Elovia

I messed around with modeling deck railing attached to a fascia board back in 2009 on the old forum. http://hometalk.homedesignersoftware.com/showthread.php?15329-direction-of-the-decking&p=64409#post64409 As Eric mentions ... yes, it can be done but not easily. Although if you have practice with the tools, it isn't all that hard either. The downside is that doing it the way described in the linked post doesn't allow you to easily modify the size of deck or relocate the railing if you need. Such is the life using custom details. Good luck.

If you have one door already in place, and the two doors are the same size, you can use ctrl-g to center the unfixed door to the fixed one. Take a look in the reference manual about centering objects relative to other objects. Good luck.

Welcome back, and thanks for the updated information.

Hi Brandon, Just a couple of general tips to add to Eric's suggestions: It is good that you've sketched the radii with CAD circles/arcs. You can use the curved stair tool to create a basic set of curved stairs; from your photos, I'd think you'd want the Curve to Right stairs, and then you can drag them into the approximate desired location. Then, snap the start, end, inner and outer radii of the stairs to your CAD circles/arcs. Look closely at your sketch and verify whether you have a true set of circular stairs, or if you have a circular section on the bottom and a tangent straight section on the upper end. In most cases, you can make the stairs fit using the "Make Best Fit" button on the General tab of the Staircase Specification dialog. This should set your riser height and angle. Pay special attention to the walk line on the stairs; you may need to turn the display of this on at the Style tab of the Staircase Specification dialog. Some jurisdiction codes have a minimum tread width specified at the walk line, and where that walk line is to be located. Your stair treads will be wider on the outside radius than on the inside. I strongly suggest playing with the stairs and stair dialog in a vastly simplified model to your target dimensions. That way, if you find that you need to start over, you won't have messed up your actual model. Practice until you feel confident in applying your new skills to your working model. Good luck.

Welcome to the forum. First off, you have two tasks ahead of you: One - learn to use the software, and Two - try to remember all the little details from the old house. Believe it or not, the second may be easier than the first, but I would give more weight (as in "importance") to the first for reason being that you will likely remember incorrectly (the memory is funny that way) or you may discover that you want to make upgrades and/or improvements to suit your current or future needs. Try not to get frustrated, because the software does have a bit of learning curve in order to use it well ... and there are many workarounds to the software limitations where you will need to use creative, out of the box thinking. Watch tutorial videos, read the user/reference manual, read knowledge base articles, and search the forums for answers to the most common questions you will have. We forum members, like yourself, are just users of the software: we don't work for the software developers, but we most likely will have encountered many of the challenges you will face. Ask and we'll help to the best of our ability, but in the end, you will need to put forth your own effort to achieve the results you want; the greater the effort, the better the reward. I've done what you're proposing to do, and without plans and actual dimensions, the best you will get is "close enough" - meaning you will need to estimate room (and other item) sizes and then tweak them to where they all fit together. Start with dimensions that make sense, and see where it goes from there. Good luck. p.s. It will be helpful if you would put your software title and version in your signature so that you don't have to tell us over and again in each post, and so that we can provide you with the most accurate suggestions for your software title; not all titles/versions are equally capable.

Welcome to the forum. This question topic should go in the Q&A forum. If you have them in your product, sloped soffits would be a good solution. Good luck.

WDBofVA, Consider making one or more copies of your finished plan ... use the original with furnishings and all the extras for design purposes, then use copies without all that stuff for finished plan set sheets. Good luck.

Debbie, I took a little time to play with your roof, but had to make quite a few assumptions. First, I assumed that the shed roof front elevation is important. I then created roof planes for the back where the roof over the kitchen and dining is a gable, and the roof planes over the master bedroom and the living areas are shed/hip roofs. This results in a potential celestory window along the back running for the full width of the dwelling. You could use it for more natural light in your building. There are still some compromises and/or problems with this design, and it may not meet all of your criteria (note eave overhang on your lot line). It is just a free suggestion, so take it for what that's worth. Alternatively, if the shed roof front elevation is not important, consider using gables for the garage and master bath and a manually-built gable dormer over the front door. If the doorway and window are important to not be impacted by the garage overhang, consider rotating your stairs 180° so the top is near the front entrance and eliminate the hall that you currently have for the top of the stairs. Then consider moving the door away from the garage wall and overhang by similar amount. I removed a lot of furnishings and fixtures in the attached plan in order to get the file size down to where I could post it. Hope this inspires or helps. Debbie447Elo.plan

Hi WDBofVA, When you select an item, the layer it is on should be displayed along the bottom of the software's window near or just to the left of the x and y coordinates. Hope this helps.

