davidstvz

The ceiling heights are the same in that area. I suppose if I played with room heights I might convince the system to generate that roof, but would that really be the best/right way to do it when the exterior walls are supposed to be at the same height? I think baseline polylines are far more appropriate here since changes to them only effect the roof.

Defaults set what new objects are created with. To change existing objects you need to use the material painter tool. While in a 3D view, go to the menu "3D -> Material Painter" and observe the tools there. You have the painter (with several modes/options) and the eyedropper. If you choose the painter, the library window pops up and you use it to select a new material. You can also use the eyedropper to select an existing material from the 3D view. Once selected, click a surface in the 3D view to replace it's material with the one chosen. Depending on the mode of operation, other materials in the plan may or may not be replaced. It sounds like you want to use "plan mode" which replaces every identical surface with the new material using a single click. This won't concern you at the moment because you're applying materials with textures, but note that color materials (i.e. paint) have no texture associated. If you're painting colors without texture, the tool by default will not remove the texture already applied to the surface. For example, you apply color to brick and you get different color brick, not a flat non-brick surface using your color. To apply a flat color to a textured surface, removing the texture, deactivate the "blend colors with materials" option.

What you want to do is a feature of Chief Architect Premier: https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00095/creating-a-cut-list-of-framing-materials.html Honestly, if you just buy one normal 8' or 9' stud for each short stud and cut them, you'll be pretty close to what you want anyway. How much of those wasted 3 3/8" pieces do you think you can use? If you learn a little Excel, you can easily use the cut list to generate a custom buy list.

I agree, it is a straightforward hip roof designed by a professional architect which I am not. However, I don't see any way to auto-generate it from wall directives. In particular, how do you create two different pitches along the same wall (as in the east and west walls of this structure)? I personally find the baseline polylines to be a very intuitive system with more ease and power than wall directives while being not nearly as complex as manual roof editing. If you've mastered manual roof editing, I can see why you would disregard it, but there are a lot of amateurs here who can benefit from it.

Yes agreed, 7'-8 5/8" and 8'-8 5/8" are very common (especially the 7'-8 5/8"). You combine with a bottom plate and double top plate (4.5" total) for a rough ceiling height of 8'-1 1/8" or 9'-1 1/8". The extra 9/8" accounts for 1/2" drywall and leaves 5/8" for flooring finishes so you can have approximately 8' or 9' between the floor finishes.

Where is 2x4x10 not a standard board length? You can get 10 foot long 2x4, 2x6, 2x8 or 2x10 right now at the Lowe's down the street from me. Surely a lumber yard would have them. In any case, I don't see any way to modify what lumber is considered commonly available. Your best bet to mimic the functionality would be to generate a cut list, export it for use in Excel and then use some kind of VB script or Excel formulas to generate a buy list from the cut list using your own custom list of lumber sizes.

I agree 100%. The auto dimensions clutter things up far too much, so I always rely on temporary dimensions, or temporarily placed manual dimensions.

