Techno

I think part of the problem is that Home Designer is too stupid to deal with below-grade situations. It's going to paint terrain as intersecting the house, including the open garage door, at 0" even if the area in question is essentially dug-out. And it's going to flow the terrain around the end of the retaining wall (they don't have a solid-abutting one) no matter what you tell it to do. So I probably have to redo my tri-level, built a bit into a grade, because I started with the pad, which is the first floor, at 0" terrain and floor, and have terrain that goes 14" below that and a garage pad that is basically 9" below standard ground level... but has a dug-out driveway and path for it. Instead, HDA shows grass going up the doors. Seriously. And painfully. Dave, a few lines doesn't fix this. Please try it; you'll see.

David, thanks, but I'm only using like four and haven't a clue why it's so screwy. How do you get a region's elevation setting to be respected?

Here the problem is... The grey region is an elevation region set to 0. The upper right has another elevation region at 20" and near the street is a long thin 24" region. The wall is a retaining wall, but apparently not terribly effective. Hard to see, but at the intersection of the retaining wall and the garage, in that corner, I also put a zero-height elevation point... and yet it falls outside the zero region! Note the green spline created by HDA... it cuts the zero-region in half roughly. So my trouble is that the generated elevation lines do not respect the regions or points. Which makes adding sidewalks, driveways and decks rather challenging.

Thanks. I will do so tonight. The Undo is too slow when I've made lots of steps. I do use it heavily, but for example after adding 20 elevation points, just reloading is faster.

Using Home Designer Architectural 2015. The pad or 1st floor is at 0", as is the driveway. So far so good. But I can't keep it there. As soon as I add any elevation data anywhere on the map, the terrain lines change, ignoring the elevation regions I've set. Well, not quite ignoring, but viewing them merely as loose guidelines and imposing on them significantly. Which results in the driveway not mating to the garage and all sorts of other oddities. Even when an elevation region extends into the garage. I do have the terrain elevation automatic setting to "Off"; "On" was a bugger because it would move the entire house on elevation additions. I was hoping that the terrain wall or retaining wall would help, since part of the issue is a three foot wall (and stairs) between the driveway and the entry of the split-level house, but the terrain builder doesn't seem to get the concept. There is always a lip up where the terrain/driveway meets the garage. What should I do differently? Only slightly related, after I try a few things and see it's a nasty infected rabbit-hole, I want to close and reopen the file. I've been closing and reopening the application since I don't see a File-Close menu item; is there one?