5 replies to this topic

[Nate Joseph]

I'm a two month user with SoftPlan and I feel like I just wasted my weekend. I hope someone can help me figure this out.

I'm working with this house that has a 10' roof bearing height for the first level, but at the rear of the house there is a wall that's 15' tall with stacked windows. Because I don't know any better, I made the wall on the first floor 10' (as the rest of the house and then I went to the second floor and stacked another wall on top of the first floor wall that would go all the way to the 15' bearing for the high roof. By doing this I was hoping that my stacked windows would have all the walls they need to live in.

I'm not sure if I'm wrong or if SoftPlan is dumb, but now I have a portion of the second floor wall hanging through my upper windows. I thought that SP would of automatically cut out the areas out for the windows. What am I doing wrong. See attached screenshot.

 

 

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[Sam Morgan]

I had to come up with a good way to show this as I do really high end renderings for my stock plans.  I draw the wall and windows on the upper floor as you did, then go edit the wall and windows and uncheck show in model on that level.  Then go edit the main level wall to be the overall height from floor up to the second floor plate and add all the window there and edit all the offsets.  I'm sure there may be other ways to do it, but this works well for me.

[Nate Joseph]

Thanks for your suggestion Sam. Since I'm new to SP I cringe at having to run into workarounds so early in the game. If I do as you suggested I still might have an issue because if I make the lower wall continuous to the high roof, I'll still have a triangular area on both sides of that wall that I need to show.

The only other way I can think of is to split the wall on the second level in in three pieces. One part on the left side of the windows, one on the right side and the middle wall  with enough offset to clear the top of the windows.

[David Zawadzki]

Have you tried using a hidden wall?

[Keith Almond]

It's not really a workaround, more of just an odd situation.

 

Softplan's key mantra is "Draw it like you would build it". That particular wall wouldn't be built as two levels so drawing it as two levels isn't really correct, and that's where Softplan is getting confused.

 

As you suggest, you could draw it as three wall sections, or you could add a CROSS OPENING on the upper wall to cut out round the lower window and label it as windows from below on the upper floor. Or you could just make the lower wall 15' high for that section with triangular walls at high level that are hidden on plan (as David suggests).

 

How you construct it depends in part on how accurate you need Softlist to report. if you don't use Softlist, any quick and dirty fix will work.

[Nate Joseph]

Thanks for the guidance guys. I tried the Cross Opening and that worked like a charm. I also tried making the window wall "full height" with the hidden walls above to fill in the triangles and it was more time consuming for a newbie like me but I believe its more accurate for softlist. Thanks all.