Roof Issues

[ChiefGeek]

Folks,
I am at the roof portion of the design of my future house and cant seem to get a grip on a few issues. I have attached a file that shows the roof pline for my design.

1. I can see light coming through several of the roof plane connections. When I try to connect them with the join roof plane tool I get the warning "cannot move one of the roof edges without making one of its adjacent edges..." They dont seem to want to join. If I make the peak height the same as a neighboring roof plane, the eave board comes out of alignment. There has got to be something basically wrong here, just missing it. I watched the roof design tutorial then reproduced it in a test project. Of course it works, its a simple roof. The roof join tool works every time.

2. One of my roof planes WILL NOT display a returned eave, like all the others in the design. In fact, when I delete the roof plane then add a new plane in its place, the same part of the roof plane is still an angled eave, and whats odd, its only part of the eave, not the entire eave of the roof plane.

3. Finally, I have a front porch with a roof that is a foot higher than the rest of the house. I got it drawn, but it sure looks nasty underneath. Is there an example that ships with X1 of this? Does anybody have any suggestions/tips?

Thanks

[DON SHUMAN]

The attachment is very light and hard for me to see!
Did you do a automatic roof or are you doing a manual roof? You may want to do a automatic generated roof then change the roof planes as you need.
In any case is the porch ceiling ht.the same as the rest of the house as you want them in all rooms and are the roof pitches the same or as you want them in the room/ structure dbx? Don

[Chiefdoggydogg]

sometimes it helps to use the parallel tool to make sure your edges are parallel, if they wont join naturally. you may have accidentally threw it out of wack.

and yeah, if you could post a clearer pic im sure we would be able to help you more.


edit: wait, if you are talking about the small hip roof to the bottom left then the lazer tool might help in that instance. make sure all of your roofs are in place and at the appropriate hight. then click the main roof plane and make sure it is selected. then while the main roof is selected click the ridge board of the small hip roof. you will see a small gray x appear where the roofs intersect. repeat the process with the facias and then pull roofs into place. with 3 coordinates the angles of the valleys should rectify themselves. cant really tell without a better pic.

[ChiefGeek]

I have uploaded a gif version of the roof overview, in .gif, it seems clearer.
To respond to a few questions:
I started out with an auto roof but it was too much to handle. On the advise of the CA tech support I created one manually. There are several places where the overhang is much greater than the default 3 feet as we are creating porches, etc.
All roof pitches are 4in12.
The front porch eaves need to be 1 foot higher than the eaves of the rest of the house. Its ceiling will be 10 feet, the house ceiling height will be 9 except for closets, halls, etc.

[Chiefdoggydogg]

ok well there are two ways i would approach that. firstly what you tried. however it looks like you may have tried to join them while they are not parallel. that will not work. if you make both edges of the valleys parallel with the main roof they should join with the join tool. if that doesnt work i suggest watching louis's lazer tutorial. id recommend it to any chief user. the lazer tool has become one of my favorite tools in my toolbox. there are multiple ways to skin your cat. i can think of one other but its an absolute last resort.

make sure you set room hights before creating manual roof planes to make sure they sit on a top plate and dont encroach on your ceiling and poke through.

[carpenterguy]

Post the plan. Nobody is going to steal all your great ideas.

Andy.

[gawdzira]

Are the baselines the same for all the roof planes? It appears from the way you broke the roof planes for the small projection in the lower left corner of plan that the baseline for that section is higher than what is adjacent. Is this the case? Either way, you can get that to work.

One thing that I find is that it often helps CA if you take the roof edges close to where they will be going before trying to join them. If it is a simple shape the roof edges can be perpendicular when you join them. If it is a valley like what you have in the plan lower left corner, CA needs some direction.

alan

[Allen Brown]

I usually find that the reason I can't join two roof planes, is that there is a break in the edge of one of them you are trying to join, which is preventing the joining. If this is the case, place two or three more breaks in that edge and pull that edge closer to where you think it should go. When you get that warning, more often than not, one of the roof plane edges goes to where they should connect, which helps you figure out the proper position.

Another common problem is that you are trying to connect two edges that would not connect in the real world, because you are selecting the wrong edge of a roof plane. The easiest way to determine this, is to work in 2D and 3D at the same time; take a render full overview and zoom in to the section you are working with, then tile the windows vertically so you can see them both at the same time. This will slow the program down a little, but will save you time getting it figured out.

[jonathank]

Post a plan...seems like everyone is kind of shooting blindly here...

It would help us be able to give you a solid answer.

[Curtis Johnson]

ChiefGeek:

See the image I have attached. Your first picture shows one or more extra lines or roof plane edges extending up near the ridge of AA. As I note, when you select AA, the whole area I have hatched should be a single roof plane. If it is not, then you need to make it as one. If you click on the front side roof plane (that the porch roof attaches to), and the offending line/lines are highlighted, then, as Allen was discussing in his post, you need to pull one or more of the extra breaks you have in that roof plane up to a single corner and then rejoin the roof plane edges.

Not sure what you have going on with the porch roof without at least a 3d view or two of it and a view of your floor plan below (or zip the plan and let someone take a look at it). You could simplify it a little by raising the porch roof up some more so that where the double arrows I show are, the left side of the porch roof becomes part of the larger roof plane for the house (if that look is OK with you). Your way is fine ... just suggested as an option. Does your porch roof have a vaulted ceiling? What is that larger square/rectangular area with the dashed line?

