TheKitchenAbode

Rocky - When you convert a single wall to a pony wall, CA assumes that you wish to add an additional wall on top of the existing. It makes the lower pony wall type the original wall type designation. It then checks the default pony wall settings for the upper portion, in your case the default is siding 6. CA uses this for the upper portion of the pony wall. Siding 6 will be treated as an above grade wall and therefore when the roof builds it will automatically generate the wall fills to the roof. You need to either manually change the upper pony wall main wall layer type after you click pony wall or go to the Defaults, Walls, Pony Wall and change it there.

Open up your wall, select wall type, change the main wall type from siding 6 to 8" concrete stem. What is happening is that the foundation wall is not properly defined as a pony wall when you generated the roof. The roof generates fine as the foundation wall is defined as an 8" Concrete Stem Wall. When you go back and change it to a pony wall you need to notice that CA changed the main wall type to Siding-6 and made the lower wall type 8" Concrete Stem Wall. You just need to change the upper wall to 8" Concrete Stem Wall and all should be good.

If you desire the porch edge to have a brick feature then you need to adjust the thickness so it is say 1/16" higher than the concrete porch. it will then be above the porches concrete plane and therefore be displayed properly without Z-Fighting.

Yes. For some reason the foundation wall where what appears to be wood has it's type set as "Siding 6" while the other porch walls are defined as "Concrete". When you move the camera around you will also see brick flashing through the porch concrete around the perimeter. We call this Z Fighting, it's when two differing materials are in exactly the same plane. CA does not know which one to display so it jumps around as the camera is moved. This is due to the fact that there is a custom counter top polyline around the porch leading edge and the assigned material is "burgundy brick", should be concrete to match the porch.

It's a great video, well worth watching. One other comment, if you shoot your camera to see the underside of the porch roof you can see that things are not correct. The porch ceiling and roof soffits are not making proper connections. This is telling you that something somewhere is not right, maybe your invisible walls, room or roof. Ideally things like this should be sorted out and corrected before moving on with some other item. Underlying problems like this can result in other unexpected things happening down the road.

Rocky -One thing that might help when working in CA is understanding that CA predominantly works/thinks in a similar manner/approach as would be done on a real construction site. For example, in the real world roofs are only constructed/installed once the required exterior walls have been put in place. CA's auto build roof function works on the same principle, it needs the walls before it can build the roof. In your posted post plan the same principle applies, in the real world a properly sized porch would be constructed first and then the support posts would be constructed/placed on top. In your plan the porch is undersized for the posts as they overhang the porch. If the porch had of been adjusted properly then when you add the terrain everything would have been fine. Thinking like a builder and how things are constructed in the real world can go a long way in helping one construct/design in CA.

I think the problem is the fact that that post on the left side is not in the same plane as the one on the right, it's just overhangs the porch floor a bit more. Likely CA is seeing it as sitting on the terrain while it sees the other one as sitting on the porch. When you add the terrain it adjusts the one on the left but leaves the one on the right alone. Your settings elevation reference for these is "from finished floor", if the object is not predominantly on the finish floor but on the terrain then it will use the terrain. Just move the left post a bit more onto the porch like the right side one and all should be good.

It's unlikely that any video is going to demonstrate every conceivable way of doing something, even the reference manual does not cover every possible way of doing something. I'm not sure why you are having problems getting your walls accurately positioned/sized. We are all doing this everyday of the week, never have an issue.

Have you tried holding down the CTRL key, select the wall(s) you wish to move, select the appropriate dimension. The selected wall(s) will move and all other walls will remain as they were.

I made it 8" thick, pulled it forward, extended the roof, added 2 columns and a slab porch.

Here's a quick example, Polyline Solid with three holes in it. Thickness set to 1 1/2".

Just draw a polyline solid, click on it to select, the last (right) icon bottom of your screen is the create hole function. Just click on it and you can draw a polyline hole in your polyline solid. The hole can be manipulated just like any other polyline. You can place as many holes as you wish as long as they do not overlap another hole or extend outside of the main polyline solid.

Well if you kind of think about it, the screen you are working on is only 2 dimensional so that 3D from a visual perspective is really just a trick. If you really need the real thing then pony walls are good way to accomplish this, probably less work than using niches to cut through the drywall finish, at least for the baseboard detail.

