Drawing Walls

One way to begin is simply to begin drawing exterior walls. All well and good, and if you have a pretty good idea of the dimensions of the first floor of your (proposed) house, you can sketch in the walls very quickly and be on your way to laying out the floor plan in mere minutes. On the other hand, if you aren't sure what the overall width and depth should be, there is another, somewhat more "organic" method for laying out your house. For this design, we will begin by sketching in the outer walls, then move on to refining them and placing interior walls (making our rooms). Then we will go back and show how to use Room Boxes to produce the same (or similar) layout.

How to begin?

Let's review our program:

Garage facing front, on the right side of the house (as we face it--left side if we're inside looking out).
Stairwell just to the left of the garage. I envisioned L-shaped or U-shaped stairs, but you may decide otherwise.
Front door just to the left of the stairs. We can experiment with reversing these (putting the stairs to the left of the front entrance) to see the effect.
Main living area (living room) to the left of the front entrance.

This should be enough to get us started.

Tip #2: Face the front of the house toward the bottom of the screen. We could face it in any direction, of course, but the overview 3D image (which we will use, a lot) will always start facing toward whatever is on the bottom of the plan, and the sun angle will always use the bottom of the screen as south, meaning that side will be the brightest.

Since we know where the garage is, let's draw the garage walls first. Start at the upper left hand corner of where you want the garage to be, and draw a wall (remember we have already selected the wall tool) toward the right. We do this by clicking and holding down the left mouse button, then moving the mouse to the right.

Note that as you drag the mouse, a wall begins to form on the screen and the wall length displays in the status bar. Two-car garages are anywhere from 20' to 25' wide, so go until the wall length is about 22'. Don't worry if it's not exactly the width you want it to be, there will be ample time and opportunity to adjust room dimensions, later. Let go of the mouse button, and now you have your first wall!

Whoopee! Go have a cup of coffee, you must be tired. (Just kidding.) Now, click at the right hand end of our wall, and draw a wall downward about 25' (more or less). This is the right hand wall of the garage.

Tip #3: Try to draw exterior walls in a clockwise direction. If you do, then they will be created with their exterior surfaces facing out, which is what we want. If you draw in a counterclockwise direction, the outside of the wall will be on the inside, and you will have to reverse the wall. Reversing the wall layers isn't hard, just tedious.

Draw another wall along the bottom of the garage back toward the left, then draw a final wall upward to meet the first wall at the upper left hand corner. Click on the cursor tool (a mouse arrow icon) to exit wall mode. You should have a rectangle of about 22' x 25', and it should look like this:

The "LIVING AREA" text label below the garage box shows the square feet on the current floor of the house. Normally garages are not included in this number, but we haven't yet labeled this as a garage. To do this, click inside the garage somewhere, then click on the open door icon in the toolbar. On my computer it's near the top on the left hand side of the screen. You can see the "Open Object" label in the image. This opens a specification dialog box for the object (in this case, a Room Specification dialog box).

As shown above, select "Garage" from the Room Type drop-down box, then enter -18 (meaning 18" below the level of the first floor) in the Floor Height (A) text box. When you tab out of the box it recalculates the ceiling height automatically (also shown above). Click on OK or press Enter to set the room type.

Tip #4: Important note about opening the Room Specification dialog box. You will find that for almost any object, you can simply double-click the object to open its specification dialog, and in fact, this works for rooms, too. Beware, though, that there are circumstances in which the walls surrounding a room won't be properly connected (especially when you are moving walls frequently), and accidentally double-clicking inside a room could crash Home Designer! This bad thing is best avoided by using the toolbar and clicking on the Open Object icon. If the room walls don't enclose the room, you won't get an Open Object icon when you click inside the room. This would then be your clue to fix the problem with the walls before attempting to set the room type.

I'm sure you're as anxious as I am to see what the house (or, what we have of it so far) looks like. And we can do that, too. Simply click on the blue Camera icon on the toolbar (the Render Tools icon), and then click on the solid House icon (the one with the blue roof). The design will then be rendered as an overview (a view from up in the air at a distance) so you can look at your house from virtually any angle (including from below, if you so desire). The initial render overview looks like this:

If not already selected, select the "Move Camera with Mouse" tool (it's the Mouse icon in the toolbar), and scroll the mouse wheel up to zoom in, down to zoom out. Now, click and hold down the left mouse button, and move the mouse from left to right (and up and down) to see the image rotate various directions on the screen. If you have both a powerful enough computer and video card, the movement should be smooth and in "real-time". If not, then you might have to move more slowly and carefully to rotate the image. Practice with this, because you will do it a lot. Visualization is the name of the game, and this feature is why we all bought this program.

Now we're going to draw the rest of the first floor, then we'll fix the walls to be the type we want them to be. As you can see, the chosen exterior wall type is a grayish stucco, and we decided we wanted a generic aluminum/vinyl siding. We could have set the wall type first, and that might in fact have been easier, but I thought it was perhaps more important to get some walls established before we set about making everything look exactly as we want.

First, though, we need to do something about the stairs. Click next to see what I'm talking about and why this might be important.

Program | Next