In this video,
we're going to take a look at the way soffits work in the
Home Designer products.
You might use a soffit typically to go above a cabinet,
as we can see in this image.
You can also use soffits to create a different ceiling texture or a different
ceiling style.
Let's go through the process and take a look at how soffits work in the Home
Designer products. In this sample kitchen that I have open,
you'll notice that there is a blank area above the cabinets.
You'll find the soffit tool underneath the cabinet tool and you can come over
here and click and place the soffit in this view. Typically,
you're going to find that your soffit is one inch in depth beyond your default
cabinet style.
You'll also find that these are a little bit easier to place in your plan view,
especially in this corner area.
Let me toggle back over into the plan area. Again,
let's choose the soffit out of the cabinet menu and as you hover into the
corner, it becomes a corner soffit. You can then click and place that.
You can then select the soffit and modify it as you need to.
I typically won't change the corner soffit but rather the side soffit and simply
bump that into place using the cabinets below and alignment.
Click a soffit on this side and again click and resize that soffit to the edge
of the cabinet.
Sometimes it is difficult to select items that are on top of one another.
In this case, a soffit is on top of the wall and base cabinets.
If you click to select the soffit, but the cabin is selected,
you can press the tab key to go to the next closest object.
You could also use the next button in the lower left-hand corner of your screen
to move to the next closest object allowing you to select the soffit.
When I return back into the 3D view, notice the soffit has filled that space.
Also, the crown molding follows around the soffit.
If you'd like to turn that off,
I'll just hold my shift key down and select all three soffits.
You'll find a setting in here to ignore the room moldings and when you check
that it will then toggle the molding off and continue behind the soffit.
I'll go ahead and undo that.
If you have particular needs for your soffits and you know about them in
advance,
you can actually set these in your default properties under the default settings
for soffits. You can define the width, the height, the depth. Also,
settings of floor to top if it's going to be ignoring the room moldings and a
few other settings.
So these are settings and properties that you can use for your soffits if you
know in advance what you're going to place.
In Home Designer Architectural and Home Designer Pro,
you can create your soffits and have them follow the ceiling or the roof.
Let's take a look at how we might create this style of a soffit.
In this sample plan that I have open,
I'm actually going to set the properties for my soffit by going back into the
default settings and for the soffit itself I'm going to go in and set the width
to eight inches,
the height at six inches and then depth of it,
we'll just set it at something like 48 inches and make the adjustment.
Floor to bottom at 90 inches is fine.
Now when I go in and place my initial soffit,
it will have those same properties.
Go ahead and click and I'll stretch that from end to end.
Let's go in and take a 3D view with my open camera here.
Notice the soffit comes in as a flat soffit that spans from the floor to bottom,
which we set at 90 inches. Let's go ahead and open up this soffit,
and I'm going to make a change.
If you're using Home Designer Pro and you've created a custom ceiling plane,
you can use this setting, place under ceiling.
If you've created a shed style ceiling that I have in this you can place under
roof. Let's go ahead and just mark it as place under the ceiling.
Notice in the preview,
it automatically changes and it also marks that it is a sloped soffit.
That soffit then adjusts, and if I tilt my camera up,
you can see the way that that soffit comes in.
I'll simply use my material eyedropper and paint that soffit the color,
and then to replicate that soffit, it's pretty easy to select the soffit.
Use your copy tool in the lower left-hand corner,
and I'll use the sticky function and I'll just slide a series of soffits in
between the lights by sliding them in the sticky mode,
and then finally one more at the end.
Go back into the 3D view and you can see how quickly we created a different
texture on the ceiling using the soffit tool. Remember,
with all objects in Home Designer, inside of the dialogue is a contextual help.
This will open up the help right into that section and you can learn more about
any object you're working on in the program.