Help w/ roof line

[gdesignbuild]

I am working on a house plan and cannot seem to get the roof line that I would like. I have tried many different approaches and even was doing a manual roof draw but had problems connecting the roof lines. It is the porch roof that I am having trouble getting. I tried just adding a roof over the porch with the house wall set as a full gable wall. I tried using setting the ground floor wall and even attic wall as having roof returns that extended out the width of the porch. With the manual roof plane tool I have not been able to get it right. If anyone can provide some guidance it would be much appreciated!

[gawdzira]

This is a pretty basic roof to draw. I rarely use the auto roof tool so I can't describe how to do it automatically. I would just draw an invisible wall at that line of the porch posts wall and then build a roof plane. When connecting at the hip just shape the roof in plan view so it is kind of close and then hit the join tool. When roof planes are close they generally snap together in a predictable fashion.

[Rich Winsor]

...If anyone can provide some guidance it would be much appreciated!

Don't know about guidance, but maybe some inspiration. Here is what I came up with:
>Make the rear wall and the 2 front walls into gable walls and generate a roof. This will give you the basic shape.
>Manually create the porch roof as a rectangle and then drag the appropriate corners to make it a parallelogram. Beat it into submission by locking the pitch angle and eave heights as you work around all the roof planes until they are all the same. I think there was also a missing small triangular roof segment at the front left corner that I fashioned manually.
>Manually create the overhang above the garage door in a similar fashion.
It helps to tile your plan and 3D views so you can see if you are on the right track with your changes. Just keep tweaking it until you get the desired results (or go stark raving mad).

[gdesignbuild]

That looks closer than anything I have been able to do Rich! I do not have much practise with the manual roof tools. Could you show me a pic of that in plan view by any chance? I am not at home at the moment but when I try to connect the roof lines, I get an error message. Will try to play with it more tonight with the windows tiled. I think I may get what needs to happen now. Thanks a lot guys for the responses!

[David J. Potter]

When you get this error dialog while trying to use the "Join Roofs Tool" it means usually one of two things:

1. You are trying to connect more than just two lines to one roof edge (the tool is designed to join one roof edge line to only one other roof line edge at a time).

2. The roof edges you are trying to connect will not meet each other due to being parallel to each other or a too widely differing base line heights to meet, 3D geometry wise.

So that dialog tells you that you have some additional manual editing to do to either change the pitch or baseline height so they will meet or to make sure that you have only two roof edges that you are trying to join, per instance.

DJP

You Tube Videos that might be helpful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBheAzsqJrE

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

[Rich Winsor]

.....Could you show me a pic of that in plan view by any chance?

That's proprietary information which can not be divulged without special dispensation.... Oh, what the heck, here are the plan views of the five planes that form the roof. I went ahead and bumped out the eyebrow over the garage door to make it more resemble the photo. I'd like to tell you that I'm in total control at the keyboard but to be honest, sometimes I don't remember what I did or how I did it right after I did it. Remember you can edit the roof planes in both plan and 3D views. It takes a combination of many tools (break line, point to point move, join roof planes etc.) to get the desired results.

[Rich Winsor]

Since you can only attach 5 images per post here are the revised plan and 3D views.