More problems with room over room

[Doug_N]

OK so I have wrestled with this house for waaaaaayyy too long.  Still, the room over the room is fighting me.  I think I am getting close.  

 

This is an as-built design, with a new flat roof over a storage space in the garage to give the client stand up space in the storage room.

 

The house is complex and I have not even begun to work on the basement which has two floors.  One of the floors contains a built-in swimming pool.  That should be fun.  There is a basement level under the garage as well.  

 

The storage room over the garage has a crawl space on the right side of the room when viewed from the front of the house.  I have included a couple of screenshots so that you can get an idea of where I am trying to go with this.

 

There are a few other problems that I am having with walls not stopping at intersections on interior surfaces and exterior surfaces as well.

Test building to get second story crawl space.plan

[Doug_N]

Hey guys, please.  I am getting a headache with this.  No matter what I do I either lose a floor in the room in the garage, or a wall shows up where it shouldn't.  Please take a look.

[AvoyeDesign]

Please be patient with the kind folks here on chieftalk.  We are all busy people and you have thrown quite a complex problem out there.  If you need help right now I suggest calling technical support.  I would offer one on one help per my hourly rate, but I don't know if I have time this week to set aside on short notice.  Be patient, someone will respond.

[AvoyeDesign]

Also, you have described the design, but left it a little vague what the problem is you are having.  Some more detail on that might get more responses.

[AvoyeDesign]

Hi Doug,

I just took a quick look at your plan, and the first place I wanted to check was your floor defaults.  And quite frankly, they are a mess.  Remember that chief follows these settings first for all rooms on a floor, unless you manually change it.  I would suggest going through your defaults for each floor and setting your levels for the most common areas.  Then go back and make all rooms follow these defaults.  Then go to rooms that dont follow those settings and make the appropriate changes.  Based on the floor default settings you have, I don't know why you would want any one room to have those defaults.  Yet they appear to be set by you.  It would be a good idea to thorougly review in the help section the purpose of floor defaults and how chief builds floors and rooms.

[Doug_N]

Hi Rod.  

 

Thanks for your comments.  Hopefully, the following comments may help explain where I am with this design.

 

I gave up on trying to use a default room setting for structure because this house has different floor levels at the rear of the house versus the front.  They are different by 12"  This is true for both the first and second floor.  In addition, the floor for the room in the garage has a different floor.

 

What I am trying to accomplish is to make the wall dividing the  balcony space from the floor over the room in the garage invisible.  Because the floor for the room in the garage is a second floor, the floor over the crawl space is a third floor.  That floor has to match up with the balcony floor, which is a second floor.

 

Maybe I am wrong, but the default settings are useful only if it works for most of the house.  No default setting would seem to work for this design.  Similarly ceiling levels are also different in several locations.  The same is true for the roof planes.  

[AvoyeDesign]

Regardless of all that, pick a default for each floor that matches the most ideal room you have and go from there.  Chief does not ignore defaults unless you tell it to, and even then I'm not even sure.  The defaults you have don't make much sense to me, and if you are not using them, it is best to pick proper ones any way.  Rule that out, then begin looking for other problems.

[Doug_N]

Rod.

 

OK will do.   I will let you know the results.

 

Doug 

[Doug_N]

Rod,

 

Here is the new plan file.  I have made some adjustments, but that darned wall is still visible, or at least one part of it is.   The default elevations have been set for the rear of the house.

Doug

Test building to get second story crawl space.plan

[AvoyeDesign]

OK, I see your problem now.  Because chief only allows one room on each floor (i.e. you can't stack 2 rooms on the same floor), you either get a hole to the garage in the study or a hole to the study in the den.  You are allowing chief to create the hole to the study in the den, and creating a room on the 3rd floor and dragging it's height down to match the level of the den.  The wall that appears is apparently not being trimmed properly by chief, and this type of buggy behavior is to be expected when chief is jurry rigged this way.  In all fairness this isn't a condition that the developers have really acocunted for in the program, but that is no help to you. 

 

My suggestion would be to go to preferences>architectural and make sure that "select room before wall in 3D" is unchecked.  Then you can select the offending wall and drag the top below the floor.  But since you are stretching the intended funciton of chief I would expect to see this type of persistant behaviour in other areas of the plan.

 

Alternatively, I've attached a mock up of another way to tackle this.  Basically I've treated the floor of the den and the floor of the study as one assembly, with an air gap in the middle.  I've had to add finish layers between the two structural layers, but with some calculations I was able to perfectly align them.  Then I added a door to the wall between the study and den, and adjusted its height, elevation and width to fit between the two floors, and removed the casing.  I had to add a couple of polyline solids to fill some side walls, and a manual room molding, but it is pretty close.  A little bit more patch work might be needed.

 

 

3 rooms 2 floors.plan

[Doug_N]

Gosh Rod thanks for the perspective.  I would never have designed a house like this but it is an as built that needs modifications.   

 

It seems that as built are way tougher to do than new designs. I have been using CA for about a year and a half now.  Always learning more.  

 

Thanks once again.