meanwhile

Hey thanks for chiming in, Glenn. I decided to start with a fresh plan and try that out. After much experimentation, I think I finally understand the basics of this trick with a knee wall. Both rooms need to be non-attic rooms, right? That's what made it work for me. Although, I don't really understand the numbers – the height of that small room created by the knee wall needed to be set to an oddly specific number (e.g. 22 1/4″) to get the knee wall to my target height (52″). And that number needed to keep changing as I adjusted the knee wall location or roof pitch. Anyway, I'm unsure if this can work in the strange building strucutre I'm actually working with, but this was really helpful to get my head around. So I thank you very much! This is great to know moving forward.

Yeah, JiAngelo has been incredibly generous with his time and expertise for this newcomer.

Ok beautiful, I got the rim joist beam, steel posts, and studs in there according to your instructions. I had some measurements wrong actually, the steel posts are really 3″ × 9″, then the stud is 3″ × 1.5″. Here are some clearer pics: Clever to add another stud with holes lined up with the bolts for drywall. Getting those features in there and then doing cross-section elevations to see the big picture is quite satisfying :) You had it completely right about our roof: And your explanation on wall alignment (to exterior-side framing) clears up a lot for me and makes total sense, thank you. Although, I still can't seem to get rid of a few strange artifacts, even after aligning to the exterior framing faces, turning off auto-roofs and manually adjusting walls and roofs: There's even a tiny hole in the corner above the shelf-ceiling closet for some reason... Here's my latest file in case you feel like taking a crack at it, but you've helped so much already. I spent quite some time trying to figure out the exact placement, junctures, and structures of all of these walls and aligning them between floors (attic west dividers, bonus diagonal, attic south, invisible vaulted, etc.) – because the more I worked, the more wonky artifacts kept popping up. I decided to use my real world measurement of the attic width (gable to gable) to lock in the south attic wall & invisible wall/beam placement. (15′ 5″ measured drywall to drywall, or probably 15′ 6″ to the framing on your recommendation). I've come to greatly dislike angled junctures in Chief! Even if they make for some interesting design aesthetics. To your assessment of my process here, you're not wrong. We're doing a remodel/conversion of a home theater to an ADU, and I decided to try out Home Designer as a way to work on the design; but the level of detail I'm getting into is definitely meant as a deep dive learning exercise for both the program and architecture. I'm more versed in other types of design and CAD, and this felt like a natural place to start digging in and learning about architecture. Your tips are much appreciated and I'll take them to heart moving forward! Thanks!

Holy guacamole, I've nearly got it. I went back and meticulously redid your process, this time even more from scratch and changing a bunch of auto-roof parametrs to match some real-world measurements of the rafters, west roof pitch, eaves/fascia/soffits, etc. Still not completely clear on the exact height at which the rafters bear IRL or precisely how that works, but I've learned a lot about roofs. The last little snag I'm hitting is a weird hole in the corner from the exterior to the living room, see below. Any idea what might be causing that? Technically the patio overhang paneling should fill the entire triangular ceiling space as well. No big deal, but if there's an easy way to do that, please let me know. Here's an updated project file. Thanks!

Made a video for this one, thought it might be clearer/more complete :-) It's a bit long, goes over the whole thing, so no worries if you don't have the time. Figured I'd give it another shot just in case, tried to keep it snappy and concise.

I really appreciate your generous time and help with this, John. I followed your instructions a couple times over and am running into some different results with a few issues – see photos below. It's so close! Especially on your end. But the biggest issue (which I think happens on both our ends) is still those incorrect exterior roof baseline / soffit heights – it seems impossible to raise the attic/bonus room height by adding a wall without overshooting the soffit height. Which got me wondering how the roof actually meets the edge of the attic IRL and how the soffits play into that, so I crawled back up and took some more pics. I can't see how exactly, but the rafters seem to exactly meet the attic subfloor, so adding a tiny wall there doesn't seem quite right. Even a 0" wall height overshoots the baseline height out there, so I don't understand what's causing this. I'm almost positive the floor structure between floors is the correct thickness, for what it's worth. Also as an aside, this seems like a lot of hoops to jump through! I mean if this is the way to do it, I'll keep chugging along. But I wonder if Chief could benefit from a feature to simply let you specify an individual wall's height difference. In the case of vaulted ceilings, it could just auto-adjust the roof pitch to match. This would be so easy! I'm slowly educating myself on roofs and eager to understand how in the world this all works. It occurs to me that the correct designation for that west wall should be a knee wall, but it seems like the overhanging roof section and diagonal-axis wall below really throws Chief and doesn't let that work properly. Anywho thanks again! Any continued help with these snags is super appreciated.

Thanks so much for your help! Sticking to auto-roofs is definitely more ideal, but either way works alright, I'd just like to accurately model it. I think that in-the-wall photo was misleading, sorry – the tape measure was for reference, but the wall height difference (9 3/4″ actually, on remeasuring from subfloor) really is to the top of the wall line of the interior drywall on each side of the room (see below). Which you did seem to achieve by some magic. The 1″ wall attic→room conversion breaks my brain a little bit. Like, 1″ seems kind of arbitrary. But somehow it more or less works? I'm unsure about the rafters on the other wall (east) – it's fully enclosed. But yeah, the taller wall (west) does seem to use 2×6 rafters (5 1/4″ wide by my measurement). One snag and piece I only partially mentioned is that the exterior boxed eave soffits are 9′ tall exactly IRL, which is 8″ higher than the 8′ 4″ interior ceilings of those walls just on the other side (1st floor). The attic–bonus room trick lifts those soffits up too high, to 9′ 4 3/4″. The other snag is that the way I had gotten the "patio" overhang to generate is actually how it is in real life – the corner / double hip, rather than the full gable your solution yielded. Also double checked the ceiling pitches, almost positive the East side is 45º and the West side is ~41º, or a 10.43″ pitch, for whatever it's worth.

Thanks for the tips! The 1" tall attic space room sadly caused some weird problems with split height roof planes. I'm quite stumped, so here's a stripped down copy of the plan, as well as a couple of images below showing that +10″ taller wall from both sides of it. Another possible missing piece of the puzzle – that side of the room seems to have a different ceiling pitch than the 45º of the other. My iPhone measured 42º, and a Klein digital angle finder measured 48º, so I'm stumped again. Both tools measure 45º on the other ceiling plane though. It's a tricky one! You'll see a small corner overhang "patio" in the model that complicates it as well. Would really appreciate any help on cracking this one.

Hello! The left side wall of this attic bedroom is 10" higher than the right one in real life. How do I model this? The length of the room is accurate, although I believe the peak/ridge of the roof is at least 5" taller (couldn't get a clean measurement). The first floor ceiling heights are accurate, but the roof baseline height is somehow taller on the exterior. Thanks!

Hello! I'm trying to model this shelf ceiling closet and running into a couple of snags. The shelf ceiling creates a strange hockey-stick-shaped hole through the other side of the wall it's against. How do I prevent this? It was framed unusually IRL – against the drywall, not into the studs behind it. How do I model this? (For what it's worth, the divider wall has three layers of drywall on the interior side.)