lot. I don't have level areas. This means that I can't really use elevation regions - I need to use lines or points. This is going to mean a lot of measurement and a lot of data entry. Both are places where mistakes can be made - and this what probably I find the most daunting about creating the terrain of my lot in HD. What I would like to be able to do is create sloped regions that can be sloped in two directions. That would allow me to enter in probably the least amount of data and get a reasonable approximation of what my lot looked like. But without that, I'm probably going to have to enter points - and there seems to be a couple of potential approaches to this project: 1. Map out the yard in a grid and take probably hundreds of elevation points using a dumpy level, and figure out how to import them into HD. This is likely a full weekend project. 2. Use some sort of photogrammetry to capture detailed data, and somehow import that into HD. I don't even know if this is possible, but I'm going to give it a whirl I think. The shortcoming of these approaches is that once I have the data into my plan, I still have the problem of how to then modify the plan to reflect grading changes in the lot, if those grading changes consist of anything remotely askew. If there's anyone else out there that has some insight into this process, I'm all ears. There has to be a better way!

The project I'm planning is going to include some substantial re-grading and building of terraces around the house. The land is about 1.25 acres with a change in elevation of 24 feet over 350 ft, with substantially steeper slopes around the house. I have the hang of using the terrain points, lines, and regions for modifying the terrain - but because of the radical changes in elevation in parts of the property, it's becoming pretty clear that I need to get actual elevation measurements from the property. I could do this with a surveyors tape and transit, but that seems probably overly accurate and pretty time consuming. It seems like there are a lot of new instruments out there (like the Leica Disto series). Does anyone have a recommendation on new tools or software that can be used to collect elevation points for import into HomeDesigner Architecture?

I've watched a number of videos. So far, I'm having better luck turning off the automatic settings in the terrain properties and turning off flatten in the same dialog. Also, when terrain is not gentle, the algorithms used to generate the terrain can make things swing wildly. I've ended up putting really big rectangular elevations *outside* of my terrain perimeter to tone those down a bit. One of the challenges that I have is that the dimension lines from the building make it hard to find things like elevation points, lines, and regions. Does anyone know a way to temporarily hide the dimensions so I can see where I have put elevation data?

The background on this is that I have a lot that's 400 ft front to back and slopes downhill back to front about 12' in elevation. I'm trying to put in a drive under garage, but when I set the terrain elevation for the driveway to cut it into hill, other parts of the hill "pop up", some times really radically. Why would telling the program (2019 version) that one elevation point was lower cause other areas to raise themselves up?

I'm using Home Designer Architect to layout some proposed retaining walls, and am struggling to even get basics to look right. I have retaining walls that meet at right angles, but at the joint, the footing sweeps up like 4 ft to meet some other elevation (I think). Overall I'm a bit confused when using elevation regions and retaining walls. Where are the walls supposed to go? On the high side? On the low side? Split down the middle? I'm missing something - can anyone help?