Invisible Room

[lbuttery]

Can a room be made "invisible" ?

I have a few alternatives in how I re-model my house and two of the choices are to put a full addition (43' X 9 1/2') across the face of the house and putting the pool and spa there with a staircase to basement (being refin. also) or just putting a
foyer on the front of the house to cover front door and staircase to basement.

I have been setting each alt. on separate layers and was expecting to be able to turn on/off the appropriate layers to show the desired alt.

I am finding that there doesn' seem to be a way to assign celing planes and floor surfaces to layers so if those layers are left on I get the effect showing in the attached pic.

If I turn those layers off then there are no ceilings or floors for the rest of the house ?

Am I missing something here or did I need to have separate plans for each alt. ?

I wanted to keep everything in one plan as I imagine that trying to keep multpiple plans in sync would be a royal PITA, and probably impossible to do.

I sure hope I am missing something.

Lew


P.S.

the "room" to the right of the basement stairs would be the "foyer" alt. and the left and right "rooms" would be the new full addition alt..

[Tommy Blair]

The only thing I know to do Lew is to make separate plan files under different names or number them. That's what I normally do.

Tommy

[David J. Potter]

Lew,

I agree with Tommy in that floors and ceilings cannot be selected selectively to be assigned to seperate layers (if you could select them then you could). Make an "as built" model then save it as your remodel versions (as many as you need to make up your mind) rather than try to make one model represent them all. That's to hard in my opinion.

DJP

[Glenn Woodward]

Or, if you really want all the options in a single file and the ability to see the options all at once, draw the existing and do an Edit Area All Floors Copy as many times as you like. Now do the alternate schemes on the various plans - line them up so that when you take an overview, you can see all the options at once.

[lbuttery]

Thanks for the replies.

Not what I wanted to hear, arrrrgh !!!

Lew

[Tommy Blair]

Lew,

I personally don't think it's too hard to use different file names for different plans. At least if something major should happen to one plan and you lose it or it becomes corrupt, you have another plan to go back to and reference from. I always felt it was the safer and easiest way to go. I'm doing one now that has 3 plan files for a kitchen; one for existing, one kitchen design and a 2nd kitchen design.

Tommy

[lbuttery]

different file names for different plans

Tommy:

The issue is having to make changes to multiple plans, that alone can be a PITA, but invariably changes will be made to one and not the other (I have a deadline so I'll do that tomorrow).

Then trying to sync them becomes a real PITA if additional changes have been made in the area that needs to be sync'd.

As a programmer for 27+ years I have run into this problem trying to control code changes.

The problem magnifies immensely when there are multiple people working on the project and/or multiple revisions over time.

It's far better to keep everything in one place.

Lew


P.S.

an extreme example was a project I worked on awhile back where a core set of 300+ programs were cloned 14 times for each division of the company and then some of the screens were modfied because div3 needs these fields and they don't need these and div 4 needs these changes.

I warned them that over time as changes occurred due to need or a 3 am emergency that some of the div's would get updated and some wouldn't and over time they would end up with 14 unique systems instead of 14 divisions sharing the same system.

These kinds of decisions are great for a programmer's job security, but also cause programmer's nightmares.