Move buildings?

[BobD]

OK, so from what I've seen related to this question, I'm not encouraged, but I'll ask it anyway:

I've tinkered for some time with Home Designer, having started at Suite 7, with upgrades to Architectural and now Pro 10. I have a garage design and a house design, a kitchen design, etc., but I didn't start up doing much with perimeter or careful placement until recently, as I'm finally getting kind of serious about doing some major renovations. So three related questions:

1. Is there any straightforward way to import my previous work into an overall site design, carefully placing e.g. a house in the precise, correct location within the perimiter, and

2. If I e.g. draw a garage and a house on my lot, and then decide that I really need the garage to be, say 8" closer to the house in one dimension, and 5.5" closer in the other, is there any way to do this, or am I SOL and really have to go back and rebuild the garage?

3. If I do a bunch of building design before having a good topographic model of my lot, and later collect and enter that data, how messed up will my plan be; will it adjust to the new terrain, or am I looking at starting over again?

Thanks for any help, I expect I might have another question or two later.

[Elovia]

Welcome to the forum, Bob.

If you have your buildings in separate plans, you should be able to copy them into a single plan. However, straight copy-n-paste is not the tool of choice. What you'll want to use is Edit -> Edit Area -> Edit Area (All Floors). Once you select that tool, then drag a box around a building, you can copy it, switch to the plan in which you want to insert it, and then paste. If you then need to move, rotate, or otherwise adjust the position of the building, you simply use the Edit Area (All Floors) again and then you should notice the presence of a center and side drag handles as well as a rotate handle.

Hope this helps.

p.s. I'm really not a terrain person, but I'm led to believe that if you design the house then landscape or landscape then house, it doesn't matter much. If you build the terrain after building the house, you may have some minor cleanup to accomplish, but that is true for the other way around ... it is just a different sort of cleanup.

[BobD]

Elovia,

Thanks much, this did exactly what I needed. It took a bit of tinkering to figure out how to move the terrain to a precise location, but I got this to work by placing a point where I wanted a corner to be, and then using the point-to-point move to get it to relocate the corner onto that spot. Again, thanks!

--Bob

[jaustin]

Does this not work in the Architectural version? I still get just one floor floating in space after the paste.

[David J. Potter]

Does this not work in the Architectural version?

When done properly the procedure works in all titles that have the "Edit Area" commands, I wonder what you actually did?

I mean exactly what command did you use and exactly how did you use the command to get what you got? There is always a vast difference between "done" and "Done Successfully (properly)".

DJP

[jaustin]

One difference I see is there is no sub-menu on Edit Area. Procedurally I opened the plan with the garage, selected "Edit->Edit Area", put a box around the building, and then selected "Edit->Copy". Then I opened up the other plan, selected "Edit->Paste" and then clicked where I wanted it to go. The floor was pasted but the foundation and the roof reverted back to defaults. I tried it on a multi-story building and it only copied the floor I was on.

[David J. Potter]

When you use "Edit Area" as you have already seen, it just copies objects and not Default Settings which are resident in the plan file and not in the objects themselves. Default Settings are something you manually set per plan.

DJP

[jaustin]

I expected it to copy all the floors though. The reason the roof and foundation reset to the defaults is being they're being auto-generated again. It sounds like it might just be a limitation on the Architectural verse Pro version.

[David J. Potter]

It sounds like it might just be a limitation on the Architectural verse Pro version.

This feature operates exactly the same in Architectural as it does in Home Designer Pro and Chief Architect Premier.

DJP

[jaustin]

It doesn't appear to be the same. The instructions say select "Edit -> Edit Area -> Edit Area (All Floors)" but this screen shot shows what my menu looks like on Architectural 2014. There's no sub-menu under Edit Area.

[jsl10]

I'm having trouble with this too. Can someone help? Also using Architectural 2014. I keep reading it's the same in all versions but there is no Edit->Edit Area->Edit Area (All Floors). I have a two story home on a large terrain that I have just right. I want to rotate the home on the terrain. I understand it's best though to rotate the terrain rather than the plan. So I use the Edit Area and copy the home plan to buffer and delete. I rotate the plan just the way I want. Then paste the home back and drag to exact location. But I only get the original floor. Other floors are hanging out where they were originally. Why don't I have a Edit Area (All Floors)? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[jsl10]

With 597 views there is obviously interest in how to move all stories of a plan simply. Without the Edit Area (All Floors) feature on Architectural 2014 I'm assuming there is no easy way to do this. Selecting all the items in the terrain and not the house is to say the least a pain! Not being able to move a plan on your terrain seems like a pretty obvious thing that seems to be missing (unless I'm still missing something - a definite possibility.

[JoAnn]

In the version that I have, it is necessary to 'copy' and 'paste in place' each floor individually.