Dormer roof cutting in to room below perpendicular roof

[Liam]

I see a few people have posted on this problem in the past; can't seem to get any of the prior solutions to work with my situation.
As can be seen in the below images, the metal roof of the dormer is cutting down into the room below.
Any ideas appreciated.
Thanks. Liam.

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Liam,

The dormer in the first image does not appear to be the same as the later ones, as it has a flat roof and presumably is not appearing inside.

You can of course just use the Roof's right click 'Cut Opening' tool to cut off the corners where they appear inside but the normal Dormer tool should just cut an opening in the main roof and cut the corners of its roof accordingly.

This raises the questions:
How were the other ones done?
Are they on a different location to the main roof?

Allan

[Liam]

Hi Allan.

You're right; technically there are 3 dormers in the construction.
The 2 small dormers with the small windows on either side of the big dormer are just fine.
It's the big dormer that juts into the roof of the main house.
All 4 pictures are of the same big dormer.
To make the last 2 pictures, I saved a new version of the drawing and cut out as much detail as I could to show the situation clearly.
That included the flat roof on which the dormer sits.

The flat roof does not appear inside; just the dormer.
Thanks.

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Liam,

OK I have got a better picture of it now.  Actually your images are so large that it means a lot of scrolling back and forth to see the whole picture (the size of the bottom one is OK) and becasue the small dormers were missing from the other images I did not realise that the roof they were in was also a "Dormer".

This still comes back to the question I asked before - where is the large 'dormer'? Is it on the same Location as the main roof?
How was it done? Is it actually a Dormer (using the Dormer tool) or is it just an ordinary roof?

From the first image it just looks as though it should be an extension of the main roof. Choose "Roof by Picking Points", draw a square extending into the main roof and the new roof 'extension' will just become part of the original roof. You can then add your small dormers.

Allan

[Liam]

Hi Allan.

Hope the attached (smaller!) photos make the problem clearer.
Photo1 I defined some roof names.

You were right that "Dormer" #1 could be considered just as perpendicular roof to the main roof.
I originally drew it using the dormer tool.
So, I redrew it as a roof rather than a dormer using roof by pocking points as you guided.
Then I added Dormer#2 (and #3 which cannot be seen as it is on the other side) using the dormer tool.

Unfortunately I still have the problem of Dormer #1 sticking into the roof space of the main house and the room below.
Photo2.

I tried adding a siding wall perpendicular to Dormer #1 just to see if the roof would still tunnel through it; it did.
Photo3

Right now the dormer construction is in its own location. I tried bringing it into the same location as the main house to see if the roofing tool would get smarter about the join. It didn't.
Any insights greatly appreciated; spent a week on this problem now....

Thanks. Liam.

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Liam,

When you created the new 'dormer' roof by Picking Points you must create it on the SAME location as the main roof otherwise they will not mesh together. Locations are specifically use to keep things apart so they do not interact, although walls will, if they are in excactly the same 3D space and doors and windows will cut through both walls. If you think about that it is logical. If wall heights and hence roof heights are different however , they should be on a differetn location.

Turn off (in View Filter) the Location with the current 'large dormer' on it (so you don't lose it in case) then try drawing  the large 'dormer' again, but this time do it on the same location as the main roof and use the same roof type. They should become one roof and nothing should protrude inside. Any walls on the same location will then terminate at the roof (as long as they are set to auto-extend).

Really the 'flat' roof over the garage should have been on a separate location as should all the walls etc as the walls appear to be a different height to the rest of the building.

I did try adding the 'dormer' in your model and had the same problem - that the roof did not become one but I do not have the same roof as you, so this may be why. When I deleted both of your roofs and inserted a new one over the Living Room part, flat one over the garage part and then added the Dormer part by Picking Points, it worked perfectly - even with the flat roof on the same location but with the support heigh lowered.

Anyway - try it and see how it goes for you. It it does not work that time you may have to re-do all three roofs.

Allan

[Liam]

Hi Allan.

Thank you for all your guidance.

I tried before to copy/move the big dormer roof into the same location as the main roof. They didn't merge then.
However. I followed your advice below and recreated the dormer roof in the main roof location. Sure enough, they merged properly and there was no cut through into the room below.
A big thank you. I have been struggling with that for a week.
I guess just moving a roof element across locations doesn't cause it to be redrawn properly; you actually have to recreate things from zero.

Now I'm trying to rebuild the walls around the perimeter of the dormer. The base of these walls is at the height of the flat roof; they do not extend below that roof.
I followed your advice of drawing these walls in the same location as the main roof.
However this is difficult since in 2D view these dormer walls are shown intermingled with those in the rooms below.
What's more, I needed to go in and elevate each dormer wall individually to get it to start above the flat roof.

I tried instead to draw the walls in the dormer location (where their base height is set correctly) rather than the main roof location.
However here the auto-extend walls do not "see" the dormer roof above them since they are now in a different location (that of the main roof).
I note your point here of:

"Locations are specifically use to keep things apart so they do not interact, although walls will, if they are in excactly the same 3D space"

What happens is those walls are either limited to a 1ft height all along the perimeter (this is the height of lowest point of the dormer roof where the walls meets the roof) or they extend to a full 8 ft and cut through the roof (attached image1).

I tried to fix this in the dormer's gable by forcing the wall tops on a slope that just meets the dormer roof. This works, but is not an elegant solution at all...

