Baphijmm

As I continue to get fancier with my build, several questions have arisen with relation to various ceiling treatments. Since they're all fairly related--at least in my head--I hope it's okay if I ask them together. First, the primary inspiration for the interior design I'm working on is Victorian-era interior design; at the time, it was common to paper the ceilings, using particularly fancy paper treatments--trims, cornices, etc., often building up a border surrounding a fill field--in rooms that might see significant regular use by guests, for example the parlor, dining room, or guest bedroom. In addition to building up a border, it also accentuated the often-irregular shapes of crown moulding around details of millwork, large panel frames that at one time would have decorated and hidden structural columns, for example. The problem, of course, is that it doesn't seem that one can define so much as a border ceiling material, much less more intricate items. My current hypothesized workaround would be to create soffits of as negligible depth as the software will allow, and simply defining those with the border material; however, does anyone know of a better way to do this? (Or a way at all?) The second question is quite related, as it deals with much the same sort of definition, and lack thereof--similarly in Victorian homes, the ceilings might have a piece of moulding--something like a simple bullnose at the simplest, some usually-symmetrical piece of varying detail that was itself a set distance from the defined crown moulding, again on the ceiling. In a rectangular room, this could be approximated by a simple wall panel, if the definition of those items allowed them to be rotated along either of the horizontal axes, rather than the current simple single vertical axis. (Coffered ceilings were certainly common, but I'm not talking about those; I know those can be defined via soffits, and quite well.) As with the ceiling paper treatments, I can somewhat see soffits potentially holding the key here, though I'd say less so; I do know HDP allows the rotation of moulding profiles, which WOULD do the trick if they could then also be defined a set distance FROM the walls in the room. Does that make sense? Any ideas? I feel like this could be accomplished with a crown moulding build-up, but I suspect that's a Chief Architect feature. I'm including an example of the paper border treatment; Bradbury & Bradbury (who I believe created this example) used to be quite prolific with these sorts of treatments, but with their current switch to more eco-friendly printing techniques, they haven't recreated their entire former library yet. I'm also including an example of a ceiling moulding treatment like I'm referring to; this example is simple, but frankly it's best to get simple working first, before moving on to more complicated, if that makes sense. I am currently using Home Designer Pro 2023.

The angles are all equivalent, and the stairs are all the same height. While it's true that someone on either side of the stairs would experience them differently, they should still be fairly consistent in any given climb. Fact is, elliptical stairs like these are NOT terribly uncommon; they used to be used quite frequently, and you'll still often see them in government buildings from the 19th century. Additionally, it's EXTREMELY easy to draw; an ellipse is literally just a curve defined by the same total distance from two points. CAD itself has no issue whatsoever drawing these shapes, even segmented into stair treads, and indeed Chief Architect apparently has the necessary tools to draw this up correctly. It's just that Home Designer itself does not have this functionality. In the meantime, I've simply opted to take the "close enough" approach, which is proving somewhat difficult because the software thinks it knows what I want better than I do, but it's getting done.

Haha, see, the boolean tool was something I was kinda hoping I'd find buried somewhere. Alas. As for "Useful how," even being able to define an intersection point between a line and the ellipse would be useful; I could approximate the curves then, which wouldn't be exactly what I'm after but would still be useful. Regarding the previously-mentioned polyline created when I'd attempted to convert the ellipse into something else, naturally none of the lines seemed willing to define an intersect, either. The problem presented is that, this elliptical space between the stairs is then defined by a wall, as below these stairs is another set of similar stairs into a basement; my ultimate goal would be to be able to define this wall.

Thank you to both of you; the methods presented by each are effectively the same thing, and using that I was able to get the stairs started. My issue at this point is the ellipse itself. While I've defined the ellipse in CAD, it doesn't seem possible to then convert that to anything useful. I tried converting it to a countertop simply to use it as a guide, but that didn't work; understandably, the software converted the ellipse to a large number of lines, which in and of itself isn't a HUGE problem but it's definitely not what I'd intended. Since the curve itself is elliptical, not circular, it seems somewhat challenging, if not impossible, to get the curves to match up if I try simply defining the inner surface of the landing as a curve; additionally, since snapping isn't working basically at all, I can't seem to keep any of my angles consistent. Is there some element I'm missing here? I understand that defining walls from CAD elements isn't supported in Home Designer, but surely the functionality must be there, even if the tool itself is not.

