Shed dormer

[Kilgore Trout]

When creating a walkout or daylight basement, don't forget to turn of the auto calculate elevation and flatten pad in the terrain model. This messes up just about everyone the first time.

[Dan Park]

If the roof is correct you probably don't need to have knee wall selected in this design. Find the wall that is set as a knee wall and uncheck it and the message should go away.

[slefferts]

Dan,

What I have done it to generate a final view of the roof as my base model. Now that I have that I will (hopefully) never generate the roof again so I won't be getting the confusing message. Voila!

Kilgore,

Yes, thank you. I have been avidly reading the threads about terrain building. It is as complex as roof building, which means that it is a highly sophisticated algorithm that requires many hours of study to master. With that in mind I have done the following:

I placed elevation points all around my site map. I set the elevations to be accurate to my actual land, starting at around 330' and decending to around 320' for a flat area of around 30', then a sharp drop to around 308' for a flat 12' landing, then a continuous slope downward. Of course, upon 3D rendering my house was at the bottom of the lot, buried under 300' of dirt! So, I used the Auto Calculate Elevation once to reset my house, but it was still around 4' underground, yet the walkout level was more or less correct.

At this point I dropped all of my elevation points of the upper flat landing to 316'. That seemed to leave the house where it was and lower the land around it. From there I was able to properly model the surrounding terrain. My only real issue at this point is that Suite 6 seems to want to put little random bumps all over the place, so some of my lower deck off of the walkout basement has grass growing through it, and there are bumps around my garage up at the grade level that I haven't been able to get rid of. I just keep adding elevation points to keep flattening them out. Am I on the right track here? I must have at least 80 EPs by now. Still, it is looking great.

Next, I am going to add a retaining wall along the dropoff behind the garage to the lower level. Any words of wisdom would be most welcome.

Overall, I am loving this software. Too bad I am only planning to build one house! Hmmm...do I see a new career coming?

Seth