ArminBuilder

Ah, THAT is where it was hiding. Thank you It is such a useful capability (when needed), such a shame we can't use the Plant Chooser to "Select Object". Not complaining!

Dumb question, but I swear I saw one time how to do this. I think I want to plant a lot of trees on a section of terrain (in a feature would be perfect). Is there a way to do it without dragging out a hundred and copy/pasting the group all over the place? Like a "fill terrain area"?

I am not arguing, just pointing out that the software could help with plumbing circuits (and I will add, hvac to that). HD provides a mechanism to do that for foundations, framing/roofing, electrical, cabinets, etc. Every one of them could be drawn with CAD and 3D shapes/soffits. So why does HD offer ANY layout and design capabilities? To save me time showing contractors what the objectives are. The end result - after consultation with the engineers - will almost certainly be different, and that is expected. And what is built will never be exactly what is on the blueprint, and that also is expected. So why is any of this different for HVAC and Plumbers? They have the same needs as any other contractor (particularly similar to electricians) - "tell me where you want it, and how it ties together" - where it comes in, where it goes out, where the fixtures are expected to be (HD does at least do the fixtures), and what they are expected to connect up to (HD does this nicely for electrical). The contractor figures out the rest. I am curious. Have you figured out a way to add plumbing circuits to the plumbing layer? Can you turn plumbing shapes off without turning off CAD or shapes used for other purposes? Really, all I am asking for is an honest plumbing layer and an honest hvac layer where I can put the fixtures and circuit metadata, and be able to display them only when needed.

Agreed! I have a very similar situation, and HD Pro does exceedingly little to help me. At least help me route water, sewer, and hvac ... it does not need to specify fittings, sizes, or anything (though it would be super cool if it was that smart). I can do all my hvac flow modeling on SimScale, and figure out plumbing pex / pipe sizes and fittings with PlumbingCAD or QuickPlumb or something. Or do it all manually, which is the sucky option when the plans have to change. IMHO no house plan - regardless of who will make final decisions - can be considered complete until plumbing and hvac are roughed out. I would vote big time for at least some rudimentary tools in the plumbing and hvac space.

@DavidJPotter , @solver Just thought I would pass this along ... Digging in the "Edit > Defaults... > Roof" menu, I discovered the "Segment Angle at Curved Wall" option. I saw this before, but its purpose did not click until I read the help page for it. Setting this to a low value makes the app much more accurate when it carves out a hole for the roof around curved walls, but is limited to 6 degree segments. Sometimes it lets more of the wall through, depending on the radius of the curve. There are pros and cons to this. Smaller segments mean more manual edits, but the edits are likely to be more accurate. I have found so far that it does help make it more obvious where the problems are, at least on larger radius curves. There may be other undesirable side effects, but I experimented a bit with adding unusual geometries to the main (lower) structure, and the roof planes seemed to behave themselves, so it is encouraging.

Thank you both for your responses! Eric, not sure how long it would have taken for me to realize that the roof was the culprit, thank you for pointing it out. I agree that the software could handle curved walls better, if such improvement is even possible given all the other things HD does for us. Nonetheless, there are occasions (at least in what I do) where things like this are necessary, so I search for options. David, thank you so much for demonstrating the roof plane polylines, it made it clear exactly what needs to be done. Manipulating them is indeed a little finicky, but manual adjustments on the roof plane could be done as a finishing task after everything else is done. Though I suppose it would have to be re-done any time revisions require a roof rebuild, but it is a workable option. Thanks again. You guys rock.

The walls on the taller (inner) structure do not paint to its ceiling. How can I make them do that? By "paint", I mean the walls of the circular structure are not drawn correctly. They are truncated at the lower ceiling, not the upper ceiling (or roof line, if you wish) to which they belong. Edit - added drawing In the cross-section image below, I have drawn a red line to indicate the expected wall height of the inner structure "should" be. The orange indicates where there walls are being truncated. Bizarrely, on the left of the picture, you can see a small column portion of the wall is actually drawn in. There are actually two of those little columns of wall, which together encompass maybe 2 or 3 degrees of the inner wall.

