Stage5

Thanks as usual for the quick replies David! I know you've helped me several times before. It's greatly appreciated.

I had a guess that the patterns would be much like a brick patterns found in most CAD apps. I'll have to explore the app a little bit more in depth. It's not terribly different from UV images in the 3d apps I use. I have to force them into scale and correct proportions typically, and there aren't many settings for giving an exact dimension for the mortar and brick/CMU sizes. Procedural materials do have some settings for that, but they usually aren't in any real world values. More based on ratios. Plus there aren't any built in features for custom brick patterns, borders, and insets (attached examples of that from another current project). I had minimal measurements and pictures to go on for these. So these have a lot of problems. But at least they will give me a start to come up with some beginning options.

I have about 4 projects right now that have some sort of monument base work that needs to be done. So anything I can do to speed up the initial drafting during the design phase would help a lot. I'll keep exploring solutions, and if anyone else here has some other suggestions, I'm all ears. 

I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Hi Everyone,

I know this may be a bit out of the ordinary for this software, but it would be related to Architectural structures.

I work as a graphic designer at a large US based sign company. More and more lately we've been asked to retrofit or modify new signage onto existing brick / stone monument bases. I mainly work in Adobe Illustrator and also augment that with some subdivision 3d modeling apps (Modo, Cinema 4d, Blender). The problem with those is that there aren't many built in tools to deal with intricate / custom brick and stone patterns. While I can draw or model them manually, it takes a lot of time and it's difficult to input exacting accurate measurements. I do have some plugins for Adobe Illustrator that allow me to create a Chord Arc from three points. The pattern maker in Illustrator is extremely confusing, and that's coming from someone that's used it about 30 years. I would have to do a lot of guess work and incremental testing back and forth in my 3d apps to get these base structures modeled. Most of them also do not have any built in way to input Chord Arc measurements, or other CAD drafting features. We've also had a few recent clients ask us to come up with some totally new monument base designs. We don't produce these directly, but we're asked more and more to design bases that work well with our signage designs. So I'm making more of an effort to learn about how Masonry works.

I'm attaching a picture of one of the existing curved face entrance monuments that we've been asked to show a proposed option to retrofit new signage on. (They also may be willing to remove this and put an all new sign in, but they want to see all design options before deciding.)

So to my question, is there a best way to go about modeling this in Home Designer Architectural? I currently have v2020 for a Mac, but I don't have a problem updating to 2023 if it has better built in functionality for this type of project. Would a curved exterior wall, curved foundation wall, or curved pony wall be the best place to start? Some other better method from within the app?

If anyone has any suggestions of other software that may be more dedicated to this purpose, please let me know. If that's an ok thing to do here in this forum. I know some forums don't care about other software discussions, while some others strictly forbid it.

Also if anyone knows of good training resources for learning Masonry, with special focus on the design aspect, that would be great as well.

Thanks in advance for any responses!

Simon

Thanks for confirming that that tool isn’t in the version I have. Odd that they left that one out if the mid-tier version. I’ll make do with the tools available then.

Hi David, I watched one or your videos on YouTube "A Terrain Tutorial (done in Home Designer Pro 2016)". The tools show that you have an option for "Elevation Spline", but I can't find a tool named that anywhere. Is this not an option in the Architectural 2020 version? The only options I see under Terrain > Elevation Data are: Point, Line, & Region. For the life of me I can't figure out how to draw curved lines so I can recreate the contour paths. I looked in the help file, but I can't find anything telling me where this tool might be.

Thanks again for taking the time to help and the nice tutorial videos. 

41 minutes ago, djkoell said:

I was able to take a PDF of my survey which listed property boundaries with line lengths and angles.  There's a YouTube video that shows how to turn survey information into a site plot within HDS.  You should then be able to scale your PDF drawing to your plot and then trace the terrain lines.

Thanks for the info. I’ll look into that as well. 

5 minutes ago, DavidJPotter said:

This tutorial is done in Chief Architect but the Terrain tools are identical in Chief and HD PRo.

 

DJP

Thanks for the tutorial video! I’m sure it will help a lot. I should just watch all of the ones you’ve made as I can learn a lot from them. Cheers,

Simon

Hi Everyone, I'm really new to Home Designer. I come from a graphic design background and I've used different vector applications for decades. I drew the terrain contours of our house in Illustrator. Is there a way to import these into the app? I still need to add the footprint of the house to have a flat area. I think these contour lines (shown in red on the pdf) are 10' spans. 

I tried to draw the contour lines in Home Designer, but couldn't figure out how to make them curve. Plus it was easier for me to create a template to trace over in Illustrator. So I'm obviously doing something wrong inside the app and I need to watch more tutorials. I tried this several months ago, but I think I was able to import the DXF file, but I couldn't figure out how to scale it and then apply it to the terrain.

Thanks for any help or specific tutorials anyone can point me towards. 

Contour Lines.pdf

Contour Lines.dxf

Thanks for the tip Robborito. I do have Photoshop and use it most days. So that will allow me to create images with transparency. Cheers!

Simon

Perfect! That video also helped me with another question I would have had about scaling the image. I think I'm now in a position to build the terrain height and rough out the other elements. Thanks again.

Thank you sir!

I'll have a look. 

Ok, I think I figured it out. So I can drag an image from the desktop straight into the viewport. Not sure if I can lock that image or dim it? Is there an Object Browser for this app? I only see a Library palette on the right. 

I appreciate the quick replies. And sorry for originally posting in the wrong forum section. 

I did not search for tracing. I will do that now. I knew it probably would be a key word search issue though. I use a lot of different graphics software and they all use different terms for similar functions (Adobe, C4d, Modo, etc.)

Thanks

Edit:

Hmmmm. There are no results in the search for the word tracing.

Thanks, I'll create a signature now.

I did search through the help documents, but I can't find anything that tells me how (or even if) I can place an image on the plan view grid. Although I may be using the wrong search term. I've used the term "Image" and have read every result that pops up. 

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post. I've been a professional Graphic Designer for a sign company for the past 20 years. I also do a lot of mechanical 3d work. I'm new to this app though and have little experience in Architecture.

My wife and I bought a new house last year and we have a lot of different projects we have planned. We're mainly starting with exterior landscaping. The biggest issue right now is for me is getting the terrain height into the software. We have a heavily sloped backyard. I've collected a bunch of different data from my county's government website. So I've been able to get a 10' contour map that should give me the general height of my terrain and an aerial satellite image that has the property boundaries / general tree locations.

I watched the tutorial videos on setting up terrain height, and I don't see any mention of if it's possible to use an image to trace on top of? Most of the graphics software I'm used to using allows a semi-transparent template image to be used. For now I will just model the outside walls of the house and eventually will finish modeling the inside walls and other details. I tried searching the help documents, but I don't see anything about using an image as a drawing / modeling template. So any help regarding this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!