Roofs and dormer windows

[sufrana]

I have been sitting here for the last hour and I can't figure out how to draw:

a) a roof

b) then how to put a dormer in. I know my angle is 42 degrees and the house is technically terraced.

So for a start when I put a roof on it comes out the wrong way round. I can't seem to find any tutorials on how to build these things and I have never done it before. I only ever out on flat ceilings and never needed to do this before. Yup a complete novice.

Thanks

p.s. i only seem to have selected roof tools available is this right? Yup no idea what I'm doing

[Jonathan Pickup]

you can only palce a dormer window into a Roof. you can't add a dormer window to a Roof Face.

to make a roof, select the walls or polygon for the area of the roof.

[Sky]

So what do you do if you want to put a skylight or dormer into a Roof Face?

[CipesDesign]

You can cut a hole in the roof face using the Clip Surface command, then fairly easily build/model your skylight or dormer. A basic skylight can be modeled from three extrudes and a dormer can be done using walls and roof as appropriate.

[mike m oz]

Another way is to extract the 2D polygon shape from your roof face and create a Roof object from that. Convert all of the none eaves edges into gables with zero overhang to create a monoslope roof exactly like your existing Roof Face object. Then insert your Window symbol into this Roof object to create the required dormer.

You can either leave the result as a Roof object or you can ungroup it to get back to Roof Face and Wall objects. The latter will allow you to refine the appearance of the dormer elements better (don't ungroup the sub-elements).

For consistency the "dormer routine" needs to added to Roof Face objects. Hopefully that will be done for Vw 2011.

[Sky]

Thank you both for those suggestions. I will give them a try.

[jay_rhp]

you can only palce a dormer window into a Roof. you can't add a dormer window to a Roof Face.

to make a roof, select the walls or polygon for the area of the roof.

Thats not entirely true. Im not sure what version of Vectorworks you are using, but you CAN put a dormer in a roof face, using the window as a symbol.