ChrisO

Well you could knock me down with a feather! I can't repeat the same build. There is now a second top inside the doorway. I can't work out how to remove it. :-(

This is well worth remembering. Thanks. Again, as replied elsewhere in this thread, it's necessary to understand that a doorway is not just another door. Now I get it. And again, it's necessary to know how to remove a door frame. But the solution is very interesting. In real life, the half height wall will need support. The upper left corner as shown will be very weak. I need a vertical post to the beam above to give it strength. One option would be to use 2 doorways. I expect I will use this method for something similar. I see that I can put a 40cm wide flat surface like a countertop on top of the half wall. Like a bar...

This is the solution. Great! But it took a mental crunch to realise that doorways are not just doors without doors. Huh? I read the manual 2 or 3 times before the truth dawned on me. In the app, I think that the way the doorway menu item is nestled inside the rest of the door options made me think that it's just another type of door. And then my understanding of the manual was that I could somehow use the door options to put different doors in a wall. I can't drop anything inside a door, and I can't put a window inside a pass-through, so the idea that I could drop something in a doorway.... Oww! The impact of the penny dropping was earth shattering! The second essential bit of information is that the door frame can be reduced in size, and in fact reduced to nothing. I had been struggling to find a door that didn't have a frame (i.e. a gate). Then this video showed a door without a frame. What...? Where...? I looked everywhere for a door without a frame! But this option doesn't seem to exit in any of the parameter selections. So it was just by chance that I noticed a tiny extra dimension displayed, and zoomed in. There I saw the very small extra line which defined the width of the frame. So now I could make the frame disappear (just click and drag). Perfect. But a small problem remains. There is a line drawn above the door. I don't know what it is. I cannot select it. I can see the microscopic lines defining the door below (red arrows) but I can't work out what to do with the narrow bar shown by the yellow arrows. Look at the size of it's shadow.

To answer your question; I'm in Vietnam. I'm about 200km east of Saigon. I own a food court but the business has been bankrupted by COVID. So we plan to start again on a new site, and I am designing the new food court. We can only raise about $100,000, and there are regulations about land usage, so most of the place must be built from wood, bamboo and coconut leaf. Regarding the term "stable door", British people use that name for what you seem to know as a Dutch door.

That's quite a good solution. Thanks. It would be nice to be able to remove the top door, but if the door is arranged to swing inside (actually the doors need to swing outwards) then the upper half is partly hidden. Also would be nice to have the "display the door open" option but obviously that's beyond the capabilities of this object. It's not a serious problem. It is certainly a much better representation of the intended look. The problem with the railing method is that the opening reaches all the way to the ceiling or beam, and it doesn't look like a door anyway.

Thanks David. That was really educational. I guess I made a mistake when I used the term "stable door". For us in the UK, a stable-door is a two-part door where the top and bottom half can be moved independently. It does not mean that we are dealing with horses. So, imagine a standard doorway in a wall, and there's a window next to it. But the door is split horizontally at the same height as the windowsill. In my case, the top half and the window will be pass-through with no actual window or door.

No. I am just stupid.

Is there advice in the reference manual regarding hiding this part of the doorway?

I tried that. There is still a lintel over the gate.

I need a simple hinge-swinging half height gate. How do I make one, or where can I find one? The problem is that any door or gate seems to have a lintel over the top. I just want a full-height doorway opening with a half-height door in it. It's like the sort of walkthrough you get in a bar; the bar-top hinges up, and there is a half-height door underneath that opens the let the barman out of the bar.

Can anyone tell me where I can get a pool table object that can be imported into the library? Or tell me how to convert a Sketchup SKP file?

We seem to have a workable solution now. The method of butting elevation regions up against each other does work, but it is a brute force solution and it causes very slow 3D rendering. Even the smallest error will produce huge anomalies. Having worked with the tech support guys, the following method works reasonably well: 1. Separate the elevation platforms by a distance that would result in about a 45 degree slope. Without the retaining walls, this is displayed as a fairly even ramp between the two heights. 2. Place a retaining wall mid-way between the two regions. This will display as flat land above and below the wall. If the terrain slope leaks through, separate the regions more, or reduce the height difference. 3. When building outdoor stairs or other objects that sit on or across the gap between the regions, cut the retaining wall and rebuild it beneath the object such that the edges don't quite show. This has the effect of preventing the terrain building under the object and penetrating it. It's only needed if the terrain shows through. 4. Contrary to what is shown in some of the help videos, it is not a good idea to use terrain holes because these somehow stress the terrain calculation and cause oddities. 5. If you change terrain height, you must check objects like chairs etc. They will be suspended in mid air or buried underground. To restore them, just open the object and save it again. 6. Do not not stay in terrain-tool mode for any longer than necessary. The slightest error can cause a small elevated region that is incredibly hard to find. Similarly, avoid using elevation points and elevation lines. A very thin elevated region is easier to handle. I'd recommend marking any small areas with text or an object so that you can find them again. 7. Extend the elevated regions outside the terrain perimeter. It seems to use few contours. 8. Use "Fill" to colour your elevated regions. It makes it easier to see what is going on. 9. Use the "draw order edit tools" to bring objects to the front so that the elevated does not get selected first when clicking on an object. 10. Save new versions frequently in case to do something wrong and cannot find the error. I found that it is easier to use the "absolute elevation" settings when working with objects on the terrain. That's personal preference caused by the need to set room heights to get a particular shape of roof. It also applies to plants and trees because they like to be sat on the floor, but you might not know where the floor is without doing a mental calculation. I still do not have a solution to the weird behaviour of retaining walls connected to other walls. The upper landing required for outdoor stairs doesn't seem to work properly if you use the automatic height setting (I'm using the Mac version). Set the height that you need. The lower landing seems to work fine. There's another problem with retaining walls in that the app can suddenly decide that any additional retaining walls are too complicated and it starts to throw warnings. I await further answers from tech support.