Hey there! This might be stupid of me to ask, but I'm gonna ask anyway. I've got this design for a house that was produced for me by an architect; one element of this design is an entry stair which does not conform to what Home Designer seems to consider standard. In particular, the stairway itself is elliptical on the inside, and follow the walls on the outside; the stairs themselves radiate from the center of that ellipse, meaning the rise direction is itself also elliptical. I'm hoping to recreate this design in my Home Designer file, so I can then render it; however, I'm somewhat at a loss for how to do this. Recognizing that the software is based in CAD, I initially attempted to define the space of the stairs as a CAD polyline, only to learn that the CAD ellipse doesn't seem compatible with the CAD lines in the software for the purpose of intersections and re-definition of the polyline space. Further, even with the limited capabilities of what I'd tried, since the conversion from a polyline to another structure is itself limited to only a few possible options, this still wasn't really feasible. Hence, I'm coming here as something of a last resort. I understand that this design is EXTREMELY uncommon as far as Home Designer seems to believe, but I'm absolutely certain that this MUST be possible, given the CAD nature of the software. More specifically, I'm using Home Designer Pro 2023.

So I discovered, quite to my pleasure, that defining it as a fence not only solved this problem with the aforementioned reverse layers technique, but additionally allowed me to set the occasional little pilasters as "newels", the wall itself as panels, and just change the textures to match. It's not PERFECT, but you know what, it doesn't need to be, and it's a significant improvement over what I was getting before. So thanks!

This certainly looks like the solution; from the way things are looking from a search + checking things in the program, this can only be done on WALL walls, not terrain walls? I don't mind re-defining that stuff, just making sure I'm correct.

Hey there! Trying to create a terrain wall that matches, or at least somewhat resembles, the cinder-block wall defining my backyard. This wall has differing heights in differing locations; for example, at the front terminus, it's about 32" tall, but this is stepped up (gradually) to 60" tall a few feet back. (I'm including an example picture, which I hope will illustrate what I mean a little better.) I thought I'd figured out how to do this by separating the terrain wall using line-breaks and disconnecting the selected edge, but the moment any other change is made to another part of the wall, it automatically re-joins the separated part and attempts to re-equate the heights! Is there any way I could accomplish this seemingly-Sisyphean task?

Hey, look at that. It's a little different icon on 2017, but it's there and it worked. Thanks again, again!

Alright, after much finagling, I think I've got it mostly okay. There's still a weird issue where the terrain is showing in the room even though it's defined as part of the basement to avoid that, but it's not nearly as big an issue as simply trying to get this structure to look halfway correct. Thanks again.

I appreciate this fact; however, what I am lacking is a knowledge of how to do that. So far, Eric's been pretty helpful; I'm kind of stumbling through it, because I honestly don't know enough about... anything I'm doing, but I'm getting there. Things like, the lookouts still being present even though I've alternately disabled them or trimmed them down as small as they'll go, or the framing not rendering.

I mean, this is a little more complex than the idea I have envisioned, but it's the same basic idea, at least for the above-ground portion.

Hey there! Tried to do a quick search through the forums and didn't see much helpful information towards this end; information on this topic in what I've seen of the help files doesn't help much either. I'm looking for some sort of hint as to how to properly create / design an attached greenhouse, though I suppose part of the structure would be more like an older Victorian-style conservatory. Panels would eventually be multi-wall polycarbonate, but plain glass is fine for now, for the simple purposes of modeling. The idea of the structure is that it would be on a split level, accessed from a stairs landing to a basement, so it's partly underground (and that portion would be standard foundation walls); the above-ground portion would probably be panel and metal construction. Leading from the house is a small "path"-type room with a typical hipped roofline, connected at a peak on the house side, and leading to a wider, taller, square greenhouse chamber with a fully-hipped roof, such that the "path" room's peaked roof extends itself over the hip roof of this room until the square room's roof goes higher. (This is difficult to describe; I'm including an exported picture of the basic structure.) I'd like it with no eaves, but I'm having difficulty with that as well. I've already created the structure itself in the program, but what I don't know how to do is turn that structure into something remotely resembling a greenhouse. About the best I can muster is a building that looks like just the rest of the house (which is more Mediterranean) but with a bunch of windows, and skylights that don't extend along the roof properly at the angles. Running Home Designer Pro 2017. I can upgrade to the latest version, and do intend to eventually, but this might be a little ways out. So, if what I'd like to do necessarily requires that upgrade, that's fine, but for now it'd be nice if it didn't, and someone could point me in the right direction. Is this something this software can do?