Tray ceiling rendering and material problems

[GeneDavis]

I needed to show a tray ceiling option in a house I've modeled.  First, right up front, I had to do some workarounds, as my situation would not build using the Chief tray ceiling tools.  I had to manually draw all the planes.

 

The plan (drawn in X12) is here.    https://www.dropbox.com/s/o24qyty4cin897w/BZ kitchen dining tray.plan?dl=0

 

I have attached images to show where in plan this is, and how the problem exhibits itself.  The wing of the house is the kitchen-dining area part of an open arrangement adjacent the two-story tall greatroom and a hall, and room division is done with an invisible wall.  It is that feature, the invisible wall, that throws Chief's tray tool for a loop.  Maybe they'll fix the bug someday, but I gotta do something here and now.  And I did.

 

The planes you see are manually drawn.  Wanting a planked look for the finish, sloped surround planks going with the slope, the center field going the short way to be 90 to trusses, I applied materials accordingly.  Or tried to.  

 

Manually drawn ceiling planes do not get their material spec from a direct user dialog.  They get their material from the room spec dialog, where ceiling finish is specified.  You've no real control of planking direction.  I know.  I tried everything.

 

Chief gets all mixed up and cannot produce what I wanted.  Look at the vector view, which shows the top flat plane getting planked BOTH ways.

 

There was no way I could get the planes to show good definition of plane joints at all the hips, and where edge planes (6/12 pitch) met the top plane.  Chief gives one a muddy mess.

 

I ended up modeling the whole ceiling in Sketchup and importing the whole room's tray as a symbol, and taking vector view screenshots with the symbol turned on, and the ceiling planes turned off.  A couple of pics are included.

 

But I sure would like to know why I could not succeed with the manual planes and their materials.

[scottharris]

Gene, you might also open your flat ceiling and uncheck "use room ceiling finish" - it seems to remove the cross hatch.

[Chopsaw]

1 hour ago, GeneDavis said:

Manually drawn ceiling planes do not get their material spec from a direct user dialog.  They get their material from the room spec dialog, where ceiling finish is specified.  You've no real control of planking direction.  I know.  I tried everything.

 

Not completely true.  Ceiling planes can get their material from the room or you can uncheck that and define a unique material.

 

1 hour ago, GeneDavis said:

There was no way I could get the planes to show good definition of plane joints at all the hips, and where edge planes (6/12 pitch) met the top plane.  Chief gives one a muddy mess.

 

Ceiling planes are essentially the same as roof planes  and use a lot of the same tools.  Join them with the "Join Roof Planes" tool.

 

[GeneDavis]

Thanks, Eric.  Much cleaner than my manual planes.  I did not get the generation of ceiling planes outside the room as you did, but got a warning message, which went away as soon as I exploded the group in the room.  And for some reason, the ceiling painted right with the planking material, all the planes, without need to do any rotations.

 

I went taller with it than before.