marylou

Ah ha! Thank you so much Eric and JoAnn. Even though I read a tutorial on making different room heights, I was not even close to making the connection between that tool and my roof dilemma. And I had the wall break in the wrong position too. Thanks especially to you JoAnn for sending me that floor plan that made me realize what I needed to change.

I was not able to save the plan in the demo mode, and the computer I am installing the paid version on is currently being fixed (keyboard issues). But it is a really simple 6-wall design that you can throw together in under 5 minutes. Attached is the floor plan.

I have recently obtained Home Designer Suite 2016 (sorry, the attached images have water marks from the trial version when I was testing it out.) From the painting you can see the original gambrel-roofed 2-story, 2-car garage that we are converting into a home. We are building the extension off of the port-side with a gable roof as you can see. Using the Wall Break tool on the rear wall, I was able to get the back-end looking nice so that the gable roof slides directly into the gambrel roof without weird effects. However, in order to get the gambrel roof to start at the base of the 2nd story in the model, I selected "Ignore Top (2nd) Floor" in the Build Roof dialog. This made the gambrel roof look perfect, but it put the gable roof one floor too low (see "outside2.png"). Alternatively, if I uncheck "Ignore Top (2nd) Floor" and instead try to use the Wall Specification dialog for the side walls to manually lower their upper pitch start height, the program does not allow me to go below the floor of the 2nd floor (see "outside3.png"). What is the correct procedure for doing this? It seems so simple, and yet I've spent so much time trying different things, all to no avail... (yet!) Thanks!