Firewoman

I did read through some of those, that's how I was able to get as far as I did (which considering I've never worked on any software like this, I think I did pretty good considering the shape of the lot ). And I didn't ask a single question, although I was tempted   I guess I am "terrained" out. I was trying to take a shortcut by just asking someone rather than doing three more hours of reading.

terrain issue.plan

another view, showing it dropping off as well raising up on the left

Looking for some help. I am wondering why when creating the terrain for this plan, the grey area in which the entire house sits, and is set at 0" for the entire area, creates elevations. You can see in the full overview how it drops down.

Thanks Mick and Jo_ann. I have put that project aside for a little and started working on my house plan instead. I haven't had a chance yet to try your suggestion yet but thanks!

Thanks Mick, yes, I see now I just didn't know how to properly use the camera tools. I'm getting there, let's just hope I don't drive you guys crazy along with me, in the process. I very much appreciate the help and advice.

Forget about walls and think "rooms".  CA tries to build rooms that can support a flat ceiling and roof.  Tweaking individual walls causes issues because the walls are shared by two DIFFERENT rooms with different ceiling heights and CA doesn't know what to do when the ceiling heights are different on opposite sides of the same wall.

 

Try this exercise:  Draw a large room set to 15' height.  Now draw four new walls to create a new room inside that room and set the ceiling for tne new room at 10'.  Now look at your dollhouse view.  You will see that even though the ceiling is set for 10', the walls appear to be 15' tall.  WHY?  Because these walls are SHARED with the room outside of it, and CA needs to build a flat ceiling so it draws them up to meet the outside room, even though technically they ARE specified structurally as 10' tall (if you have crown mouldings on you will see they are at 10' height.

. 

Next.  Build another room INSIDE that room, double click it to set the ceiling at 10'.  CA sees that the adjacent wall is "technically " 10' so allows a 10' room inside it.  You have worked around it and now have 10' room. 

 

So this leads to a workaround, using invisible walls to transition from your taller walled sections to your lower walled sections. There may be easier methodss, but this is the only one that comes to mind for me right now.

 

In your pic above, I would probably take the whole area surrounding the short rooms and set the height at 10', (which would lower the outside walls to 10' also)  Then I would draw an invisible perimeter wall BETWEEN the short rooms and the outside wall, then designate that space at 15' to bring the outside walls back up to 15.

Deezine - this was excellent advice. I saw invisible walls somewhere and wondered what the purpose of that was and explaining it like this helped tremendously. I will try to think rooms now. Thank you!

Mick - thanks for the info!

Ok, so prior to purchasing this software I watched a bunch of the tutorials, thought it looked great, an looked very easy. After I got it I figured I'd just jump right in and start my design. That was my mistake. I really should have just fooled around a while on a simple design and got used to the tools.

So after completing the amount I have, and having my little melt-down, I watched the tutorials again. Now I was able to retain what was in them since I can now interact with the program, and I have figured out a LOT of the things I couldn't before. Not so frustrated anymore and actually excited again.

Well so much for using half walls. If I could figure out how to attach an image on here I would, but here is a link anyway. This is what happens when you add doors to half walls, and when I saw what happened I remembered to post in the other forum. But his solution was with tools that are not available with Suite 2015.

https://stores.dc-sports.com//media/images/ugh.png

I didn't receive the manual yet, but I did look through and read a lot of the posts in the online reference manual. So it is not possible to simply walk through the design without recording an elaborate path?

I think I am at the point or returning this. It's not really suiting my needs. It will be a year before I am able to complete this design. I already have it finished in Autodesk, and the whole thing only took me a few nights after work to complete. The only thing is that free software has very limited finishes, so I got this one. There is just too steep a learning curve. I'm a pretty patient person, and I have been nothing but pissed since I started using this and it stinks because I was very excited to get it. It just seems that some components that should be very basic are just missing or too difficult to figure out.

Each step I have taken I have looked through the boards and the support articles, but it is too time consuming and I never find an answer and want to just come on here and ask the question instead. Feeling VERY frustrated.

How do I walk through my design? I can't seem to find a tool that allows me to do that. I don't want to record anything, just walk through it. Thanks

Thanks Good idea.

Got it Eric. Thank you!

And for any beginners in the future... when I did that, even though I had my project default setting ( edit>default setting>floor) set to no roof or ceiling over the room, it still showed one in 3D. You have to go to each individual room and remove them individually.

I figured it out and can't believe how easy it is, and for some reason I feel like I tried this in the beginning but it didn't work. Anyway... In the default setting I made the entire 1 st floor 15'. The walls that were to be 10' needed to be half walls adjusted to 10'. Pretty basic, but I still think you should be able to adjust the height of individual full height walls.

Now... can anyone tell me how to delete the second floor

you would have a 10' 1st level and a 5' 2nd storey with "open to below areas".

 

I actually tried this. But the problem is most of my interior walls are 15' and only some are 10'. Doing that makes all of the interior walls 10' now. This is so frustrating.

Thanks Kbird1. And thanks for helping me find this post

Got it. Thank you.  I went to the default setting but went to walls. Didn't think to go to floors. Thank you again

How do you change the wall height? (Suite 2015) I am designing offices in my existing warehouse which has 15' high exterior wall with windows all the way to the top. Some of the interior walls will go all the way up 15', and some only 10'. I can't figure out how to make the walls the correct height.