FrStephen

And away I went! I must be suffering from the ratio that posits years of age to be directly proportional to eyes squinting (smile). Thank you!

I am a first-time VW (or BIM) user. I have built three models whose floorplans and 3D models look great. As an AutoCad draftperson from the 1980s-90s, I am amazed at much work is done for me. But now it is on to elevations, brace wall analyses, etc. Wes' comment about VWA producing rafters sounds great. I created a Dutch Hip roof using AEC>Create Roof after using the Rectangle tool to set on my walls. This too amazed me. In Top Plan, I then clicked on this roof object (which looks great under GL) with AEC>Framing>Roof Framer. This produces the expected Framer dialogue box, but all the relevant option selections and buttons are grayed out. The roof object upon which I am clicking is of class Roof-Main. Would you kindly direct me? All my reading and YouTube watching has not helped me so far. FrStephen

I sympathize with Russ but am also relieved that I am not the only one to experience these pathologies. A programmer might say "Thar be dragons!" in the Structural Member Tool. I know what it is to "code against effect" empirically in a buggy environment instead of coding by manual and to spec. And that is what I have had to do here. Programmers call this "a kluge." The user-defined beams spec out fine, but when it comes time to set them, I can do little more than enter arbitrary values and then see where the beams land (!). Moreover, the Tool seems unable to sense a change in Design Layers, so correct offsets are applied with respect to the previous layer.