KWiley

Just tried it and all components are still moving. Any other settings to check?

I wish you could choose the component of a wall when fitting walls to a roof. It would be nice if the framing would stay at the set plate height. Def need more options all around.

Vectorworks has told me that they are aware of limitations and are planning to reengineer the roof tools sometime in the future. Some of the issues we have as of now is 1. When drawing a roof slope with a bell and a square eave cut, VW seems to join the bottom of the roof instead of the top so it's a major pain to try to get corners to match up and does not work with the connect/combine tool. I think the angle change of the miter after the bell is what it can't figure out. 2. When 2 slopes with different pitches meet in a corner, there's no way to control the fascia angle or "eave cut". 3. VW measures the eave overhang to the bottom of the roof instead of the top. For example, if you want a 16" overhang using a 12/12 slope with a 5.5" rafter, it actually comes out to 12.111" since its measuring to the bottom. This causes us to have to adjust the overhang on every single roof face every single time. 4. Dutch Hip roofs are very limiting when using the create roof tool. Dutch Hips could easily be done with Roof Faces if #1 wasn't an issue getting corners to join. 5. When you have a wall protruding through your roof and you fit walls to objects, it would be nice if the framing (Top Plate) would hold at its set plate height and only the wall component (like brick) would drop down and fit to objects. Workarounds 1. We can achieve a bell by using the Create Roof tool for example with all faces at a 12/12<Ungrouping the roof, deleting the faces we don't need, and pulling the faces down to the bearing point<Then creating a Roof Face on the side with the bell for example at a 18/12. You can't Connect/Combine the 12/12 bell to the 18/12 roof face cause the intersecting point is below the bearing line so you have to just let them overlap each other, this can be framed in the real world but not in VW. Sometimes this requires some editing in the annotations to cover unwanted lines though. For complicated roofs as a whole and to achieve everything we need to, our workaround has been to create our own rafter profiles, we have profiles of all our different pitches, some with bells, some with different overhang lengths, and all with the soffit already drawn in. We then just extrude the profile into a solid, grab it by the seat cut, drop it on the top plate, and push pull the solid roof faces and intersect them. We then use a combination of the Stitch & Trim and the Slice tool to trim off all the intersections. The only way to get a seamless look this way though is to add the solids together after their trimmed, we thought this was fine at first but have found that its almost impossible to break a roof apart after its added altogether if you have to make changes. This has forced us to revisit using the VW roof tools. I would love to hear of any other issues or if anybody has solutions or workarounds for the issues I've listed. I think a quick fix for now would be if VW could make the Connect/Combine tool work with solids and Roof Faces. Also, if they could let us use the slice tool on a roof face without turning it into a solid. We then could use a combination of roof faces and solids together.

Stacked walls would be great. As of now I have a layer for my roof and anything that I want seen on elevation views (like the top wall of stacked walls) but not on floorplan views. Not ideal but it works and makes things simple.

Been waiting for D5, very glad to hear it's getting closer.

I was actually able to make this work with the bell but is there any way to change the angle of the eave cut? This house is a perfect example of having 12/12 and 18/12 slopes but I would need all of the eave cuts to be at a 12/12.

@twk So after trying to draw this roof again with roof faces I remember some of the issues we were running into. Everything seems to work seamlessly as long as you have a vertical cut, but all that changes when you use a square cut, which we use for almost every house. If I remember right all of our issues revolved around this.

@twk You're obviously way more efficient with roof faces than we are, we're still in the process of switching over to VW, I'm the only one in the office using it full time so we are all still fairly new to everything. Your video has inspired me to dive back into Roof Faces now that I see how you're using it. I always had a problem with the connect/combine tool but getting to watch the way you work has def opened my eyes to the possibilities. As I said before, the elevation and the actual roof plan were different as I'm in the process of changes and I see that you caught the eave mistake on the garage corner. I'm very impressed and I appreciate you taking the time to make a video, I'm about to see what I can do with roof faces now following your lead. Can you post the file from the video?

@Tom Klaber Did you find the fix? We've been having this problem for months, it's very aggravating and does this on multiple different computers. I submitted this as a bug 2 updates ago and was told they were aware of the problem and it would be addressed in update 5. Just downloaded update 5 and it's still not fixed.

@twk I used Roof Faces a lot initially but after I noticed I was push/pulling and cutting and trimming them so much to make things work that we finally just ended up creating our own rafter profiles to save time. Roof faces will work for a lot but I kept running into limitations with bells and hips, also it was hard to get corners to match up right with 2 different pitches. I guess it helps that we don't use any roof data to create worksheets though. These are screenshots of my most recent project and also some of my rafter profiles. (The elevation pic is actually a 18/12 above the garage with a 12/12 bell, in the middle of making some changes at the moment.)

Most of our residential roofs are way too complicated to use the VW roof tools. I use to use a combination of the Create Roof tool and the Roof Face tool but ultimately I ended up creating my own library of roof faces out of solids, I have all my different pitches, with the different cuts for brick or siding, overhang, and also the soffit already drawn in. Once I set my wall heights I just grab my roof faces and set them on the top plate. I then just push pull all of my intersections and trim off the overlaps with a combination of the Stitch & Trim tool and the Split tool. This has been by far the easiest and fastest workflow we've found for complicated roofs. After I do my intersections and trim the excess, I join my faces together with the Add Solids tool to get a beautiful roof. The problem is when I have to make a change, once my entire roof is added together as a single solid I can't get it broke back apart. Ungrouping, editing solid, or editing features does crazy stuff. It'll throw random solids out in random spots but will not break the solid apart. I can use the Split tool sometimes to break a section apart but this only works about 1/2 the time and will leave solids that aren't even touching act like they're added together. Once the solid addition is too complicated, I'm assuming, the Push/Pull tool also stops working. If anybody understands how solid additions work better than I do to where I can understand the behaviour better to figure out a way around these issues I would greatly appreciate it. Also, I would like to hear any other workflows, tips, or tricks from any of you who also draw complicated roofs.

In the first picture you can see how my walls are broke up, I have to do this so that I can get the right look I want for my Top Plan view and also my Elevation views. No big deal. But as you can see in the 2nd pic, sometimes my brick hatch is perfect and sometimes it shows the joining line. It seems to do this randomly, I figure it's because I'm kind of tricking the software here but I figured I would ask to see if anybody else has had this problem and knows a solution. And yes I've checked that all my walls are sitting on each other perfectly, I know if your off even just a little you will get a line in Hidden Line.

@grant_PD I'm going to attempt to try this, thank you.

I have a custom favorites file that has everything that we'll be using in our office. As of right now we each have the favorites file stored locally and every time a change is made we have to send a new copy to each other. We have a shared OneDrive folder we use to store and pull files from but i'm trying to learn how to setup our favorites file in the cloud or as a workgroup folder where we're pulling from the same file in the RM and if either of us makes a change it automatically updates. I've done some research and I don't fully understand and I don't want to do something wrong. So if anybody has the same setup and can point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it.

@Christopher Graye I think the way @Tom W. suggested would give us the same results and able to use the same workflow. It seems like going around the world to achieve the same result though. It was very simple being able to attach a record from the RM. As of now, I cant even remove the record that I attached this way since the context menu command is no longer there. I think I would have to revert back to a version before Update2 so that I could use the command to remove the records, or start from scratch and spend another week rebuilding our entire door and window files. I'm going to hold off for the moment and just hope that you get the command back.