Not too bad considering it took only a few minutes to create and can be applied globally to every wall in the house.

This is just a stacked baseboard molding. bottom piece 4 1/8", next piece 1/8", next piece 1/2", final piece 1/8". To the 1/2" piece I used a gradient color/texture, they are in the materials color library. This creates the showdown look that gives the appearance of depth. The two 1/8" pieces are just a bit of a different shade to emphasize the edges. The entire molding is just 1/16" thick.

Just create a polyline solid as a large triangle say 1 1/2" thickness on the gable face and then create 4 triangular holes in it.

Here's another thought, just do one wall section, take a camera view straight on and save it as a jpg. take it into a photo editor and crop it to show the baseboard and recess, save that as a texture and then apply it to a standard base board set 1/16" in thickness. Might create the look. Could do the same for the door casing.

You could use the wall niche tool to create the recessed region in the drywall and then a regular base molding with the offset set to recess the base to be flush with the drywall face.

There is nothing in that pic that can't be done simple and fast in CA. No need to create symbols. The only time users are going outside of CA to create a symbol is when the symbol they need is very complex, things like light fixtures, furniture or items with contoured surfaces. Before going through the process of creating your own custom symbol you should first check through all of the CA libraries and then say 3D warehouse. Also, before choosing to make a symbol you should consider if an Architectural Block is a better choice. The advantage with Architectural blocks is that all of the elements contained within it are fully accessible and editable. Symbols on the other hand are extremely difficult to edit once created, you can resize the overall symbol but you can't change the items within.

The issue with Quadro cards is that they are considerable more expensive than an equivalent gaming card and there is no performance gain to be had. CA will work fine but you are paying for features in Quadro cards that CA does not use. Money much better spent somewhere else.

Thanks for that additional "Shift" command, works really well.

That's for sure, been there done that way too often and paid dearly for succumbing to that temptation. The other realization is to take the time and effort to understand and respect how CA wants things done. Though I may have my own personal preferences as to how CA should do something the reality is "it is what it is". My time is better spent conforming to CA than trying to fight it with a bunch of workarounds. What's interesting is that once I have properly explored CA's way I tend to gain a better understanding as to why they chose to do it that way. Now I can move forward instead of wasting a bunch of time trying to create techniques/methods that often end up creating more problems than they resolve.

I'm with Mark on this one. Fast zoom in or out and then hold the CTRL key to fine tune.

Not only is it much easier and faster but more importantly you have not potentially corrupted the wall. In CA walls are the most fundamental element, it's the core that many other elements such as roofs, floors and foundations are derived from. If your walls are correct, properly positioned and defined, then CA will do a very good job at generating the rest. Many of the issues you are encountering are directly related to your walls. Keep in mid that if CA auto builds for example a roof that is not what you expected it did so based upon the data it obtained from your walls, as such the place to look for the issue is your walls or lack of walls(visible or invisible). Another indicator that your core structure of methods are not correct is when you start using things like polyline solids and custom made symbols to make the core structure look correct. These tools are mainly designed to provide users the ability to create highly customized elements. For example, in your plan you used polyline solids to create your terrain, Ca has a terrain feature which should have been used. Unlike a polyline solid the CA generated terrain is fully recognized by CA, it contains important data that CA can use when placing other objects within the terrains boundary. A Polyline Solid is not recognized this way, objects placed on the terrain will automatically adjust if the terrain is adjusted, objects placed on a Polyline Solid simulated terrain will not do that. It's very tempting when starting to learn CA to get ahead of ones self. Before the primary structure is correct we start decorating the model with furniture, trees, molding trim work, lights and everything including the kitchen sink. In most cases this will come back to haunt you as at some point in time you are going to have to fix that primary structure. The more complex your plan the more difficult it will be to isolate the structure problem, then when you fix that you will most likely have to go back and adjust all of those other decorative elements. Also, some of those decorative elements can interfere with structural changes, walls will bump into and be restricted if there is an object in the way, now you have to move the object before you can move the wall. The more complex the plan the worse it gets, frustration rises, the plan becomes error prone and can get to the point where you have to delete everything and start all over again.

That is not the same as being able to extend only a single continuous line in 3 planes. The transform/replicate is just a sophisticated copy/paste function, the end result is two independent objects, they are not tied/linked together.