disappearing floor material

[TonyRichardson]

I am having a strange problem with floor materials on the ground floor of a 3-floor house. As shown in the picture below, the wooden flooring is "disappearing" half way across this room and showing only the underlying structure. This "fault-line" continues across the entire floor plan through other rooms, splitting all types of floor coverings into visible and invisible areas. Any ideas?

[Kbird]

Where can I get that feature nice !

but really no Idea I only have Pro10 and haven't seen that one ....send the plan to tech support , let them look at it

M.

[Miranda]

That has happend to me a couple times, but I never really figured out what was causing it or how to fix it. Sorry no help, just wanted to let you know you are not alone.

[David J. Potter]

What you should do is to make a copy of the offending file available to us, so we can inspect it ourselves and see how it performs on our PC's.

DJP

[TonyRichardson]

What you should do is to make a copy of the offending file available to us, DJP

David, in your reply above, who do you mean by "us", and where should I send the file? Tony

[David J. Potter]

us means "us" (any of us interested in helping you). You can make the file available to others by use of Google Drive, Dropbox or other free file sharing services, if zipped you can attach it to your posts her provided the size is small enough. It is up to you do decide.

DJP

[TonyRichardson]

us means "us" (any of us interested in helping you). You can make the file available to others by use of Google Drive, Dropbox or other free file sharing services, if zipped you can attach it to your posts her provided the size is small enough. It is up to you do decide.

DJP

OK, thanks for clarifying "us" (-: The project is rather large (70MB file) so I have used Dropbox to share with you. David, I have shared with you, but if anyone else would like to have a look, please let me know by responding to this post with your email address. The "disappearing floor material" problem is most visible in the Office on the Ground Floor.

[Kbird]

please update the thread when you figure it out so we can all learn , thanks,

m.

[David J. Potter]

I just did a 15 minute look-around using Tony's plan file (thank you for sharing it with me). I wish I had better news (I will upload the resulting video to You Tube probably tomorrow, I am tired now and must go to bed).

I found that the plan contains several 3D symbols that are corrupt (broken and not showing in camera views).
That the plan file has (in my opinion) too many objects for the plan file or most PC's to parse per unit of time.
When you share files with someone else all of the custom materials must also be manually exported and shared with the other person viewing the same file (the command to use for this is under "File - Back Up Entire Plan", this command then exports the plan file along with all custom materials you used to support WYSIWYG at the other end), an easy error to make when learning and sharing but is NOT why you are having the funny floor material appearances. That is being caused by the plan file being to a large degree corrupted by to many wrong guesses, standard procedures not being followed, default settings being overridden in local room dialog boxes (paradoxical settings in other words). Unnecessary wall and roof plane breaks, out of plumb walls (an accumulation of errors over time).

I wish I had better news, I really was hoping I would find something with a "Eureka" in it. I did not. You can fix your floors with custom slabs as I showed in the video (skinny slab overlays to cover up the corrupt flooring appearances). I am sorry.

DJP

[TonyRichardson]

I wish I had better news, I really was hoping I would find something with a "Eureka" in it. I did not. You can fix your floors with custom slabs as I showed in the video (skinny slab overlays to cover up the corrupt flooring appearances). I am sorry.

DJP

Hi David, thanks for your response. I realise that my model is quite a complex one, with many rooms over several floors in a non-rectangular house. I was aware of the disappearing 3D symbols (often with objects imported from SketchUp), and have been gradually replacing them as I find them in different rooms. Several of the other "errors" are due to having skylights in a non-rectangular roof, which requires me to use many "slithers" of roof to approximate the shape and slope of the roof (and the skylights cross over some slither boundaries, causing an error). Messy, I know, but that is what the actual house is like )-:

Having recognised these problems, however, I must say that my tradespeople have found the floorplans and 3D views from Home Designer very useful in the actual renovation of the house. If you want to have a look at the renovation website, check it out at http://www.kanumbra.com/house/

Re the disappearing floor materials, I had come to the same conclusion myself of simply overlaying a thin rectangle (with appropriate material) onto the floor surface. I do this often to overcome other limitations of the software.

Cheers, Tony

PS: I look forward to watching your video in the next couple of days

[Katalyst777]

I would second Kbird's recommendation to send the file in to Technical Support. While David is great at helping folks out, he's not an actual company technician for the Home Designer software and those are the folks best equipped to handle things like this. Just covering up the problem isn't really a good solution.

http://support.homedesignersoftware.com/

[David J. Potter]

Here is the link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP-5...yghLQ03SnAiwBA

What Kat says is quite true. I was hoping to find something or a series of things that could be corrected by methodically checking the plan over but by the end of the look-over, I was convinced that it is, in terms of the floor material display, corrupted.

It is a nice piece of design and I am glad that it is serving its purpose for you (that is the main thing). I have had only one plan that was similar that I created myself, early on in my career. I have seen others since, created by others. I have only had one plan that became totally unusable do to my errors that I placed into it. That single instance was enough for me to change my way of operation with the software.

I am certain that Tech Support will tell you pretty much the same things I did but might be worth a try to share it with them.

DJP

[JoAnn]

WOW! What a project! Thanks for sharing the link!

[Leanne]

This is definitely something that we would like to see sent in to Support, as while there are many causes of materials displaying incorrectly, file corruption as suggested is not one of them, and we would like the opportunity to try to assist you with the issue.

Please register for our free online Support Center at: http://support.homedesignersoftware.com/ and submit the file.

Thank you.

[TonyRichardson]

Thanks to Kirk at the Support Center, my disappearing floor material has now re-appeared (-: All I needed to do was change the main layer of the front angled wall to the stud layer (between the two brick courses). Not sure why it solved the problem, but thanks, Support Center.