Hi Debbie. Welcome to the forum. Since you have HD Pro, the easiest way to achieve the result you seek is to use a single manual roof plane drawn after you have the exterior walls placed. Draw the manual roof plane above the lowest wall and then stretch it across all three. Then select the roof plane and use the break line tool to break the leading lower edge of the roof plane and set the new overhang distance for each set-back section. See the attached plan for an example. Of course, I have no idea what dimensions you need for your design, so this proof of concept technique works as demonstrated on a simple plan with semi-random dimensions. It should work for yours too. Hope this helps. Debbie447.plan

The requested feature does not currently exist in the Home Designer line of software. There are half-hearted workarounds in HD Pro if a user is willing to put up with a lot of compromise, but not any that I know of that you could use in your version (Suite). Sorry to be the bearer of sad news.

Convert your slab to a custom counter top. You have the same shape customizing tools, but counter tops can have molding applied ... and they're more flexible to use than soffits when it comes to creating shapes with obtuse angle corners. Hope this helps.

This should be a standard disclaimer: Home Designer and Chief Architect products do not perform ANY engineering calculations, structural or otherwise, and prior to construction, all designs created with them should be professionally reviewed by an experienced and licensed professional engineer if not otherwise required to be so by local governing bodies. As rfcomm2k has discovered, you can easily draw things in this software that should not be able to, or even cannot, build in the real world. I think very highly of this software's capabilities to provide visual information about a particular design and changes thereto. But this software is for creating virtual models, and some of which may not necessarily have real world equivalents. Case in point, you can quite easily model a floating roof with no wall or foundation supports; not exactly something that can be built. In the interest of fair disclosure, yes I am a licensed professional engineer, and no, I am not and do not intend to ever be in the business of reviewing user-created HD or CA plans. Just throwing that out there ... Good luck.

Looks like a B&B layout to me. As for doors to the bathrooms, and if that were mine, I'd be willing to consider pocket or hanging barn doors to better maximize floor space.

Robert, I'm not a professional architect, so take my suggestions for what they're worth ... since I'm not charging you for them, I guess you know what that means. (with reference to viewing the front door) Consider mirroring the cross-ridge roof on the left over to the right, thus transferring the valley to the back 2nd story wall. Then add a new shallow shed roof plane below the window to direct runoff toward the outside of the building envelope. I'm not sure this will solve your egress problem, as the resulting access space to the window may be too crowded. You may need to consider changing the layout of the one suite so that the egress window is on the exterior of the building envelope. Maybe consider rotating the bathroom and closet counterclockwise and against the separator wall between the two bedrooms, so that both the bathroom window and the room egress window can be on the (plan) east wall. Good luck.

Short answer: yes ... with a qualifying "but" If you want to stay completely within HDPro, you can adapt the following knowledge base article for your use by using ceiling planes rather than roof planes: https://www.homedesignersoftware.com/support/article/KB-01187/creating-a-barrel-roof.html The "but" is that the method is tedious and exacting ... not much fun to create and not very flexible when modifying the model for future changes. Instead, consider creating a triangular prism-like object with a concave bottom in SketchUp and then import that into your model. Create using approximate dimensions in SketchUp and then tweak fit it into your model in HDPro. This method is much quicker and easier. Good luck and hope this helps.

LCrosno ... I wrestled with what you're after for quite a while a few years back (c. Pro 8 and 10). I have not tried in more modern versions of the HDPro software, so forgive me if there may be an easier way. I found that creating a regular dormer with a curved roof, and then exploding it and moving it to where it wanted it, led to really quirky model behavior. Yes, that method will give an idea of what it would look like, but it causes other problems if you're even the tiniest bit OCD about how it looks. The good news is you have HDPro, which is required to create manual roof planes. The bad news is that while creating a curved roof using manual roof planes is possible, it can be tedious and exacting work. I suggest that you start by manually creating a (wall) dormer using the wall tools on an upper level of your building model. At some point, you will have to delete the roof planes that come with the manually created (wall) dormer (assuming auto generated roof), and then add your own curved roof. See the following article from the help knowledge database for a process for doing just that: https://www.homedesignersoftware.com/support/article/KB-01187/creating-a-barrel-roof.html Good luck and hope this helps.

