Fun with skylights

[Gene Davis]

We love building skylights into houses, and now I am into the skylight part of my self-education in Chief.

I have watched and then watched again, the video tutorials I have for my V10, and practiced the basics. No problemo.

But now I am wondering what it takes to do the manual workarounds for things we do routinely that don't fit the standard Chief patterns.

How is the skylight vault handled when it intersects ceiling planes? A simple example is shown in the attached B&W Chief section. I cannot find a way to edit the flat ceiling that is not being intersected with the vault.

How is a single vault done for ganged skylights, so that the member or members between skylights is something like only 6 inches depth, versus the depth and shape of the vault sides? See the Sketchup model screencap, attached.

One more. How about when a sloped ceiling has a skylight vault, and it is desired to bring an adjacent flat ceiling, due to its proximity, into the vault to enlarge it? How would you do this? See the screencap from my Sketchup model.

Your advice and help, as always, is appreciated.

[billemery]

Here you can see the large single opening and the girder trusses necessary to carry it.

I eliminate one of the ceiling openings and stretch the other to fit. I do have to go back and fill in the drywall surround with polyline solids.

I think that you can get everything that you need by using manually generated ceiling planes. The second picture is with manually generated ceiling planes and pline solids

[Gene Davis]

Thanks for your input (and your later edit), Bill.

Your first example, shown framed, I can do. Correct me if I am wrong, but it is a pair of skylights over a manually generated ceiling plane. Your pic shows it framed with scissors trusses.

When I do that, place a skylight over a manually done ceiling plane, I get a hole in the ceiling plane that is editable in my Chief V10, and can do as I wish. It is a little tedious having to manually do the shaft walls with polylines, but I am happy there is a way to do it nonetheless.

I can do your finished example, also, which is a pair of skylights that overlap onto the attic area created above the manually generated flat ceiling plane. That plane can be edited to give it the cutout for the skylight shaft. Once again, p'line solids are used to do the three shaft walls for the part above the ceiling plane. You cannot do that arrangement by raising up a "ceiling over this room" ceiling; you must make a flat manual plane.

Your framed example was great to see. I can do the skylight and shaftwall parts, which are done with paired skylights over, again, a manually generated lower ceiling. Whether or not that ceiling is pitched, Chief generages for me manually editable skylight holes. No problemo, except for having to do, again, the manual p'lines for the shaftwalls.

I'll save trussing one of these for a later exercise.

The behavior I am seeing in my Chief V10 is that skylights, if popped on a roof plane with no ceiling below, don't have editable ceiling holes, and the shaft sides of their holes punched through the roof frame "tilted platform" can be shaped by only the three radio button choices in the skylight dbx.

That prevents me from doing two things we have done with skylights in building houses.

One, if skylights are ganged in a deep, say, 2x12, roof frame, I don't see a way to change the depth of the "between" framing, to yield a single large ceiling opening with raised up supports between the skylights.

See my pic below for the ganged pair with short-drop framing member between.

Two, if a skylight in a pitched ceiling, has its upper boundary reasonably near a higher transition to a flat ceiling, we like to bring a "tongue" of the flat ceiling into the skylight shaft. Both the Sketchup pics below show that feature.

I have tried, but cannot find a workaround way to do this. Without a fully editable ceiling hole (and Chief does not give me this) in my skylight, I cannot get a way to reshape things.

If I try by changing the roof deck frame thickness to something slim like 3/4", and then manually placing a ceiling plane below pitched the same as the roof, as if it were the bottom plane as 2x12 framing, Chief gives me an skylight with an editable ceiling plane, but one that comes with a shaft that is all wrong, and the shaftwalls cannot be deleted. Two pics included here show a section of such a try, and a roof view. In the roof view, I deleted the skylight hole (the two holes were not "coupled,") and you can see the shaft going up through the roof and beyond.

Whaddya think? Have I stumped Chief 10, wanting skylights with these features? Or, can you describe workarounds.

[billemery]

I think this may be what you're looking for. I created an opening in the roof and inserted another roof plane with a shallow rafter depth in the opening. I then added the skylights in the shallow roof plane.

The ceiling is automatically generated, and the drywall fills at the rafter height transitions are polyline solids.

[Gene Davis]

That's a good one, Bill. I played around with it another way, making the entire roof plane with a shallow rafter depth, then doing all the thick underfill with p'line solids.

Now I'll do it with your method, the entire roof in 2x12 depth except for my skylight vault gross rectangles, which I'll roof with separate "insert" planes into the holes, at minimum rafter depth.

It should frame at pretty close to real, doing it your way, and should require little editing of the framing.

I hope the roof finish up top comes out registering the same, instead of looking like a big oversized patch around the skylight.

[billemery]

The roof transition will be undetectable in render view as long as everything is positioned correctly.

I think the easiest way to get a hole in the roof is to place a dormer, explode it then delete everything but the hole.

It frames pretty well but you'll have to do some editing.

I did this in X1, but I think it will be pretty much the same in V. 10.