Hello all. Setting aside the question of why someone would do a thing like this, I have a question related to walls, and how they relate to roof heights on a structure. I have attached a simple plan and an image that demonstrates the problem. The walls of the interior (taller) structure paint to the ceiling of the larger structure, not that of the interior structure to which they belong. I suspect the answer is simple, but it is evading me. Thanks for any tips! -Armin experiment.plan

Thanks for the great replies. Both solutions work in their own way. For my purposes, Jo Ann's solution works best, and has the benefit of allowing me to keep the heights for the floors. That is a great tip!

Good evening. A quick question. My example scenario is a 3 story building, where the top floor is a rental. A stair well runs up the inside of the building to the 3rd floor, leaving floors 1 & 2 inaccessible. Ideally, the stairs would be a straight run to the 3rd floor, so my thought was to make floor 2 of the stairwell "open below". However, I cannot find a way to make the stairs complete a full run from floor 1 to floor 3 without hacking in a small segment of floor 2. Please see attached plan. The goal is for the stairs to run uninterrupted all the way to the 3rd floor. Hoping you have a better solution, or some way around the "open below" issue. Thanks! stairs between open below.plan

Thanks for the info. I tried that approach (adjusting level 0 heights), and it will work. I do find the height numbers in level 0 incredibly confusing though. They just don't make sense to my brain - I probably do not understand the relationship between "floor below" and actual floor height in level 1. I find myself switching between 0 and 1 all the time trying to get things adjusted correctly. More importantly for me, the foundation seems to insist on creating a stem wall, which is not used with ICF structures - ICF sits directly on the footer. I could not find a setting to make stem wall 0" (or to be ignored). I also could not find a footer setting to make it use vertical footings at the step. Foundation walls have those features and seem to work fine when level 0 is deleted. I may be wrong-headed in this thinking, and am happy to learn.

@solver, oh, that is interesting! So, I turned on auto build foundation, and could not reproduce the deep foundation you got (re-downloaded the plan I attached above to confirm). Strangely, I did finally get it to behave, but I have no idea why. No changes other than to turn on auto build foundations. Here is what I did... - I rebuilt the sunken structure (have done it many times), still got the same behavior - Selected all of the bad structure (on floor 1), and moved it to a new location - this prompted to turn off auto roof build. - Turned auto roof build back on. Suddenly the wall was fixed, no idea why. The reason I was using foundation walls (and had deleted level 0) is because the app automatically moves all foundations to the negative height of the lowest foundation. This makes it hard to communicate to the engineer and construction crews what is actually desired (footings should step down with the floors). I tried to make level 0 step down, but could not figure out if it was even possible. I could, of course, turn off auto-foundations and manually adjust them from level 0.

Thank you for your quick response David! I agree that manual adjustment does solve the problem. I had hoped that there might be some explanation or solution for why the app does that to the wall. For example, if I recreate the same structures in one of the provided New Plan styles, the front wall does not do that. I will spend a little more time playing with my settings and see if I can discover the root cause. If not, manual adjustment will do the trick. Thanks also for pointing out the terrain challenges that will go along with the stepped foundation, but from experience on other plans, am confident that it can be sufficiently managed. Though I do wish I could raise terrain on buildings to make a green roof, but that is another topic for another forum.

Hello folks. I can not figure this one out. I want to create a room that steps down. So I set the floor and ceiling down and everything works, except the front wall ... its foundation goes down to some arbitrary depth. Have spent quite some time trying to get that one wall to match the others, and have not found the problem. Even deleted the foundation "floor", but still no joy. Plan and image attached. Be aware that ... - I use from the bonus and manufacturers catalog - The plan has User materials - you can replace with anything that paints like a wall board - Defaults have been modified a fair amount to meet the use-case for this design - The attached plan has two separate buildings, but the behavior is the same whether the lowered room is separate or as part of the other building. Any help is greatly appreciated. Bad_front_wall.plan

Thank you! I will back up everything before attempting any of this. Modifying the default template is something I may try once the camera issue is fixed, so appreciate your explanation.