Here's a summary of what the manual says (roughly) about roof baseline polylines: 1) How to create and display them in the first place, and that you'll get at least one baseline polyline per wall height in your exterior wall layout. 2) It tells you that editing (changing the shape of) roof baseline polylines is much like editing any polyline (which is almost true). 3) It mentions that the baseline polyline edges have roof directives just like exterior walls. 4) There's a very simple example where a porch is created which is probably better addressed via other means (such as using railings or room dividers to define the porch so that it has a roof overhead automatically). What it doesn't say: They never really gives you a good reason for why you might use them and very little guidance on how to use them: 1) With regard to editing the baseline polylines, they forget to mention that edges set to "Vert-V" (i.e. against wall) are forcibly aligned at right angles to the grid and their vertices cannot be combined to simplify the polyline. If you need to remove a vertex, you need to set both adjoining edges to hip and then combine the vertices. 2) The automatically generated baseline polylines may be needlessly complex if you have two or more different ceiling heights along the exterior walls. The polyline will follow the shape of the interior rooms which match its height (marking each edge with "Vert-V") whereas the roof system is probably only using directives in the exterior portions of the polylines. The only purpose of the interior portions is to ensure that all portions of the structure are covered, or to set some sections to non-hip on occasion. It may be preferable to create your own much simpler set of baseline polylines and allow the interior portions to overlap for the sake of simplicity. Just don't leave a hole in your set of polylines as that will create a hole in your roof. 3) It doesn't tell you how to manually create a new roof baseline polyline, which makes sense because I don't believe you can do so directly. Fortunately, you can copy and paste existing ones. I recommend making a simple rectangular structure as I said above so you can copy and paste it's roof baseline polyline as a way of creating new ones (if needed). Remember to increase the height if needed. Best reasons to use roof baseline polylines: 1) It would be a good idea to work with wall directives first and learn how those work before using baseline polylines as most of the time you can get done what you need with the wall directives. However, if your auto roof is not behaving as expected, one strategy might be to generate the polylines and then inspect them manually to see where your problems are (and use what you learn to correct the directives in your exterior walls, delete the polylines and go back to a normal auto-roof). 2) Your roof section with a different height is not behaving as expected. I've been able to fix some issues that, so far, I am unable to fix with wall directives, though I'm not prepared to go into detail about this yet because I'm really not sure what the problem is yet or how I fixed it. 3) You cannot have two different pitches emanate from one exterior wall. If you generate the baseline polylines, you can see that it choose one of the two pitches and makes a single polyline edge. Even if you manually create two separate roof baseline polylines with different pitches, if two edges are coplanar and the baseline is set to the same height, the auto-roof will only generate one plane using one of the two pitches. To force two separate pitches, you need to bring one of the two edges inward just a bit (if you don't bring it in too much, the roof edge remains flush thankfully). I will attach an example (the house I'm living in is designed this way). Notice both the left and right exterior wall sections change from 12 over 12 to 9 over 12 pitch seamlessly. Edit: DJP, I'm curious if you can generate the roof in the attached images without using manual edits or baseline polylines. All ceilings are at 10', except the front porch is at 12 feet and the room/wall immediately to it's west is at 11 feet. The house plan actually specifies a 9/12 pitch everywhere, including all around the edges (just for the 18" or so inches it takes to reach the exterior walls) then a change to 12/12 on the following east/west facing planes: the pair over the garage, the large pair over the main body of the house, and the pair over the front porch. All north/south planes are 9/12. It seems the only way to make two different pitches happen on a wall is to split the exterior wall and move part inward 3 whole inches. With baseline polylines, you can create the separate pitches by moving a section inward the slightest fraction of an inch.

To state this more clearly, if you generate a material list for all floors and find where the roofing shingles are listed, that should give you a good idea of how many roof squares you have. Note that if you apply the roof shingle material to anything besides the roof, it would get counted into this total and make it inaccurate.

I’ve already read those two pages, twice actually. I agree it’s good to read the manual, but it’s very limited here.

I agree that one should read the manual and try to understand the tools, but it's not always easy to do. Tinkering has always been my means of learning computer programs. It does occasionally get you into trouble unfortunately. Well, if no one else is up to the task, I will post info about what I think I've learned about roof baseline polylines here.

Here's something to get you started. Go to the menu and click: 1) Build -> Roof -> Build Roofs 2) Select auto roof and "make roof baseline polylines" NOTE: if you ever want to go back to a normal auto-roof, you have to get rid of the roof baseline polylines you just created. The easiest way to do that is from "Edit -> Delete Objects". Just click "roof baselines polylines" check box and confirm, then build roof again but without the baseline polylines checked (or check it again to regenerate new ones). 3) To actually see the polylines, you need to go to your plan display options and then enable "roof baseline polylines". Finally, I find that the easiest way to see the roof is using a full orthographic overview and then just rotate the camera to be looking straight down (pan the camera by holding the middle mouse button until you're centered over the house and zoom in with the mouse wheel to get the kind of view in my attached image; consider temporarily painting the roof ridges with slate tile as I did to make them easily visible). Now using the "window" menu, split your view to a vertical layout with the plan on one side and the orthographic view on the other. Now you can easily see how changing the polyline changes your roof.

