walls & terrain (X2)

I rarely build foundations unless I have a specific need to. In V10 I used to simply dragged the bottom of walls down to meet generated terrain, and shape the bottom edge of the wall to the slope of the land, placing breaks along the wall bottom as necessary.

However, I am having trouble with this in X2 and am wondering if there is a quick work-around for creating models and terrain without having to generate foundations. For some reason, the walls do not like snapping to a CAD line at the bottom, and neither do they like being 'reshaped' to anything other than horizontal (it seems).

I would love some guidelines as to how the 'gurus' out there handle this!

Thankyou in advance,

Lenita

Lenita,

Wouldn't it just be easier to create a foundation? If you created the foundation from the same wall type as the 1st floor, You wouldn't have to drag any walls around.

Allen,

I agree, creating the foundation seems to be the easiest option - however, I don't want to see the foundation walls below ground level when sending views to layout, or rendering a 3D model ..... and if the foundation layer is turned off, then the house 'floats' above ground .......

Is there a quick and easy way to turn off everything that is below ground level??

Thankyou for your helpful suggestion.

Lenita

Lenita,

There sure is. Especially if you are talking about on the layout page. Just create a polyline rectangle with a solid white fill, with white lines as the border. It works very well to hide things on your layout sheet.

Hmmm. It does sound like the way to go for layouts - I already use white-filled polylines to hide stuff (I usually do it in the elevation view before sending to layout).

However, my problem becomes difficult when I want to create a perspective view with nothing showing up below ground level. I need to do this for clients on a regular basis - 'squiggle' line drawings imported into Sketchup that we colour by hand (although I'm also experimenting with X2's version of this - looks very promising!).

Hmm - more thinking - my preference is to set the terrain skirt to follow the terrain - but maybe if I change that to a flat skirt, the terrain then hides the foundations .... might experiment with this a bit unless you (or someone else) have a better suggestion ......

Again, thankyou for your help and suggestions!

Lenita

I was going to suggest that earlier. If you have a sloped terrain, it will hide it. If you have a flat terrain, just make it thicker that the foundation.

Just move the cameras to the outside of the terrain.