So.
Question: how do I get these perimeter walls to "see" the roof from a different location and auto-extend to it cleanly?

Next topic.
As you suggested last week, I did put the rooms under the flat roof into a different location because they do indeed have a different wall height.
The issue I had there was that the house then no longer seemed to recognize its perimeter and this played havoc with flooring and roofing (grass inside the house etc). So I moved everything on the ground level back into the same location; this fixed everything.

Finally.
As you see in image 2, for some reason various random walls have suddenly started to auto extend through the flat roof. Not all the walls; seemingly random ones.
All the interior walls have the same auto extend properties set.
Any idea what is going on?

Many thanks again.
Liam.

[Jack Zimmer]

Hi Liam,

Auto Extend of a wall reacts with a roof drawn on the same location as the roof.
If a wall extends above a roof and is on the same location the roof was created, then Auto Extend is not turned ON.
If a wall extends above a roof and is on a different locatation than the roof, Auto Extend has no affect. The wall height determines where the wall stops. You have to uncheck Auto Extend by checking the Level option and enter a new height.

Jack

[Kajvin - Robert W]

Hi liam!
If you try this delete roof over living space, then click dorm location delete the walls fore dorm.

Adjust the dorm walls so they level with the living space top of the wall then trace the living space walls and add walls for the room there the dorm ,no the dorm it self, is located after that add the roof with picking point if you not will delete the other roof. Now use the normal dormtool to make your dorm.

With other words the roof over living space and dorm  are at the same location and then you ad the dorm will the walls auto adjust to the dorm roof

Robert

[Liam]

Thank you Robert and Jack for your replies. I appreciate the help.

It's interesting that when there are 2 roof surfaces above an auto-extended wall, it seems that the wall will punch through the 1st roof and go all the way to the second.
That's why I am getting the over-autoextension into the dormer space.
You can see this in picture 1 where walls from the rooms below are sticking up into the dormer.
Curious logic to the program, but I guess that's the way it is. I would have thought it more logical to stop the wall at the first perpendicular plane.
Anyway, fixable by forcing the max height of the walls with Level as you say.

I have tried many approaches to the problem of the roof being in 1 location (due to it needing to be linked to the main roof) and the dormer walls in another location:

(1) Put dormer walls in same location as underlying rooms. Then elevate them to the dormer level so that they do not appear in the floor below.
This intermingles with the walls of the floor below in the 2d view.
It does produce a wall that autofills up to the dormer gable. Hooray.
However, I have a dormer window that has to go in the middle of that dormer wall (pictures 2 and 3).
Since the new dormer wall unfortunately crosses the perpendicular garage wall below, I am not allowed to move the window into the centre of the dormer wall since that is where the perpendicular garage wall intersects it, even though they are at different heights. The closest I can get is slightly off-centre which is not OK.

(2) Build the dormer walls in their own dormer location.
Walls auto extend above the roof (as previously discussed) because they are in a different location to the roof.
Tried to solve this by splitting the gabled dormer wall into 2 pieces, switching off autoextend and manually sloping the walls up to the roof.
I have to do the split because there is no way to slope up and down (making a triangle) in 1 wall.
However, again I get stumped by the program not allowing me to place the window in the middle where it would bridge the break in the wall.

(3) Take the whole roof assembly and move it to the dormer location.
Then the walls of the main house all mis-autoextend

(4) Exotic. Take the whole roof assembly, convert it to surfaces and move just the dormer surfaces into the dormer location. Then build the walls in the dormer location under it.
The surfaces of the dormer roof appear 8ft above where they should be in the dormer location.
If I adjust the location heights so that the roof comes down to the right level, that value is zero.
Then we're back to having to insert walls at height zero and elevate them and it's the same problem as in (1).

There's got to be a better way to do this....!
Many thanks.
Liam.

[Allan Chesney]

H Liam,

This is all getting very confusing trying to read and interpret the text without knowing exactly how what you are trying to build, although the latter picture is building gradually.

Is the basic problem just getting the wall to fill the dormer Gable?  If it is, why not just turn on the Display Gable in the dormer roof and set the texture to the same as the walls and turn their auto-extend off?  Does that do what you want?

The other option, since the very first image you posted appeared to be OK except for the roof showing inside, you could just do what I suggested earlier and clip off the corners of the roof that extend inside the main roof using the right clip Cut Opening tool (although in this case you will clipping off the corners of course, rather than an opening).

Allan

[Liam]

Sorry not to have been clear.
The last suggestion you made (cutting the corner) worked.
Thanks very much.
Actually, a slight twist on it.
When I tried to cut an opening in the overhang, it did just that. Created a hole, and left the equally undesirable edges of the roof still sticking into the room.
What worked was to convert that whole roof slope to a surface, add new nodes to the edge and then move those nodes to force the shape of the surface to fit where I wanted.

Really like the surface functions. I used them also for complex ceilings. They give you a lot of flexibility to go in and manually control things.

Thanks for all your help.
Liam.

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Liam,

I am glad you got it to work.

Sounds as though you did not take the cut quite far enough otherwise any rough edge should not have been visible behind the ceiling.

Yes surfaces can be very useful for those odd situations for which they were devised. They become a problem if a major change is required, as a roof is then all individual surfaces, so all have to be separately adjusted. Personally I have never had a need to use them, but most of my roofs are pretty standard dutch gables.

Allan