Balcony with Round Columns and Arched Passthroughs

[mountainman3520]

Hello.  I'm designing a house with covered balconies and patios that use round columns to support the roof.  They also have round arched passthroughs above these round columns.  For example, an 8' round arch passthrough with the lower 6' supported by rounded columns, and wrought iron rails between the columns.  Example attached.

 

This seems tricky to implement and maintain in a design as the way I'm doing it is pretty kludged.  I created a passthrough windows with round arch tops and placed high up on the wall.  Then I created an open doorway with a square top, placed below the arched windows, and made as wide as I could to leave space for the pillars.  Then I placed the rails separately outside the structure.

 

A few issues I'm having:

(1) I can't completely eliminate portions of wall that intersect where the columns need to be and these wall fragments are visible on the columns.  For example corners and interior intersecting walls limit the width of the passthroughs.

(2) I have to use the snap override function to force move the columns into place because I can't remove the blocking walls to be completely out of the way.

(3) Columns do not appear in the correct location on the 3D camera views.  I shift them forward and back in CAD view to tweak their position on the 3D camera view to get them to line up correctly along the wall but each column needs to be in a different position to cause it to look lined up.  Is this a bug?

(4) The rails are manually placed outside the structure as separate objects.  There doesn't seem to be a way to use the normal rail wall type under an arch passthrough.

(5) Once I carefully manually tweak all of these things to mostly look correct, it's very fragile.  If anything else needs to change then it gets messed up and must all be manually retweaked.

 

Am I doing this wrong?  This is a fairly common architectural style so I'm thinking there must be a better way to make this work.

 

Thanks

 

 

 

Edited April 22, 2020 by mountainman3520

[mountainman3520]

Thanks.  I added a signature to my account.  My version is Home Designer Pro 2021.

[solver]

 

Watch on YouTube: http://youtu.be/ycd-3eu8A18?hd=1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jo_Ann]

1. Edit / Default Settings / Plan /   Check the box 'Ignore Casing for Opening Resize'.  Allows you to drag the door / pass-thru further into other walls.
      
2. Check 'no room definition' for railing, then control / drag it into place.

[mountainman3520]

Thanks this was very helpful.  I really appreciate the time you took to run the experiment and even record a video of the explanation!  Wow.

 

Jo_Ann, I tried making the defaults change you suggested and while that did override some trim interference it did not resolve the residual bits of wall at corners and wall junctions.

 

So I went on to the larger suggested change of adding a floor above, ie essentially dividing my current 10' high balcony floor into a 7' floor and a 3' floor above it, with no ceiling/floor between.  This mostly worked and seems to be the best option.

 

See attached new printout.  Much better looking.  The columns and railing are now working correctly and using the built-in methods to generate and place, rather than my prior kludged manual methods.  This should help with ongoing maintenance as other changes are made.

 

There are still a few issues I didn't yet figure out how to resolve.

(1) Setting up the floor and ceiling heights of this new split floor 2 and 3 for the balcony was tricky and took me awhile.  I guess I've not really mastered all the intricacies of the structure screen.  Eventually I thought I had it correct but then when I set the 3rd floor round arch windows at floor height 0" they ended up 12" higher than what I thought was the boundary between floor 2 and 3.  I then set them to -12" (actually -13" to avoid a thin visible strip of wall) and that moved the arch windows down to the correct spot.  But I couldn't figure out why I had to use -12" when I believe the floor height between the 2 and 3 floors is 0".

 

(2) Note the strange brown artifact on either side wall at the edge of the balcony area.  This appeared when I aligned the 3rd floor walls with the 2nd floor rail walls.

 

(3) Note the inset along the bottom edge of the balcony wall area.  Not sure how to adjust that but I'll look more. The rail wall on floor 2 seems to be aligned with the walls on floor 1 below so I'm not sure why its off by a few inches.  Probably something with the wall thickness/stackup for the rail.

 

(4) Columns need to be moved inward slightly from edge of floor to avoid overhang and protrusion from wall.  This is a pretty minor nit.

 

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

[cameronisaac]

Thanks a lot for the tips in this thread. I also want to add a balcony to my house and it turns out to be more difficult than I thought