FreddieAB

Strictly speaking, this is a HD 2021 issue, but there's nowhere on the HD forum for bugs; there isn't one here either (boo), but at least people seem to address the topic.

I've been banging my head against this issue for over a week. Finally did a direct mm/ins comparison, using exactly the same parameters.

I translated the inches into mm, so as to exclude any measurement issues.

To reproduce:

+ Draw a basic 26' 2" x 36' / 8m x 11m rectangle;

+ On each plan, change the left+right walls to Full Gable Wall;

+ Build a 2nd Floor; accept all defaults;

+ Build roof: (stay on the 2nd floor) check Auto Rebuild and Ignore Top Floor; set Pitch=12'' / 45 degrees. Click OK.

+ Goto Floor 1; open Room Spec dialog. Lower the Ceiling Height to 6" / 152mm; uncheck Flat Ceiling Over This Room. Click OK.

The results are shown in the screenshots below.

Does anyone have a workaround for this? Please don't tell me to work in inches - we live in Germany, and inch units do not relate to anything here.

gable-roof-feet.plan

gable-roof-mm.plan

On 11/22/2020 at 5:36 PM, solver said:

 

 

You have found the forum for the Chief Architect branded products.
 
Home Designer users have their own forum, HomeTalk, where you will find suggestions based on your software.
 
https://hometalk.chiefarchitect.com/

Thanks Solver, I didn't realise.

Off to there now.

–--

Home Designer Suite 2021

V. 22.3.0.55OSX

MacOS Mojave 10.14.6

On 11/18/2020 at 4:30 PM, dshall said:

 A walkout basement is on level 1 which leaves level zero for any concrete slab footings.If I don't use level zero,  so what.  You only need to use level zero if you auto build foundation.  I manually build all foundations,  it is faster and easier for me.

I do mostly remodels...  too much trouble to keep the auto foundation rebuild valid.

Thanks dshall - I tried your suggestion, but alas, there is a 3-floor limit in Home Designer, and it wouldn't allow me to keep Floors 0-2 *and* build another one

On 11/18/2020 at 4:05 PM, Doug_N said:

Not to sound too critical I hope, but all of us that are using CA as a main tool in our house design practice have spent a long time learning how to use this software.  Although it has some shortcomings that are being whittled away by the development team, we have found this to be an incredibly useful tool in communicating our design intent to those who actually build or renovate the buildings.

Thank you for your response. I am well aware CA is non-trivial software which requires a serious time investment to learn how to use.

However, it is built for the USA market, and we live in Europe. The defaults are almost 100% non-applicable over here, and require extensive customising.

Whilst I appreciate your comments, I was asking for help wrt _one_ thing: the auto-generated Floor Structure. This problem affects all floors.

Since I posted my original msg, I found a review on Amazon which shed light - to wit, the ability to edit the Floor Structure is disabled in the Home Designer edition. This one piece of info was the lacking piece of the puzzle, ie. it cannot be done without an upgrade. No wonder I couldn't figure out how to do it.

Chief Architect: you should put popup notes on disabled features telling people exactly wtf is going on so they aren't driven nuts.

Another criticism: every single manual, video, etc uses inches - who else does that outside the USA? Updated manuals are defo called for.

Hi,

Re: 1st floor with a slab inside the stem wall

I have the exact same problem, and it's driving me crazy.

Our house is concrete with a walkout cellar - see section-view.pdf (drawn with Gimp). Note all measurements are in metres/centimetres.

All ceilings in the house are (for the purposes of this post) solid concrete slabs. Floor finish is parquet glued to the concrete.

I've drawn the ground floor (1st floor in the USA) in plan view, and generated the Cellar from it; Room Type is set to Open Below.

But am utterly stuck trying to create the cellar wall height and the ceiling, plus for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get rid of the auto-generated floor above the Cellar.

The Room Specification > Structure dialog shows a Ceiling value of -318mm, and no amount of tinkering will remove the wretched thing without setting the Floor Above value to not-zero.

This post here offers some clues, but not enough to help me figure out the problem: chiefarchitect.com/topic/28413

The build foundation dialog that Eric refers to above is less than helpful.

It's very depressing to be so utterly bamboozled after only 2 days with CA. I hope someone won't mind explaining this to me in words of (preferably) less than 1 syllable.

section_view.pdf