Roof Help?

[kitkat]

Hi, I made a plan in X2 but I can't seem to figure out how to make a proper roof beyond the automatic roof plane build option which only seems to work if the house is a perfect square or rectangle. I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a good tutorial that could help me create a nice looking multiple gable roof for this design or if anyone had any ideas on what kind of roof would look good? Feel free to modify my file, thanks!

[Allen42acj]

Hi Kit
http://www.lfcompany.com/chief_tutorials.php
If you know how to set the model up to build the roof right, the auto roof will work.
Some roofs are just easier to do manually.

You can try building it, change the wall settings and rebuild.(auto rebuild) will speed that up.

Starting with auto and then editing might be the easiest way.

[Allen Brown]

Kit,

Not the easiest plan to make a "Good Looking" roof. Here is one option that doesn't look too bad, but I still don't like the lack of roof over the front door. This was done with auto roofs, by making the right walls gable or hip, in the wall dialog box, roof tab.

[05uurx]

Do you have the roof design that you want in your head? or are you just hunting and pecking for a decent roof design randomly? Cuz, thats not really what the auto-roof tool is for...

[geno742]

here is a roof design that frames easily and has only one ceiling beam to catch the rafter/truss tails.

I noticed that the rear great room wall exceeds 30' unsupported wall length. You might want to shorten it to 30' or add a short wing wall inside.

I moved the front entry door to align with the roof ridge above.

[kitkat]

Thanks everyone, ok so I made some changes and brought the front to back in line with the rest of the house so now the garage and front door share the same mudroom. I also extended the back wall of the garage so it's in line with the back wall of the house so the roof works better. Now when I select my gables and create a roof I get a simple but normal roof. I added a small deck on the front door and added an overhanging gable. I couldn't figure out how to do it so I created a room where the deck was, created the roof, then changed the walls of the room to deck railings What's the proper way to do this? Here is the file, I'm 0.1mb over the limit so I couldn't attach it, you can download it here instead:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/c4273p

My two issues are, where the great room gable meets the roof of the front of the house isn't a smooth transition, there's a weird bump and the great room roof actually seems higher than the main roof? The second issue is the gabled overhang on the front deck, I filled it in by selecting the "ceiling over this room" option but now there's this strange distortion on the leading edge of the ceiling when viewing in "perspective full overview" mode. Anyone know what that is or how to get rid of it? While I'm at it, two more questions: how do I create a small staircase from the grass to the front deck? Everytime I try it starts it at the level of the deck, I can't see to get it to start lower? And finally, what is the easiest way to create this kind of roof overhang?



Thanks!

PS. geno742, is it not possible to have more than 30' of uninterrupted wall? Is that interior or exterior dimensions? Is there a way around this limitation without building a "wing wall"?

[IRISH]

here is a roof design that frames easily and has only one ceiling beam to catch the rafter/truss tails.

I noticed that the rear great room wall exceeds 30' unsupported wall length. You might want to shorten it to 30' or add a short wing wall inside.

I moved the front entry door to align with the roof ridge above.

What are you getting at with the 30' thing Gene?

[geno742]

That is a code thing. The code says 25' of unsupported wall length, but these days there are so many larger rooms, that the distance has been lengthened to 30'. The option is to have an engineer to design a portal frame, but we who are cheap by nature, shy away from that.

[geno742]

The 30' is exterior length. This hardly ever shows up since most floor plans have perpendicular interior walls within 30'. The portal frame is a complicated deal usually fabricated from steel and it is a bear to make the steel-wood connections. It must be designed and wet stamped by a p.e.
Much easier to just add a 24" long wing wall within that 30' length. Many times it actually improves the plan by dividing spaces.

[IRISH]

Aahh, wall bracing. Most of my designs have elements that are not prescriptive that I almost always have my engineer review the plan and deal with those areas. Large, wide open rooms are, by my definition anyway, "irregular" rooms per code and I always plan on engineering.

[tompapa]

I've always found building roofs manually works best. It's so quick and customizable that I can't imagine needing the autoroof function.

[kitkat]

I've always found building roofs manually works best. It's so quick and customizable that I can't imagine needing the autoroof function.

is there a good tutorial on this? i watched the ones on chief tutor but the roofing stuff, at least for gable roofs is very basic. i would really like to create my roofs manually

[dcdavis]

Here

http://djpdesigns.net/html/join_roofs.htm

Dean

[dcdavis]

BTW

Here is a link to David J. Potters roof book.

http://djpdesigns.net/html/roof_book_1.htm

He also has more videos at http://djpdesigns.net/html/tutorials.htm

Dean

[tompapa]

Here's a manually drawn roof that took about ten minutes. I'm probably a lot slower than some of the experts on here but it's good fun doing roofs manually. You can pretty much build whatever you want. I even figured out how to build a roof on a curved building once that was impossible to get automatically, which is the way the videos recommend to do roofs of that sort.

The training videos have all kinds of info on how to do this.

By the way Kitkat, I'd make the two wings of the house the same width if I were you. That way the ridges would be the same height and join at the same point. I don't know a whole lot about Chief but I've built a roof or two in my time.

Enjoy,

Tom