Adding a House

Realtime Landscaping Architect helps you design a house that approximates the exterior of your client's house, while keeping the process as simple as possible. You can design a house from scratch, or drop in a pre-built house using the House Wizard and use it as a starting point for your own design.

To add a house:

1.   Click Add House.

2.   Draw the house's outline by clicking to add points. Press Backspace to remove the last point. Press Esc to cancel. Press Enter to input the angle and distance manually.

3.   Click the starting point to close the outline. Or, right-click to automatically join the last point to the first.

The following is an example of a house drawn in the plan view.

The following is the above house viewed during a realtime walkthrough. Note how the roof is added automatically.

Tips:

•      If your client wants an exact view of their house and property, use Realtime Landscaping Photo (included) to design their landscape over a photograph.

•      Adding a house is easiest in the plan view.

•      Be sure the snap-grid is enabled for easier placement of points at exact dimensions. See Snap Settings for more information.

•      You can add doors, windows, awnings, and shutters to your house. See Adding a Door and Adding a Window for details. (Awnings and shutters are added using the Window object.)

•      Use multiple house objects as building blocks to create more complex houses.

Gable Roofs

Houses use hip roofs by default. You can change individual walls to use the gable roof style instead.

To convert from a hip to gable roof:

1.   Click Edit Roof Type to enter roof editing mode.

2.   Click the wall underneath the roof you want to change. Each click will toggle between gable and hip roof styles.

3.   When done, click Edit Roof Type again to toggle it off and leave roof editing mode.

The following is the above house with the Gable roof option selected for the indicated edges.

Designing Multistory Houses

To build a house with multiple stories, first add the bottom story as described above. Use the Add House tool again, once for each upper story. Set the Elevation of each additional story to the height of the lower-level's walls and move it into position. Set the roof pitch to 0 on all but the upper story. This technique was used to design the house in the following example:

Tip: To get a better idea of how to build multiple story houses, use the House Wizard and add a multiple-story house such as the one shown above. Then click Ungroup to ungroup the house into its individual objects. You'll see how multiple House objects are used as pieces to form the whole.

When displaying the house as a floor plan in the plan view, you may not want the upper stories to appear.

To prevent an object from appearing in the plan view:

1.   Select the desired object(s).

2.   Right-click and select Advanced Object Properties.

3.   Uncheck the option Render in Plan view.

4.   Click OK.

See Advanced Object Properties for more information.

Designing Roofs with a Single Slope

You can design roofs with a single sloping surface. This is useful for creating rectangular bay windows, sheds, carports, and more.

To design a roof with a single sloping surface:

1.   Click Edit Roof Type to enter roof editing mode.

2.   Click the wall underneath the roof you want to change. Click each wall except for the wall that will have the lowest roof edge.

3.   When done, click Edit Roof Type again to toggle it off and leave roof editing mode.

The following bay window was created by using the above steps and clicking the side and back walls.

Designing Carports

You can design a roof without walls for use as a carport or other situation where only a roof is needed.

To design a roof without walls:

1.   Create a house as normal.

2.   Set the Wall height to 0. The walls will be removed, leaving just the roof.

3.   Set the Elevation as desired to raise the roof off the ground.

Customizing the Plan View

In the plan view, houses can appear either as a floor plan or as a top-down view of the 3D model. To display the house as a floor plan, check the Custom appearance in each view option in the Roof  Material properties. Two tabs will appear - Plan and Perspective. These allow you to customize how the house appears in each view. Uncheck the option to display the house as a 3D model. You can change this option at any time.

When displaying the house as a floor plan, doors, windows, lights, and awnings will appear as symbols.

The default floor plan color is white with a black outline. To change the outline, click the Line Style button. To change the background color, click the options button next to the Roof material and select the desired fill method: picture, gradient, or solid color. For example, to use a gradient fill, click the options button and click Gradient, as shown below.

You can modify the floor plan's color, line style, and transparency. The following example shows a floor plan which uses a gradient:

For a hand-drawn look, click the Picture option and choose from a wide variety of color washes, such as the blue color pencil that was used in the following example:

Building Pads

When placing a house on uneven terrain, you can flatten the terrain underneath to create a building pad. You can also use the Patio object as a building surface. See Area Grader and Adding a Patio for details.

See also:

House Properties
Selecting Objects
Editing Points
Adding a Door
Adding a Window
Editing Objects
Adding an Area Grader
Adding a Patio