Is there any detailed documentation about roof baseline polylines and how they work? I can't seem to find anything, but have got a lot done just by tinkering. One question I have is, where should the polyline typically stop on exterior walls? When generated automatically, it seems to go to different areas (sometimes to the outside of bricks, sometimes only to the outside of framing, sometimes to the inside of framing). Overlapping doesn't seem to cause any problems, in fact, sometimes it seems essential to solving problems. For example, the green outlined section in my attached image is a hip roof over an area with 12 foot ceiling, while the neighboring areas have 10 foot ceilings. Getting the southern edge of the hip plane to form a proper valley was impossible without overlapping the polyline on that side. I've taken to creating multiple independent and overlapping baseline polylines to get the roof I want. It's been especially useful in sections where there are two different pitches projecting from a single long wall (the automatic system seems completely unwilling to do that; it always just ignores one of the mismatched pitches along the wall). It seems like you ought to be able to simply draw a new roof baseline polyline, but I haven't found any way to do that. Instead, I just create a simple rectangular temp structure and then copy and paste it's baseline polyline as needed. At least that automatically sets the baseline height (it generates at 9 and 9/16 inches above the absolute ceiling elevation if you need to set it manually).

When I say "made the ceiling thicker", I meant I made the ceiling finish thicker. So, no it wouldn't be built with 2 foot thick drywall ;-) I think I see appropriate settings however. It looks like I would just edit the ceiling structure, check "frame lowered ceiling" and set the air gap + framing equal to 2 feet. The only thing wrong with this is that it makes interior walls around the room 2' higher, whereas only the exterior walls actually need to be higher. So if I wanted to get the interior of the attic looking right, I might have to make a floor above to get it perfect... but that doesn't sound too important right now.

Wall heights seem determined by the room structure height, but some exterior walls in my house are higher to accommodate the roof. In particular, I have a bedroom with 10' ceilings (most of the house is 10') but a section outside this bedroom has a 12' wall for the roof (the eaves are at 11.5'). The front stoop has 14' walls (13.5' eaves) but the ceiling is only at 12.5'. What's the proper way to handle this? So far I just increased the room structure to match the outside wall I needed, and then made the ceiling thicker. Seems like there should be a better way.

Thank you, that was very much the problem. I was experimenting and tried that somewhere along the way.

Thanks for the downvote. I guess I'm blind?

I've attached my plan. I have auto-rebuild roofs enabled, but if I try moving any exterior wall, the roof doesn't rebuild. Furthermore, if I delete the roof and manually select build roof (with or without auto-rebuild), it rebuilds the same roof that was deleted. I can manually edit roof planes, but I'm really relying on starting from an auto-roof. Does anyone know what's going on or how to fix it? Hopefully I've just missed something obvious. Oakborne_Lot_31_Y_(house_18)_broken_roof.plan EDIT: I've partially solved the problem. When using auto-rebuild, the option for "re-use existing roof baselines" can't be toggled. I unchecked auto-rebuild and disabled "re-use existing roof baselines" and the new roof covered new portions of the house as it should, taking into account changes in the walls. So if I manually rebuild the roof, I can make it work now. However, I'm unable to make auto-roofs work properly. It seems auto-roof insists on reusing an old roof base line.

Thank you. I still see plants but not trees. Am I missing something?

He didn't say it explicitly, but the way DJP answered the question implied that 2D plants can cast shadows whereas it seems they cannot. And before I upgraded from HD Interiors 2015, I did make large potted plants to simulate trees, so I'm used to thinking outside the box. I just want to know if there is a proper way to do it before I start hacking

That's "default settings -> camera tools -> full camera" ... not "preferences -> render". Also, 2D plants do not cast shadows for me, even with these settings enabled. And I do not see 3D trees anywhere. There are several libraries (for purchase) for 3D plants, but I don't see any indication that they contain trees.

I'm trying to simulate the shadows cast by trees. I see that I can make CAD shapes and convert them to countertops which can be thickened as needed (which is probably better than the other CAD conversion options). Is there a better option? Maybe I can just find some furniture that happens to be tree shaped and make it really large. EDIT: ah, I just found generic shapes... they're in the catalogs at the bottom.

Ah, that's how that works. Thanks

On a slab, the porch room type has a floor level with interior flooring, but back porches typically have a dropped floor like a garage (and even front porches). I tried just using the garage type, but then footers are auto-built around the outer edges higher than the flooring, which of course is not how a porch is done. Anyway to take care of this in the room specification without turning off auto-foundations?

Yep guess I will have to work around it for now.