Not sure which Home Designer product you're using. Do you have a triangle shape available in the Shapes Library?

The entry gable shown in the example image will probably need to be built using manual roof plane tools in HDPro since it will intersect a gull wing roof design (i.e., the porch roof having flatter slope than the main building roof). It wasn't clear in the plans where you wanted the gable as there was no apparent opening to indicate the location.

As Eric mentions, what you want to achieve may be possible depending on which software title and version that you're using. For example, I quickly created the sample below using HDPro 2017. To start, I used two thicknesses of walls and placed a standard window in the thinner wall. From the Shapes library, I placed a wedge below and an inverted wedge above the window taking care to size to match the walls. I created and placed very thick (i.e., tall) triangular slabs beside the windows. Not all Home Design software titles will have the capability to reproduce my efforts, so it is somewhat important to know which version you're using so that other users here in the forum can better advise you how to achieve your desired results. Good luck.

You know your project far better than I do at this point, so I can't tell you specifically what to do to fix it. But I offer a little food for thought. If you want to build a Concrete Masonry Unit (CMU) wall (as opposed to a fence or a rail), you will most likely want each course of the wall to be level - not follow the terrain - as that will be most pleasing to the eye and is expected construction for that wall type. You will also not necessarily place the lowest course of blocks directly on soil, and instead will have some type of rigid foundation (e.g., a concrete spread footer slab) within which you may set hooks to anchor reinforcing steel if required due to code or application (e.g., partial retaining wall). Now ... you haven't mentioned whether you intend to use non-standard CMU blocks, so if you do, that would be good information to offer up. If your wall crosses variable terrain, you may want to add a step foundation upon which to lay your blocks so that they may be laid level and you'll get better economy by reducing the number of partial courses below ground surface. And given that if your wall crosses any sort of elevation change on your terrain and if you've laid each course of your blocks level, you cannot avoid having variable height between the ground and the top of wall; the exception is if your wall precisely follows an elevation contour. One way to more easily adjust your wall height with regard to ground surface is to draw your CMU wall on/over/in your terrain, and then use a back clipped camera from the face of the wall (drag as though you're looking through the wall). You will see the wall and a line indicating how your terrain cuts across the face of it. When you select the wall within that camera view, a temporary dimension should appear to the ground surface (if it doesn't, you can place a manual dimension for the same effect). Click on the measurement's value and enter your new value. It may help to have a perspective full overview camera tiled on screen with the back clip camera so you can see how it looks as you're adjusting. Keep in mind that unless you plan to cut blocks down (can get expensive), you'll want an overall wall height that is a multiple of the individual block heights plus an allowance for mortar. Side note: you might need to fiddle a bit with the CMU texture to get it to look right (but that is another subject altogether). Hope this helps.

You'll probably need to give a bit more information, post your plan, or provide a screen shot of what you're seeing (or not seeing in your case). There could be a number of reasons but a little more context would be helpful to pin it down.

Many ways to do this ... but you were on the right track at one point. Draw the CMU rails around the perimeter as you've done before, and then open all of the rail's specification dialogs (or shift-select them all as a group and open the group specification dialog); on the General tab, select the checkbox for "no room definition". You will no longer get a room where you didn't want one, and you should be able to drop in a gate in the rail. Good luck.

Part of the problem with modeling plumbing in the HD line of software is that items may not be rotated in the YZ or XZ planes. Most plumbing lines are installed with a slope to drain, and adjustments to create that slope are just not available. Note: standard cylinder objects are provided as either plumb or level, not sloped. And since slopes can be variable (e.g., rolling offset), to do this correctly you would need the ability to either set a slope or rotate the pipe and/or fitting object ... neither command or capability is currently available. You could mock up something created in the Engineering Toolbox SketchUp Extension, and then import them (not personally tested ... I'm just theorycrafting at the moment). But there may be better ways of doing it if you absolutely must show this in your HD model. Good luck.

You're welcome. If you had placed an item very far away from the rest of your model, the 3D overview camera would also be zoomed out very far to capture all items placed. Your plan didn't zoom out very far, and showed the model as expected ... so my original suspicion (of this relatively common occurrence) appeared to be unfounded and the anomalous behavior of the plan view appears to exhibit symptoms of a deeper problem.