Complex Roof Help - empty level behaves badly

[Aaron Bourgoin]

I watched the YouTube video on Complex Roofs being used to make a Transylvanian Belfry. Brilliant. it suggested all sorts of new possibilities for using the roof shell, including the ability to make two different roof masses from a single complex roof object. http://youtu.be/owRhZlwwTuU

I'm trying this on a simpler roof as shown here. I'm modelling the roof sheathing only. One level of the roof doesn't section properly. a cutting plane slices it. Before I abandon this method and make this out of two separate roofs, does anyone know if I'm doing something wrong.

Mt attachment shows a snippet of the 3D window, the section view and the original construction drawing I'm working from.

The video doesn't section the belfry. It just shows all the steps in the 3D window.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Aaron,
That cutting plane is actually the vertical plane (90 degrees) that you define when you turn the Roof Planes on that Level into Gables.

There is a sort of a workaround: you can set the Gable pitch to 179 degrees, which will almost give it a horizontal cut.
What you can then do is this:
instead of having one Gable levels, have two Gable levels.
The first should have a Gable pitch of 179 degrees, and its level height should be as close to zero as possible. This gable pitch will then give the top of roof planes below it a near horizontal cut.
The next level above this level should have the height you intend for the empty roof level. Its Gable pitch can be 90 degrees as that will now not affect the roof planes because those are now two levels below it, not one levels below it.
I hope this makes sense, it is a workaround, but it may do what you need.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Laz!

thanks for this. I will give it a try. much to experiment with this tool. it seemed like a one trick pony until I started looking at the multi-level geometry stuff. It's a bit like the curtain wall tool.