DavidJPotter

With Home Designer Suite you can open a single wall's specification dialog- go to its Materials Tab and set that single wall's interior material to something other than its default. That works for that single wall, floor to ceiling. You can change the interior (or exterior) material of a room's walls from the Room Specification Dialog-Materials Tab which then effects all walls of that room. Architectural and Home Deigner Pro have an additional tab in both the Room Dialog and Wall Dialogs for "Wall Coverings" wich alows you to color specific horizontal strips of differing materials on a single wall or all the walls of a room. Suite does not have this feature. You mentioned using the "Wall Break Tool" and yes that would allow you to change the material settings of each vertical wall segment thus made by way of its individual wall dialog box allowing only vertical strips of differing materials assignment. Another way to overlay one material on a wall is to use the soffit tool (cabinet tools) creating 1/16" thick segments and then placing them on the surface of a wall. The soffit object will carry any material assigned to it and they can be resized vertically or horizontally. To find out about the full capabilities of your software you should carefully and methodically read your Reference Manual (found under the "Help" menu of your software), in that document is explained in detail all of the tools and procedures that your software is capable of. Read a little in it and then practice what you learned by opening your software to prove that you now actually understand what you read. Such a process will take you where you want to go quickly. DJP

KB, I have been using this forum since 2005 and no one has ever done so until they have posted several times and been asked directly to do so with no answer to thier question. If this gets enforced it will have to be us enforcing it on others. DJP

At least check these out as they are parsed especially for Home Designer titles (not all but most): http://3dlibrafarchitect.com/index.php?r=site/library&search=&x=0&y=0&x=true&soft_family_2=2&hid_soft_family_2=2&utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=ry.chie At least you will have wider choices. DJP

No matter what software you have you can take a base cabinet, set it to blank sides and increase the "counter top" thickness and download the "Cultuted Stone" from the "Manufacturer Content" section of the Home Designer Website for outward appearances. If you have Home Designer Pro you can create custom spabs shaped like that, block them and then add materials. Soffits (cabinet tools) can also be used like slabs above. DJP

Those nuances come from manually adjusting materials and lighting only, the default settings give what you have seen. It takes study followed by lots of practice that creates skill in getting the most out of a plan file. DJP

The limitation is set by your monitor DPI and its screen size in pixels. Chief Architect Permier is the only software application that they make that allows any size possible (I know an English user who created a rendering to be printed at bill board size once). Home Designer tites, all of them are limited to screen size and native DPI. DJP

There are numerous users of Chief Architect Premier in Michigan but you will have to post your query on Chief Talk to reach them. DJP

Each named camera type has it's own "Display Options" dialog and so roofs can be off for back clipped views and on for cross section views, there is a separate Display Options for plan views. DJP

I did a You Tube video on how to do this, basically you are just creating a blank second floor and then draw a tiny room on that black second floor that then emulates a coupla. The only other way to do this is by way of using a coubla symbol. End of story. When you do not have Home Designer Pro with its manual roof tools, it is harder to do because of the preciseness of settings and procedure to accomplsih this by settings alone but can be done in any Home Designer title. DJP

The software (all versions and titles) are programmed to align walls based upon the "main" or structural layer (the layer that bares the structural loading of a wall). So when the floors of two or more floors do not by default align, it is your job to manually align them wall by wall, floor to floor. The makers of the software have done a great job of this in MOST applications but where the walls do not naturally align, it is your job to make them aligned. DJP

Kbird has the right idea in terms of Home Designer Pro (Chief Premier X6 can manually fix that sort of thing but Pro does not have the additional tools for that job, so I agree with Kbird to see if you can fix the simbol in Sketch Up before import to Pro). DJP

There are six or seven different software titles in the current version of Home Designer software line and there are seven or so versions still in use, so until you state also what software you have as part of your question, no one can answer it with certainty. DJP

In order to open a ".plan" file you must have HD Pro 2014 installed on the other divice. If you want merely to share views of a plan, I commonly print views to PDF using "CutePDF" and then anyone who has Adobe Acrobat Reader can then view the file and print the PDF to paper at scale if you like. I think that printing to PDF is the easiest way to share views. DJP