Changing roof pitches with Home Designer 2014

[jonnyo53]

I am having a hard time trying to design a house with gable roofs that have different roof pitches.  I want the main part of my 2 story house to be a 5/12 and the garage which attaches to the side to be an 8/12.  I selected the gable walls and pitch I wanted but when I selected build roof they all went to the same pitch.   Does anyone know a trick to make this work.

[katalyst777]

In the Build Roof dialog, set the main pitch that most of the roof will be (so for the house, 5/12).  The on the individual walls for the garage, you need to set the pitch different from the default (so 8/12).

"Gable" walls don't have a roof plane resting on them, so you can't set a pitch for them.

It's pretty well covered in the Roof chapters of the Reference Manual and User Guide, but you might also want to check out some of the Knowledge Base articles and videos too.

Here's are some good ones that can probably help clear it up if you're still confused.

http://www.homedesignersoftware.com/support/article/KB-00127/

http://www.homedesignersoftware.com/support/article/KB-01043/

[katalyst777]

In my opinion, turn off auto build roofs before drawing plan. Once done with plan, set the roof pitch for each wall as desired as well as preferences for full gable walls. Then manually rebuild roofs. If so desired you may need to edit facia heights since Chief pivots rafter at baseline and differing pitches will result in different facia heights.

I encourage users to learn the manual roof tools and to quit relying on autobuild. These are probably the most powerful feature Chief offers and it is such a shame so many users fail to get this.

Since only Pro has manual roof planes, it is wise to understand how the automatic tools work.

I only upgraded to Pro with this last version, and always had to use the automatic roof tools before, and can only think of about two or three roofs that I would have needed manual roof tools for (especially a Victorian, I cheated and ended up using "cone" geometric shapes for the roof and was still very happy with the results).

[Kbird1]

I agree Kat , the Automatic Tools can save a lot of time if you understand them , but it is nice to have Pro as you say to fix any issues or out of the ordinary situations if needed.

 

Johnny ,Kat's advice in post #2 is how it's done , all Roofs will build to the default pitch in the Build Roof DBX, you need to set other pitches in each wall's DBX if you need it different from the Default Value.

 

Do the Roof tutorials and check the video's , this is the quick primer on basic roofs

http://www.homedesignersoftware.com/support/article/KB-00359/52/Home-Designer/Roofs/Automatically-Building-the-Basic-Roof-Styles.html

 

M.