Skylights in roofs over multiple stories

[Frank Beister]

It drives me crazy and maybe I make a basic fault:

I have a very complex roof, which can not been solved by multiple roofs. I use single roof method.

The roofs go over 3 stories and have to be visible in a "final" roof plan at the top. So I have to see it in at least 4 stories.

In each story I have skylights and grills (in form of skylights) in the same roof.

In Germany we have to show skylights in the story, where the skylight is useable. Even it is above the cutplane. And we have to show it as top view from above. Roof contours have to be shown in one story below the bottom of the roof.

My result in the moment:

I see the roof contours and cover fills in all stories correct.
I see the skylights of the whole roof in every story, the roof is visible.
I see all associated labels of all roofs in all stories.

This behaviour is absolute unacceptable! Is this the way it should work?

How are you solving this problem?

[Erwin Edel]

Try to change roof settings between projected and projected with overhead. This should affect the way the skylights are shown. You can also play with Show projection to Floor Plan Range. Set up the Floor Plan Range in your View Map for each story.

You could set it to shown down x-amount of stories, where x is the amount it takes to reach start of roof and then show up by the needed offset to show the outline of skylight you want to see.

[Frank Beister]

Thanks Erwin, this is a direction. This makes the openings disappear, but my ridge lines too. And I get additional double lines of the cutplane on top. Normally I have to show the ridge to the top and no virtual cutplane-lines. Wrong floor plan representation. Less worse than skylights, which are not part of the current sory, but no satisfying solution.

This shows a problem beside my skylight problem: I may not draw the complete overhead lines. But if the edge of a roof is not vertical, I get a whole bunch of overhead lines more or less parallel, which may not be there.

I can understand the problem of GS in their effort to derive the 2d representation out of the 3D model. But in case of roofs and skylights this does even work worse than the combination of walls and openings (reveal problem).

Some time ago I had to write a skylight object to calculate and draw level lines of the roof, the skylight was placed in.

Finally I had to implement a vectorial charset in 3D to label the lines out of the object itself in floor plan because TEXT2 does not work ind skylight objects. Very annoying. And there is no way (as far as I could determine) to check in the script the context in 2D, to be able to create a context sensitive 3D model. So the lines are visible in perspectives too! The home and the current story are not available in the object. Maybe thjere is a global I do not know, but I guess there isn't one.

This seems to me like a very unfinished end of development. And I remember, that GS promised to fix all this problems in future, when multiple roofs have been introduced.

[Anonymous]

Indeed it is a problem !
Say, we have a house which has ground floor, 1st floor and attic.
Roof is linked to the roof-floor (separate floor above the attic).
It is fairly easy to have the roof displayed on all the stories as we want.
So if we want to see dotted line representing roof overhang on the ground floor (which makes sense, because at this point roof gives us some sort of protection against the elements like rain, etc), we see skylights too ! Additionally it seems skylights cannot be moved to the separate layer, different from the roof => if you want to see the roof on particular floor, you have to accept skylights and it seems there is no way you can get rid of it.
So we end up with roof visible on the ground floor (marked with dotted lines as we want), but in the same time we see skylights on the ground floor, which are not there - very confusing.

[Gerald Hoffman]

I have also had this problem in the past. In complicated roof projects I have at times resorting to making a copy of my roofs, dragged them off to the side and exploded them into 2D lines. I put them on a different layer and then make them look the way I want on all of the relevant stories. It also enables you to create a better roof plan as you can show roofs that go under others with dashed lines etc by just cutting the line. This can't be done with 3D roofs.

Lots of downsides of course when revising the roofs and it is a workaround but I have wasted a lot of time trying to get the look I want with the 3D roof planes and still not get what I want too so I sometimes just give up fighting the software to get the job out.

Cheers,

[Gerald Hoffman]

I had tried to attach a PDF of a roof plan done this way but it didn't work.
Link to download if interested.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16118071/Roof%20Plan.pdf

[troakie45]

Converting skylights to morphs seems to allow better control over how they are displayed on different storeys - clunky but works for me!

[Anonymous]

.. the easiest way imho seems to be just to take a polyline and do the job (draw the roof line based on trace reference).

[Laszlo Nagy]

algore wrote:
Indeed it is a problem !
Say, we have a house which has ground floor, 1st floor and attic.
Roof is linked to the roof-floor (separate floor above the attic).
It is fairly easy to have the roof displayed on all the stories as we want.
So if we want to see dotted line representing roof overhang on the ground floor (which makes sense, because at this point roof gives us some sort of protection against the elements like rain, etc), we see skylights too ! Additionally it seems skylights cannot be moved to the separate layer, different from the roof => if you want to see the roof on particular floor, you have to accept skylights and it seems there is no way you can get rid of it.
So we end up with roof visible on the ground floor (marked with dotted lines as we want), but in the same time we see skylights on the ground floor, which are not there - very confusing.

What happens if you set the Overhead Line Pen of the Skylight to a white pen in the Floor Plan and Section panel of its settings Dialog?
That could also give the problem that on certain Stories you do want to see the overhead lines of the Skylight. In that case you could use a specific Pen for the Skylight Overhead Line Pen, and use two Pen Sets, in one it is white, in the other it is a visible color.

[Anonymous]

laszlonagy wrote:
What happens if you set the Overhead Line Pen of the Skylight to a white pen in the Floor Plan and Section panel of its settings Dialog?
That could also give the problem that on certain Stories you do want to see the overhead lines of the Skylight. In that case you could use a specific Pen for the Skylight Overhead Line Pen, and use two Pen Sets, in one it is white, in the other it is a visible color.

You still see the outline of the hole in the roof.