Shed Dormer Frustration


Richard_Morrison
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Do not use the HOLE IN ROOF option,  get rid of the invisible wall at the pop out on left side,  add a 3rd floor....  that should fix the gable issues....  I am always baffled when you are missing the drywall at ceiling at the stairs...  I  wish I could figure that out.

 

 

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Do not use the HOLE IN ROOF option,  get rid of the invisible wall at the pop out on left side,  add a 3rd floor....  that should fix the gable issues....  I am always baffled when you are missing the drywall at ceiling at the stairs...  I  wish I could figure that out.

Thanks. But what are you suggesting in place of the Hole In Roof option?

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Hi Richard, I looked at the floor plan pic and I could not see a raked ceiling plane in it?

I know this problem has been solved but did you try and use a ceiling plane in your plan?

Scott's method worked fine for your internal 3d clean up, did building a 3rd floor affect the exterior model?

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  • Solution

Opening plan, I got 2 dbx's for "bad polylines". I got rid of hole in roof & edited the roof planes. Selected all walls & set top & bot to default. Moved roof lines to wall surfaces.The walls that were spec'd to have roof cut wall at bottom, the roof plane has to be on the inside edge of the wall, but the roof line needs to jog back to the outside surface when a colinear wall is spec'd not to have the roof cut.... (Explode an auto dormer & examine how all the parts of a dormer are defined (walls) & how the hole in roof is shaped.) That cleaned up the ceilings at the cheek walls. I got a centerline & snapped all the roof edges to that & visually confirmed that they all had the same ridge hgt. One of roof lines would not jog back to the outside where I knew it needed to be, so I had to enable "No special snapping" in the roof spec dbx in order to put the jog where I wanted it. Used the "edit wall layer intersection" tool to clean up knee wall corners. A couple walls would not finish properly, so had to drag top/bot in place. Select all walls & restore default top/bot to see what 2 they were. I got ride of the gaps in the cl'g over the stairs by assigning a cl'g surface to the roof plane.

The wall over the garage door was actually 3 walls.

Rambling, sorry.

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All good Jim was just looking at what/how you did it , the above helps.

 

I did not get bad polyline messages , but there is a lot of weird 3d polylines where the stairwell roof meets the Garage apartment wall at the top in the original plan I was just playing with to fix the stucco.

 

I had deleted 2-3 by this stage

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Jim,

 

Very impressive! Thank you! I will need to study this for a bit, but it was not quite as easy as Scott was making it out to be, I think. I actually did try exploding a dormer first, but it was not totally clear what was important in the Roof Hole configuration.

 

Like Mick, I did not get any of the bad polyline messages. You are right that the roof at the bottom of the stairs needs work; this is in an early stage of design and I was pulling my hair out trying to get the cheek walls to display properly. This shouldn't have to be so complicated...

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I'm certain the bad polylines were the holes in roof. You probably told Chief not to show that dbx anymore. A hole in roof polyline has to be entirely contained by the roof plane.

Going on  20yrs full-time w/ the program has some perks.

:)

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No Perry, that was well before I came on board. I purchased Chief (floppy discs) & then the version w/ roofs came out shortly after.

'96 or so.

Learned the basics from Dan Bauman's videotapes, which I still have somewhere.

Glenn, DJP, Dan B & a few others were already on board by then.

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Hi Richard, I am curious to know about the advantages Chief offers you in modeling up a house like this despite the difficulties you encountered?

Well done to you guys who helped Richard with these problems we appreciate your hard work to help other's.

I hope I can follow your unselfish examples, I am not up to speed with X6 yet and we all have to watch X7 videos to keep up with X7, have fun.

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Hi Manuel,

In retrospect, I had initially thought the problems were probably just a couple of silly things that I had missed, but it turned out to be fairly involved to fix. Certainly beyond my own abilities at the moment, and I wouldn't consider myself a beginner. I find the basics are generally very quick -- certainly faster than any other program -- but if you get into anything beyond mainstream, it can take more time to sort out the issues than if you'd started with a different program (and I think you know which one I mean, LOL).  The tortoise and the hare story comes to mind.

 

There is something to be said for using the right tool for the job. I think the problem is that it's sometimes difficult to know when Chief is going to be slower than an alternative, or not accurate enough (e.g. with terrain modeling). X7 is the best Chief version so far, and so the calculus keeps changing. If Chief were the only program I used, it would make struggling through the annoyances more palatable. So I don't have an easy answer. Tough it out to get to Jim's level of proficiency? Know when to bail out and move to a more flexible program? I know I would PREFER to stay in Chief, but currently, I don't think it's always possible with my abilities, and frustration levels with a few key things that are missing for me.

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I think you might hold a very big key to helping Chief develop, since you are an Architect and have been around along time and have lots of experience in dealing with client issues that have helped allot of us here. Things like copyright and and other problems we encouter in dealing with clients has been very helpful to me in particular.

I am a bit surprised that someone as experienced as you are in Chief to have had these problems with a relatively mild level of house customization. I would hope that you would report what would have made your job easier and faster in Chief for you, if you had some features from the other CAD we use incorporated into Cheif to keep it faster for us and others when we raise the degree of complication to a mild level as you have had with this design.

Chief have listened to us in the past and will continue to do so and we have seen them add things into Chief that are good in other CAD programs.

My main CAD language is in Chief and I am not so proficient in the other CAD as you are that's why I say you may hold a big Key for Chief becoming allot better for Architect's doing multi level houses with a mild degree of customization?

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.......In retrospect, I had initially thought the problems were probably just a couple of silly things that I had missed, but it turned out to be fairly involved to fix. .....

 

 

I bet that if you had known what you were doing in the first place it would of been easy peasy......  relatively speaking.......

 

Here is a vid if interested

 

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Thanks Scott for the video. Now I know a little more.

Its comforting to know that there is some sort of regularity to a lot of these issues, rather then some random clicking around in DBX's all the while keeping fingers crossed in the hopes of a solution!

As in this case:

 

1) Adjust roofs to "outside walls" and don't use "roof holes" as I first resort.

2) make sure walls are default top&bottom

3) Check that attic gable walls are drawn on "Attic" level

4) Re-assign ceiling planes as needed.

5) Rejoin roof planes

6) A shot of F12 intermittently.

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Ouch ! Missus kick you outta bed this morning Mr Hall :)

good video, I wasn't sure why he was using the Roof holes either ,though the Cupola tutorials use that technique, but I didn't find the "hidden" wall when I was looking at the plan good spot.

M.

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Thank you, Scott, for that video! There are some very instructive points there. To clarify as to why I used a Roof Hole, it was because Chief told me that was the way you did a manual dormer: http://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00449/234/Chief-Architect/Roofs/Dormers/Creating-a-Manual-Dormer.html . Earlier iterations didn't have a common ridge, and so the holes probably got screwed up as they got closer and closer to the main ridge.  Then in trying different ways to get the side walls to behave, I started playing around with various types of walls, and just bailed out at some point.

 

If you do as Jim suggested, and try an automatic dormer and study how the generated roof hole works (with little "ears" at the bottom like a window stool), it is not intuitive at all. And I notice that you also had some roof edges going to the middle of a wall. I still have not fully grasped how that concept works and when it is appropriate.  You'd think after mucking around with this program for over 15 years I would, but I don't.

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