Truss design

[Milo]

Can I choose truss design instead of stick frame roof/ how?

[David J. Potter]

IF you have Home Designer Pro, you can use the provided "Truss Tool" after you have built roofs and have established ceilings.

What the truss tool does is to manually fill the void between the top of the ceiling and the bottoms of roof planes ( I would hardly call that "designing trusses") but that is what the tool is designed to do.

There is of course a dialog box and other ways to manipulate resulting trusses but it is not intended to replace a State Licensed Truss Engineer. It does a decent job as it is.

DJP

[Milo]

I have Chief Architect and wasn't looking for it to "engineer" trusses . Just hoped it could acknowledge their use. I am also having difficulty creating stairs from 1st floor to basement after creating a basement. Thank you

[David J. Potter]

Milo, one of the first things a newer user should learn and learn well is that "the software" does not "think", "consider", or "Do anything" except what end users "tell" it to do by way of having carefully studied, defined words that they did not well understand followed by lots of practice and nothing more.

I am not being silly at all, it is just a tool as lifeless as a hammer without an experienced user guiding it to a result. The software doesn't acknowledge anything, rather it is programmed to function and so it does.

Trusses are discussed in the Reference Manual in the "Framing" section.

In terms of stairs, they need to be drawn (created) in the basement, they will span from the floor they are created on to the next floor above (that is the way that tool is programmed to work). There are basic video tutorials about stairs and many other tools that are good introductions to their use but the Reference Manual is where the exact steps and various uses are taught in depth.
It all requires some reading followed by trial and error practice until one gets the idea of how it is designed to work.

DJP