You really should be able to easily autobuild that whole roof as I don't see any thing unusual except that your porch ceiling is higher than the ceiling in the house.

[Curtis Johnson]

ChiefGeek:

I am not sure what your #2 is referring to? Are you talking about plumb vs. raked fascias? Usually when I heare the term returned eave, I am thinking of a gable wall with Greek or whatever you want to call the special framed returns that are often built to give the gable roof a little more style and curb appeal. Since you don't have any apparent gables in your images, I am assuming you are talking about something else. Can you provide an image of what you are talking about to clarify your explanation?

[ChiefGeek]

Folks,
First, thanks to all the responded! Your ideas are greatly appreciated. Included in this post is a zip of the project. It was so big that I had to delete all the walls and furniture.
All the baselines are the same height, on 9 foot exterior walls. At least thats my intention. All the facia boards should be the same height and align with each other. Now that there is a plan, you can see that front porch I'm trying to design and the ugliness underneath. You can also see the misbehaving eave on the front left side of the house. This version of the plan has a double-wide chimney, the problem is the same with CAs chimney. I havent worked on ceilings yet so some of them might be crummy.

To answer Curts question, the "Whats this" lines, I dont know. They are part of what makes the underside of the front porch so ugly.

Also, I WANT eaves that return to the house level, not the type that slope up under with the slope of the roof. This is wokring good except for 2 places, the front left side, and the little porch-let on the back patio.

A CAD expert at work suggested something that is working quite well. I contracted all the roof planes so they do not touch. I then checked all the angles. It turns out that most of them had funky (non-integer) angles. Messing with the parallel tool and modifying a line by editing the angle helped me straighten out some of the roof planes. This is what I will try tonite, along with making that one plane all one section.

[carpenterguy]

HI ChiefGeek, looks like a very nice house, I think I will steel the ideas...just kidding. You where very close to having everything just right, I just made a couple of little changes to close up a valley and loose one of the extra roof planes.
All in all a very nice job you did.

Andy.

[James97214]

I think Curtis has the right idea you had 2 roof planes that were split...all I did was delete one of them and drag the existing to fill in where it was needed. It looks like the roof baselines are correct and only a small difference in a couple of overhangs...also you needed to join the roof planes at the entry.

James

[Curtis Johnson]

ChiefGeek:

I see Andy responded already but when I opened his zip, I see he didn't catch the fact that you have two roof planes on the left side of the house when you only need one. I deleted the triangular hip roof plane over the fireplace and reshaped the left gable roof plane to include the area that the one I deleted covered (put in an extra break or two and you'll have it).

Like I said in my earlier post, the A A roof planes are all one. I deleted the one on the front side of the house and put in several break as I reshaped the top one to cover the area of the deleted plane. I then noticed the dimensions across the left and right roof planes top vs. bottom (I am talking about the lower legs of the A A roof plane) weren't equal so I fixed that.

Then I noticed you had an odd overhang (36 3/16") on the front roof plane so I redid that one (I deleted the existing one and redid the whole roof plane).

On the porch, your left roof plane didn't match the setup for the right one: you had a pitch of 4:12 on the left and 4-3/16:12 on the right; also, your left roof planes baseline was on the inside edge of the invisible wall while it was correctly shown on the outside edge on the right side - this caused your left side to display an incorrect overhang.

The next thing I noticed is the main ridge on the right side of the house had multiple breaks that you didn't need so I pulled those out to one of the ridge corners and then pulled it back down slope and reconnected to make sure it was right.

Getting back to the left side of your model ... I am also a little stumped as to why the soffit doesn't generate as a flat soffit on the front side of the fireplace while it generates correctly on the back side. I couldn't see what was causing that. What you might try to do is delete the roof plane on that side (in your model you had two roof planes ... delete them both and build it all as one and see if the problem persists ... if so, you might get in touch with tech support and see if they can't figure it out if no one else on the forum can sort it out for you).

I also went through and pulled back and rejoined all the connecting edges of the other roof planes after checking the overhangs, baselines, fascia tops etc. There were a couple of others that I think were a little off. If your walls are all square and your baseline was properly drawn, all you need to do to connect roof planes is pull them back a little and then hit the join roof planes tool ... the edges you are joining don't have to be parallel.

I am not sure what to tell you about the front porch ceiling and the view from underneath. If your intent is to have a flat ceiling, then I would just make sure your plan is annotated to that effect. If you plan to have a section through the porch area, you might have to doctor it up a little with CAD lines to get it to display the way you want to. The roof looks good from 3D views taken above the top of the fascia ... which eliminates having to look at the sloped soffit on the left front side. Oh, I took the liberty to pull your fireplace wall in a little so that the outside of the brick lined up with the edge of the roof plane. Maybe someone else will respond with some good advice on the porch ceiling, especially if you plan to show roof framing in your CD's.

Just make sure that you pay attention to all the details of the various roof planes if you start having trouble (baseline height, fascia top, overhang, top of plate, pitch, etc.) ... if you spot something that isn't right, you're on your way to fixing the problems.



HouseStripped3.zip