ereisch

Yeah that's what I've been doing, but doesn't resolve the problem of where you click on the room returning different heights (or the auto stair issue). Oh, and I forgot to mention originally (though it was in the one screen shot): using HD Pro 2014.

Related issue: In this same case, when I open the stair section, and click "Make Best Fit", it makes the following selections, which all make sense given the 1st and 2nd level heights: However, when you accept the changes and then immediately re-open the same staircase, you are given these values: ...which as you can see has for some reason has altered the Top Height of the staircase by ~1 riser (without altering the number of risers), and has adjusted the riser height accordingly to match the new Top Height. The "Make Best Fit" button is now available again, and when pressed, reduces the number of risers to make a normal slope stair match the (seemingly random) selection of Top Height. Short of manually entering the values that work and locking them in, I don't know what to make of this to keep the program happy.

I have a hallway that connects to a stairwell, with the stairwell area on the 2nd floor and a small area above the 1st floor landing sectioned off as "Open Below" obviously. When I click on the 1st floor hallway and open the room Structure tab, it shows the absolute elevations as expected (see attached "room1.jpg"). However, if you click on the 1st floor hallway in an area that is "underneath" the Open Below area, the absolute elevations for the same room show up differently, with an effective zero floor depth for the 2nd floor, as seen in "room2.jpg". Also note the relative heights change as well. It took me awhile to figure this out, because I was trying to correct the Ceiling elevation for what I thought was the hallway area, but it would change the floor above value to match whatever I entered into the Ceiling elevation. I was clicking underneath the Open Below area for convenience, but after fighting for awhile I discovered that where you click when selecting a room to view its properties affects the contents of the structure tab. I don't know if this is a bug or not, but perhaps there should be a message somewhere in the dialog highlighting that the floor structure for the floor above is showing a 0" depth because of the Open Below modifier, but that the room ceiling has varying heights. (Though I know the varying heights message does come up when you actually do have inconsistent floor elevations for the floor above.)

Sorry, Home Designer Pro 2014 -- I've never been able to get the roof join tool to work, except in one instance. I always get the infmaous "zero length edge" error. The online help database hasn't clued me into what the underlying problem is with my particular setup. If I'm still having the same problem in a couple days, I'll post a screenshot of the faces I'm trying to join. The Roof Laser Tool is a great suggestion -- I'll look into that. I also didn't think of using Yusuf's suggestion of scoring a construction line at the base line intersection -- I'll try that too if the roof laser tool doesn't pan out.

Is there a way to auto-cut roofs at intersections? For example, if I have two gable roofs whose peaks are perpendicular to each other, is there a way to "cut" the two roof planes at their intersection, thus forming a valley? This seems like it should be trivial, but I've found finding the exact location where two intersect is not that simple, and takes a bit of trial-and-error of moving the "buried" corner around so it follows the valley line in the rendered image. Plus, my design has several such intersections, so if it can auto-cut them that would save me several hours of tweaking the plane lines. I would just let it go and have the one roof buried under the other, but I suspect it's going to affect my material list calculations. Thanks in advance.