Jo_Ann

I have no clue. Mine works.

Skip the attic walls - they are not a necessity. Delete your dormer and start over. Draw 2 side walls as shown - make them gable walls. Draw the room divider wall. Put the 2 wall breaks in - open the wall and set the shed pitch. Open the 'room', and set the ceiling height full height. Draw the 3 railing walls for the deck.

Your floor plan should look like this. You should not be having any problem building a deck. Attic walls shown have been manually drawn to close the open roof gap next to the deck walls. Set them as 'no room definition'.

Remember what I said about rebuilding the roof again, after raising the ceiling? You needed to lower the ceiling back to where it was when the gables popped up. Also keep checking the outer porch walls on floor 1, because the program sneakily keeps changing the 'in from baseline' setting. The dormer room needs to be kept separate from the 2nd floor (use a room divider wall). The dormer room ceiling should be set to it's finished height, THEN rebuild the roof.

Yes. But...you will not be able to remove the roof eave in front of the door, if you have used the dormer tool to create the dormer.

How did you create the dormer?

Make your own panel. First, eliminate the balusters by assigning them 'no material' or use the rainbow tool (in the 3d window) to make them invisible. Use soffits for posts. Set sloped soffits for the criss-crossed rails. Align the pieces in the 2d window. Raise the pieces in the 3d window. When all is correct, hold ctrl key to select all pieces (easiest to do in 3d window) and block them together. Your example appears to have glass. Use another sloped soffit (make it taller and thinner and semi-transparent) to simulate glass. Move this into the center of the blocked rail assembly (hold down ctrl), and raise it into correct position in the 3d view. Select the glass and the rail block, and block them together. You can now copy/paste each panel as a unit.

Try some experimenting. Build 2nd floor, 'finished ceiling' set to 0, uncheck 'ceiling over this room'. Partition off front part of dormer room with invisible room divider. Set ceiling in front portion of room to finished height. Turn OFF 'auto build roof' and raise ceiling in the other rooms. NEVER rebuild roof again after raising ceiling, or your roof will go wonky! If you have set the roof dialog to 'ignore 2nd floor', the dormer will not build.

Did you turn off 'auto build roof' and raise the 'finished ceiling' after your prior thread? You CAN use the dormer tool to build a shed dormer with 'auto build roof' turned off. You can NOT manually build a dormer with 'auto build roof' turned off.

CottageDesigner, Reread the instructions I gave.

The block 'cube' doesn't appear until you have 2 items jointly selected.

A little bit of trickery required. Divide the bump-out room with a wall (as shown), and use the settings shown. Move the high shed wall in or out until everything builds correct. Keep checking your structure settings dialog to make sure the program doesn't auto check the box for 'roof over this room'. It can be finicky. Move up to the attic level, and drag each existing gable attic wall over to connect with the main wall of the house. This fills the hole left in the exterior gable wall by the 'no roof' room.

I don't know why your door framing doesn't show, but in my version it does. Also, I turned off 'auto rebuild roof', then raised the ceiling and checked 'ceiling over this room'. As you can see, the program then added the framing for the ceiling. With this type of plan, NEVER raise the ceiling until you have turned off 'auto rebuild roof', or the whole roof will raise. NEVER rebuild the roof again after you have raised the ceiling.

Reduce the depth of your 2nd floor deck, and reconnect the attic wall in front of it. Also, designating that deck as a 'balcony' seems to make it play nicer with the porch ceiling below it. With your framing 3d window the 'active' window, go to your display options and check 'railings'.

Have you tried? It's no different than adding a deck, same as you did on floor 1.

Yes, it's do-able. If you have checked "ignore 2nd floor" in the build roof dialog, uncheck it. Instead, set the 2nd floor "finished ceiling" to 0. On the 2nd floor,designate the end walls as "gable" and set the eave walls at 12/12. On floor1, the outer porch walls need to be set using the lower/upper pitch (4, 12). The "in from baseline" should be set the same as the depth of the porch. Now, begin raising the second floor ceiling until the gable ends pop up. Also, don't post pdf's. Post jpegs.

Nice looking!

However, you can temporarily 'group' the windows together by holding the control key and selecting each window. The 'unit' can then be copy/pasted or moved as one window, until deselected.

Go back to the Knowledge Database and type 'house on piers' in the search bar.

A doll house view of the 1st floor, will not show 2nd floor walls. The high rise foyer walls that are showing probably do not have a 2nd floor adjacent to them, as do the foyer walls to the left of the stairs and opposite the stairs. Those other foyer walls are also part of the 2nd floor, and therefore will not show. I'll bet that if you look at a doll house view of floor 2, the foyer walls now showing on floor 1 view, will not be there.

Keith, Are you familiar with 'Murphy's Law'???

On the knowledge base page, Type 'walk out basement' in the search bar.

https://www.homedesignersoftware.com/support/article/KB-00210/using-open-below-rooms-to-define-an-opening-to-a-lower-floor.html

That's why you need to download the free Sketchup program, and fix the symbols in there, 1st, before you import them into HD.

Are you using the 'full camera' instead of 'full perspective' camera? Orbiting with the full camera will produce distortion. Vertically tile the 2d window and the 3d window. Then (in the 2d window) grab the camera handles and move it to where needed. Usually no distortion this way, and you can still view the 3d.