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Article Number 415

The information in this article applies to:
Home Designer Pro

In this tutorial, we will show you how to set your defaults for building a roof, how to manually draw roof planes to create a hip roof, and how to manually create a roof planes for a gable roof.

Home Designer Pro does allow you to create roofs automatically. You can use the automatic roof tools to create hip or gable roofs. However, in some situations, you may find it is easier to create roofs manually by hand.

Hip Roof
 

This tutorial will introduce you to the tools used to create a hip roof manually.

Before you begin: If you are unfamiliar with drawing and editing manually drawn roof planes, within Home Designer Pro, select the Help menu and click on Contents and Index  to display the software's Help menu. Click on the Contents tab, scroll down to the Roofs chapter of the Reference Manual, click on the plus + sign next to Roofs and review this chapter.

First, launch Home Designer Pro, and select File> New Plan  to create a completely new, blank plan with nothing yet drawn on it.

1. Select Build> Wall> Straight Exterior Wall  and draw, in a clockwise fashion, a completely enclosed 4-wall rectangular structure. 
   
    
   
   For the purposes of this example, our structure is 30'x40'.
   
   
   
2. Next, we are ready to set our roof defaults, by selecting Build> Roof> Build Roof  to display the Build Roof dialog. 
   
    
   
   
   
3. Set the Pitch (in 12) value to 6" and click OK.
   
   
   

Now we can begin drawing our four roof planes (one resting on each wall) that will extend up to meet the others in order to create a hip roof over our structure.

1. Select Build> Roof> Roof Plane  and click and drag a baseline from point 1 to Point 2.
    
   
   
2. Release the mouse button at point 2 and move your cursor in the upslope direction. As you move the cursor, a preview outline of the roof plane displays.
   
   
   
3. Click at point 3 inside the room to create our first roof plane. Point 3 is located on the ridge edge of the roof plane. 
   
   
   

4. Repeat this process for the remaining three walls.
   
   

Now, we're ready to take these four roof planes, (the upper, the lower, the left, and the right), and make them join each other.

1. Use the Select Objects  tool to select the edge of the upper roof plane, and click on the Join Roof Planes   edit button as illustrated in the image below. 
   
     
   
   
   To use the Join Roof Planes  tool, you must first identify which edges of the roof planes can extend to meet at a ridge, hip, or valley. The program will try to join the two planes along the line where they intersect whenever possible.
   
   
   
   
2. Click on a second roof plane on the edge that should join to the selected edge of the first plane. 
   
    
   
   
   
3. We will repeat this process for the other four roof planes, until we have something similiar to the image below. 
   
     
   
   
   You can connect two roof planes no matter what their pitches are.
   
   
   
   
4. Now that we have connected the sides of the roof planes, let’s connect the ridge of the lower roof plane with the ridge of the upper one using the Join Roof Planes tool. 
   
    
   
   
   
5. Next we will connect the smaller roof planes, start with the right one, and use it's edge to join it with either of the two edges remaining near it from the top or bottom roof plane. 
   
     
   
   
   
6. For the roof plane on the left, let’s select the ridge line, and instead of using Join Roof Planes, let’s simply drag its edit handle until it closes the gap. 
   
    
   
   
   
7. Select 3D> Create Render Camera> Render Full Overview  to see that we now have a completed hip roof.
   
   

 

Now that we understand how to manually create a hip roof, we are ready to manually create a gable roof.   A gable roof has two roof planes; two walls are bearing walls that support the roof.

1. We do not need to start a new plan, we can use our existing one, but first we will need to delete the existing roof planes in our plan by selecting Build> Roof> Delete Roof Planes .
   
   
   
2. Select Build> Roof> Roof Plane  and click and drag two opposing roof planes to create a gable roof as illustrated in the image below. 
   
     
   
   
   
3. Join the two roof plane edges using the Join Roof Planes  edit tool. 
   
     
   
   
   
4. Now we must extend the sides of each roof plane so that they extend past the exterior walls. 
   
    
   
   When we select the side of one of the roof planes we can see a temporary dimension line indicating its distance from the wall.
   
   
   
5. By clicking on this dimension line, we can set the side of the roof planes distance from the exterior of wall layer using the in-line text box that displays.
   
   In Home Designer Pro version 8 and prior, the Move Object Using Dimensions function displayed a dialog, instead of using the in-line text box.
   
    
   
   The default overhang that we saw earlier in the Build Roof dialog was set to 18".
   
   If we set 18 inches, the roof plane will be 18 inches from the outside of the wall. This is because it is being measured toward the inside.
   
   If we set the overhang to zero, the edge of the overhang would exactly match the outside of the wall.
   
   We want to measure 18 inches away from the exterior side, so we enter negative eighteen (-18) inches and click OK.
   
   
   
6. Let’s do the same for the other side of this roof plane. Select the opposite roof plane, select the dimension and enter –18 inches, and click OK.
   
   
   
7. We now want to resize the other roof plane. We could type in the dimensions, but instead let’s drag the roof plane until it matches exactly the roof plane above it.
   
   Use the Select Objects  tool to select the roof plane by clicking on the edge you want, then select the move handle, and drag until it snaps and is exactly lined up with the other roof plane.
   
    
   
   It may help to zoom in on the area you are working on.
   
   
   
8. Select 3D> Create Render Camera> Render Full Overview  to see that we now have a completed, manually drawn, gable roof.
   
   

Last updated on: 09-09-2009