Adding room with basement

[ph_knox]

I just purchased HD and am impressed with all of it's capabilities. I'm contemplating adding a room to our existing house. The existing house is built on a slab, but I'd like the new room to have a walkout basement. The attached picture shows the existing house. The new room would be simply placing a room like the exisiting garage on the right side of the house (without the garage doors of course). Can I make this new room have a basement? I did read an existing thread that said to click on the room dialog box and go to the structure tab and select basement. I'm assuming these instructions where for HD PRO because my version of HD doesn't have this option.

Also, my chimney is not quite correct. For starters, it has a roof. I don't think I drew the chimney correctly. Any suggestions?

One last question (for now), can I change the exterior of all exterior walls quickly without selecting each wall individually. This seems easy, but I can't find it.

Thanks in advance.

[daydreamer]

Hey ph,

The easy one's first. Are you talking about the color or the type?

If it's the color you can change all of them in the Default settings.

If it's the wall type I think the easiest way is to click on an exterior wall, then press and hold the Shift key while you click on the rest of the "exterior" walls. When you have finished selecting all of the walls click on the "Open Object" icon on the toolbar and change the walls to you liking.

For the chimney, double-click in the "area/room" you created to make the chimney. Under the Structure tab in the Room Specification dialog box unselect Roof over this room.

[ph_knox]

Thanks for the responses. I managed to remove the roof from my chimney (pretty simple). I'm still having problems with my room addition and basement. From the attachments, you can see when I add the basement it is exactly what I want......the end open where I can put a garage door. However, when I add the first floor room, the terrain changes and puts all 3 sides of my basement underground. Also, for some reason the front wall extends up to the second floor. Any suggestions how I can add the first floor room without the terrain filling in. I'd like the terrain to slope down on the front and back of the basement walls and the end basement wall be exposed.

Again, thanks in advance

[BB boy]

ph-as my signature implies, I am new myself, and learning slowly, but as to the wall running full height, most likely, when you drew the new wall the program assumed you wanted it attached to the existing house (which you do), and also assumed you wanted it to be 2 story like the rest (which you don't). Go back to the first floor, and with the break wall tool, put a break in between the new wall and existing wall, it should then revert the new wall back to the first floor, if it doesn't when you finish all the walls of that room and set the ceiling height, it should then recognize it is on the first floor. You also, may be able to do a vector view camera of the front of the house and then select that wall and use the move handles to pull it down. The first option I think is what you want though.

As far as the walkout basement, you should have the "auto-calculate" terrain radio button, I think you need to un-check that. There have been several threads to do with terrain features and basements, so do a separate search for those.