pjdaly

Likewise, Ive been on the lookout for a way to draw this fake trim on my house and haven't found a solution.

Interesting.... I got the ceiling to come back. It appears you can't change the room to Open Below and then forget about it like it's not longer "participating" The room Open Below isn't entirely removed such the room below it (Dining Room) "owns" the airspace all the way up to the ridge board. Instead the values in the Open Below Structure have to still be consistent. What I did was.... -- change the "Open Below" back to a bedroom -- fix its Structure to look like the green bedroom next to it... in other words make it look as it was before I changed it to Open Below. That made the ceiling come back. -- then I change the room to Open Below once again and the ceiling still stayed.

Background: I find it less problematic to set up the floors and ceiling platforms and not create a lot of rooms, initially, to avoid varying platform heights issues. This drawing was created with the open area over the dining area initially as a bedroom type labelled "open over dining". Then wide open space was created by changing that type from a bedroom type to actually be "Open Below". The second floor has its ABS Floor (C) as 96" and the first floor has its ABS Floor (C) as the standard Zero. That remaining green bedroom up on the second floor (with massive passthrough window added to peek inside) has the desired flat ceiling at the top of its shed roof ceiling (the break line is highlighted). But the same flat ceiling that *was* there in the temporary bedroom went away when the room type was changed to "Open Below." I sorta expected that figuring I'd have to adjust the ceiling height. So far so good. The green bedroom has it's ABS Ceiling (B) at 213 7/16" which is REL Rough Ceiling 117 9/16" distance from its ABS Floor (C) of 96" (makes sense). So the job was to fix the ceiling height for the Dining Room which has an "Open Below" above it now whereas it *had* a temporary bedroom with a working flat ceiling. However, the "Open Below" seems to have a leftover knowledge of its floor platform (L) 7 7/8" from when it was a bedroom. Both the relative height and the absolute height of the Dining Room ceiling should match because the Dining Room ABS Floor (C) is ZERO. When setting the ceiling height for the Dining Room: If I set the ABS Ceiling (B) for the dining room to that of the bedroom, 213 7/16", it becomes so. But the REL Rough Ceiling (E) becomes 221 5/16" which is EXCESSIVE by the (L) distance. If I set the REL Rough Ceiling (E) to the 213 7/16", it becomes so. But the ABS Ceiling (B) becomes 205 9/16 which is SHORT by the (L) distance. I figure this is either a bug or I shouldn't be trying to create the open space over the Dining Room using an Open Below. Just looking for whether its a bug or a don't-do.

I agree about not wanting to have a bunch of duplicate walls types that differ only in color of pre-colored wallboard. I saw a Youtube video about doing that so apparently that's one way that people do this. (Note: it's a tad awkward on a Mac which brings in Apple's color picker into play and it applies color profile changes if you're not paying attention) I kind of like the practice of making one wall definition with a zero-thick paint layer in front (another way I've seen done). You can also make color some default wall color if you want. I did this on a few rooms and used it the initial color "Primer" Then spray (or edit) the paint layer in the wall of individual rooms to be some color material (like Strawberry in this example). It seems.... changing the "Interior Wall Surface" from 1/2 inch Drywall material to a 1/2 inch of some color material -vs- changing the "Interior Wall Surface" from 0 inch "paint layer" (primer or "main" color) to 0 inch paint of some room's color appears to be a conceptual difference but the latter appeals to me as better emulating painting a room. I may well turn out that doing it whatever way you want to do is sufficient but I was just looking for advice against particular ways of doing this in case others ran into some unforeseen problem with that method. Thanks for the reply.

You can create a lowered ceiling by going into the room specification and editing the ceiling finish. In there is an option to lower the ceiling. I made the right one drop by 3 feet. The outside wall I made invisible for a look inside. Is this like you had in mind?

Okay, so I spent a lot of time figuring out how do to all these painting methods on my own without asking for any help. I've seen them done by others. What I don't know if there are any advantage with doing it one way or another because I can find no discussion of methods. So I asked that question and got a downvote. What am I doing wrong by asking this question?

To have paint on an interior-6 wall (for example) which has Drywall as the Interior Wall Surface, you can do it several ways. I don't find any discussion of advantages of one way or another. (1) This video by Home Designer simply shows replacing the Material Drywall in the wall with the Material color-Strawberry https://www.homedesignersoftware.com/support/article/KB-00071/changing-the-color-or-material-of-a-single-wall-in-home-designer.html (2) You can also clone Drywall and create your own Strawberry-colored Drywall Material and replace the default material "Drywall" with your pre-colored version. (3) Yet another way is to put a zero-thickness "paint" layer in front of the wall's Interior Wall Surface to receive paint and then spray (or edit) it room by room with your different room colors. Even the method of getting the Interior Wall Surface changed into your colored Drywall (or having a zero-thick paint layer in front of the library Drywall) can be varied: You can create your own pre-defined wall type that incorporates your colored Drywall material (or add a zero thick paint layer) and use it in a wall. For example, you can clone interior-6 as "interior-6-Drywall-Strawberry" and then replace Drywall with Drywall-Strawberry. And you can set your defaults to have interior walls drawn using your default Strawberry wall (or your zero-thick paint layer) if you want. The distinction between swapping out Drywall material with a colored material -vs- changing the color of an added zero-thick "paint" layer seems to be more of a conceptual difference than a practical one since the HD video does the simple material change (replacing Drywall with a color).. Perhaps there are inventory concerns with one way vs another.

You might try drawing them manually My house is very similar to what you describe: - The rear dormer has one side flush with the gable end wall and one flush with the rear wall. The difference with yours is mine has one cheek is abutting the 12 pitch main roof rather than the other gable end. - The front dormer is inset on three sides. I ended up drawing them without using the dormer dialog because they are just too complicated, for example: - Both dormers have two rooms: one with a flat ceiling and one with a half-cathedral ceiling. - The "Window Bedroom" in the front dormer has a wall shared with an Open Below to the dining room. - The window bedroom and dining room have a shared 30" wide flat ceiling at the top of the cathedral that spans the wall between them and the dining room half extends into "Hi Hall" then drops to a flat height that is shared by the twin and Queen bedroom. The vestige of main roof on the back of the house is a fake detail on my actual house whereas in my drawing it's actually a strip of the rear main roof's roof plane. My house has a fake gable barge board (45 degrees) on the flush-cheek rear dormer to emulate the missing gable end. I haven't found a good way (yet) to draw in a fake one like it on the plan but there's other things to be done first.