That looks interesting. I have never tried anything like that.

Several hours later, with zero progress (no, I mean negative progress) I am sick of this total mess of an application. It is a waste of time and money. If someone wants to design a kitchen, OK. But the terrain functions deserve a few heads rolling in the dev department. It is TOTAL SHITE.

Actually, my advice to anyone tempted to use the terrain feature is to stop now. Go find another application, because this one stinks. I've wasted hours, days, and now weeks on what I can only describe using four letter words. Today I thought I was making progress, but then the app did its thing and wrecked what was starting to look like a usable plan. Trashed! And now I am unable to rebuild it and I cannot work out why it does not do what it did before. Here's an example: Added a "flat terrain area" at 1m under a simple structure that was already set for floor height 1m. Now I have terrain going into the hut. It is a total **** up.

The more I work with terrains and elevations, the more hiccups I find. But here are few tips that might help if you are having problems: 1. Don't copy anything from one elevation to another. Many objects seem to to carry the same elevation properties with them and you may end up with walls deep underground, flying stairs, terrain holes under floors etc. If you have those problems, try diving underground with a camera to see what is there, then try deleting any walls and redrawing them. 2. If you break an isolated room that has positive elevation (e.g. +2m above 0m sea level), then you may find that all objects in the room drop down to 0m. Once you have reconstructed your room, they will be missing. Go underground with a camera and take a look. Then select and open each subterranean object, re-save it, and it will magically teleport back to the correct floor elevation. (Does not work for walls etc). Also go up one floor and see if there are any automatically generated objects that should have been removed when the ground floor item was changed. 3. Never ever never leave your tool selection on a terrain tool if you are not using it. Tiny elevated areas and holes cannot be found. 4. Go back to the old days, and save the file every few minutes. If you get a sudden change to extreme mountainous terrain with 50,000 contours, give up and go back to the last saved version. If the app tells you that you are about to create thousands of contours and asks if you want to adjust the contour height, just cancel and dump the file. You cannot recover by clicking "undo". 5. Put retaining walls in the higher elevated terrain. If you still get weird contours and slopes, add a terrain kerb over the tightly packed contours. If you have grass growing vertically on a side wall, drop a terrain kerb on it. Going underground can help you find innumerable problems that you did not know existed.

I'm designing a large aquarium display that should look like a natural sea environment. The idea is to construct what looks like an underwater cliff face with glass windows in it to display the inside of about 10 separated aquariums. In the centre is a selfie spot where visitors will pose beside the scene. The height will be about 2m (6ft 6in) so that the visitor cannot see over the top, and the width will be about 6m (20ft). The cliff wall is just a stone facade, and behind it is a metal frame on which the aquariums are mounted. There's a lot of plumbing but we don't need to show that on the design. So I'm looking for an object that can be dropped onto the plan to give a rough representation of the display.

Thanks for trying that out. I thought I was going crazy, but now I see that the app is not designed to put dimensions on irregular shapes. Unfortunately, in my environment in rural Vietnam, there are no straight lines, no right angles, no dimensions without decimal places, nothing horizontal, nothing vertical. It's an irregular place. If I ever find any such items, I know they were created by accident and not by design.

Believe me. I have done hours and hours of experimenting, repeating, experimenting... I don't think I will choose this app again.

That you so much for directing me to that instruction. I must have spent an hour or more yesterday trying to find something like that, but found nothing. The help system seems utterly impossible to search for what you want. So today I tried for an hour, and followed the instructions to the letter several times. But each time I get weird results. The wall heights change, I can't work out how to fill in the retaining wall. etc etc. And then suddenly the system told me it was going to generate a few thousand contour lines, and it did this.

Now let's add a small room at the higher elevation first. Everything is flying! How does anybody actually manage to use this app?

This is without a completed room on the "sea level" elevation. And this is after the room is completed.

So I discovered an interesting and annoying issue. Land must have a complete room built on it before it will lock to right elevation. The only difference between these two plans is the small building. Without the building, the stairs will float at the height of another structure even though the land elevation is much lower. But put another building on that elevation, and the stair height will correct itself.

Thanks. That's very close to what I am trying to do. Can you send me that plan and let me look at it? There's one significant difference to the real situation: There is a road along the left hand edge of the terrain, and the road height is about 1m below the height of the terrain on the other side of the wall. Therefore the wall has its base on the lower side (the road). Would that make a difference?

Sorry to say it, but the terrain function is just a pile of wombats doos. Hours and hours wasted... This went from a fair model of a stepped hillside to this. Every time the terrain is built, it gets worse. I'm struggling to keep a polite tongue in my mouth.