Shed dormer

[rossdev]

Is it possible to have a shed dormer exterior wall cut at the ceiling on a 12/12 pitch roof instead of the floor in HDP?

thanks,
Brian.

[Dan Park]

Try using the open below room type. If you need to define an area without walls use invisible walls.

[slefferts]

I have learned a lot from following the threads on dormers and roof generation and have gotten pretty close, but I can't get a couple of things to work.

First, is it possible to generate a shed roof over a dormer in Suite 6? When I change the pitch in the Wall:Roof dialog box of any wall it always reverts back to the default roof pitch as soon as I leave the entry box. Hmm... Is there another way to do this? I always get a hip roof instead. (see pic)

Second (and related), in S6 can I change the height of the dormers so that they do not go to the top of the roof (also in pic)?

Thank you for anything you can tell me...even if it is "upgrade"...

Seth

[Dan Park]

First, take the (D) out. This stands for dynamic defaults and will set the pitch back to whatever the default pitch is for the plan.

Second. Use invisible walls to section off the room and lower the ceiling height for that room. Again - don't forget to take the (D) out.

Finally make the end walls full gable walls and you should get something like the attached image.

[slefferts]

Wow, Dan. You are, like, scary-awesome! I have 100% success on both lowering the small gable rooflines and building the shed roof. Check out my pic. I found that 90 inches at 1/12 gave me the best result for the shed roof, and 60 inches gave me a nice dormer gable. Thank you!

OK, so how do I get rid of that message about the 'selected edge for this roof plane below this kneewall is apparently..."? It is just annoying not understanding what it is trying to tell me, that's all.

I am going to attempt terrain next. I have a slope leading down into the property, then flat for a short yard and 1/2 of the house, then a slope down to a walkout basement, flat for 10 feet or so, then sloped down again. I will attempt it before I start to ask for help.

Take care,

Seth

[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

[annp]

Hello,

I'm using Suite 7.09.

I'm creating a cape-style house with 3 front gable dormers, and one large shed dormer that extends across most of the rear of the house.

I was able to figure out the front dormers (using the auto-dormer function), but I can't for the life of me figure out the rear shed dormer.

I did find a few posts addressing this topic, but wasn't able to make their instructions fit my case. I downloaded the plan from this post:

http://www.chieftalk.com/showthread.php?t=20278

but I could only open it "read-only", as I'm not using chief architect, so that didn't help too much. It looks pretty close to what I need to do, though!

I'm attaching pix of my plan, the rendered plan, and the real-life version of what I'm trying to create.

I'd appreciate any tips!
thanks so much
ann

[Allen42ACJ]

Hi Ann
That can be done auto. It might take a few trys to get the pitch right.
You might even want to practice on a new plan.
If you have the front OK.Set your front to attic or storage ceiling height 0.
Open the back wall DBX,under roof tab set the pitch to 4,this will over ride the defaults..
Try that...

[Allen42ACJ]

See if this helps..
I like to add a center line to get the ridge point.Adjust the back pitch to move what you get..

[RootFarm]

Allen, I got the impression she was looking for something like this:

[annp]

Root - that is exactly what I'm looking to do. I tried using "auto-dormer", changing the roof type to "shed," but it's not attaching to the existing roof (see pic)...

[Allen42ACJ]

Ann
Lower the pitch of the dormer roof.
Root
Did you get that with the dormer tool?And are the walls aligned in the back?
I never had luck doing that.
My way you can get the cheek walls on the sides but not roof all the way across at the bottom of the shed dormer..

[Allen42ACJ]

Just did this auto..