In this video segment,
I'm going to cover the basics of ceilings in Chief Architect.
Let's begin by looking at the automatic flat ceiling. With the Wall tool,
I'll create a simple four-sided room. When you're finished using the Wall tool,
you can press the Spacebar or the Escape key to leave the wall drawing mode.
You know you have formed a room if you can click inside and see gray shading.
Let me use the Camera tool and point and drag to generate a 3D view.
A flat ceiling is automatically generated.
The height is defined by the floor or room default settings.
I'll click toward the floor,
and use the Open Object button in the lower left-hand menu.
In the Room Specification dialog,
you'll find the settings for the ceiling height on the Structure panel.
These settings correspond to the diagram on the right hand side,
and you can change either the Rough or Finished Ceiling.
You can use math in the dialog or type in exact values.
In the ceiling section of the dialog,
you can control if there is a ceiling in the room, if it's a shelf ceiling,
or if you want to use a soffit for the ceiling surface for a cathedral ceiling.
I'll cover these items in a few moments. For now,
I'll change the ceiling height to 9 feet and close the dialog.
Let's take a look at using the Soffit tool inside of the room.
Underneath my window, I'm going to tile my screen vertically.
When using soffits for your ceilings,
you'll find the Soffit tool underneath the Cabinet tool.
If I come over into the floor plan view, click and place the soffit,
resize to stretch it, you'll notice the orientation indicator.
Let me also place another soffit on the other side of the wall and go ahead and
stretch it out. Soffits can also have moldings on them.
If I were to click inside the room - open the room - underneath the Moldings panel,
if I come over and uncheck Use Floor Defaults and add a new
molding - I come down to the crown molding,
I choose a profile and I'll go ahead and set the height of this to be
quite large to make sure that you can see it at 6 inches.
Let's take a look at the new crown molding. In this case,
the crown molding automatically follows a soffit.
You can control how that works with your soffit.
Double-click to open up the soffit.
And there's a setting on your soffit, underneath the options portion,
to Ignore Room Moldings.
When you place electrical with soffits, the electrical cans in this case,
will automatically follow your soffits.
I'll go ahead and place a series of lights in here.
I'll use the Multiple Copy tool in my lower edit menu.
I'll go ahead and set that to be 36 inches and make a series of copies of
that light all the way down the soffit.
Do the exact same thing in the other direction.
And then you can see the lighting effect.
The soffits are intelligent when the electrical is placed on them.
It will automatically lower those electrical items.
Let me remove the soffit and let's go ahead and take a look at how to create
your trey ceilings. To create a trey ceiling for the room,
you can click in the room by clicking on the floor.
There is a tool called Make Trey Ceiling in Room.
Using this tool, you can define the Width, the Depth, the Pitch,
as well as several other features for Moldings and Rope Lights to create an
automatic trey ceiling. Using this tool,
you can create a variety of different ceilings. Please see our other videos,
specifically on using the Trey Ceiling tool.
A cathedral ceiling in Chief Architect is where the flat ceiling is removed from
the room, and the ceiling follows the roof. For this condition,
we will need to build a roof. To create a roof, let's come up to our Build menu,
come down to Roof, and select Build Roof. On the Roof panel,
I'm going to choose the automatic rebuild roof,
I'm going to accept the default 6 and 12 hip roof, and we'll click OK.
Now for the purpose of the video,
I'm going to go ahead and set the two end walls to gables.
Click on the right side wall, hold my Shift key down,
click on the left side wall. In my lower edit menu,
you'll find a setting to change these walls to gable walls.
Since the automatic roof tool is on,
you can see the gable line in the 2D plan view.
I'm going to use the Backclipped Cross Section view,
and let's take a look at this in a section style view.
I'm just going to cut through the middle of the house.
You can see the flat ceiling, you see the roof.
Let's also tile our screens and take a look so we can make some modifications.
To create the cathedral style ceiling, click inside the room,
use the Open button in the lower edit menu, come onto the Structure panel,
underneath ceiling, and remove the Flat Ceiling Over This Room option.
In this case, the ceiling will automatically follow the roof.
If you're after a simple vaulted roof and you're an interior designer,
this may be the fastest way you can create that.
You can also go in and rebuild your roof and force that ceiling at a different
pitch. If we come down to the roof, we come over to the Pitch,
we change it to 3 and 12.
You can quickly create a new vault at 3 and 12. Furthermore,
if you want to create a barrel style ceiling,
you can manually curve the roof by clicking on each of the roof planes.
I'm going to hold my shift key down and grab the other roof plane.
Use the Open button, come down on the Roof panel, click Curved,
change the ridge at the point to 0. At this point,
the program may tell you about a problem with the roof.
You can go ahead and ignore that in this case where you're just using it for
only the ceiling.
The program may also tell you that you need to turn off your automatic roofs,
and we'll go ahead and select Yes, in this case. So,
this is a very quick way to create a barrel ceiling condition,
especially if you don't care about the structure of the roof.
Let me press Undo and get back to the 6 and 12 pitched vaulted ceiling and roof
that we had.
Manual ceiling planes can be used when you have a situation where the ceiling
vault may vary from your roof pitch. In this example,
let's look at drawing a 3 and 12 pitch ceiling,
and leaving the roof at the current 6 and 12 pitch.
You will find our manual ceiling planes underneath of our menu bar,
using the Ceiling Plane tool. Using this tool,
I'm going to come down into the plan view section,
I'm going to hold my left mouse button down,
click along the inside of the wall and drag, release my mouse,
come up slope, and click. At this point,
the ceiling plane comes in at the same default pitch as the roof.
I'm going to double-click and open up that ceiling.
Here's where you can change the pitch.
Note there are a few places you can lock where this ceiling is going to pivot about.
I want to make sure that I do have the Bottom Height used as the lock
condition at 109 and an eighth. It will pivot around that point,
which is the point of the original ceiling height.
Change that to 3 and we can make the change.
Let me do that one more time for the other side. Using the Ceiling tool,
I'm going to come down to the lower portion of the wall,
I'm going to left-click and drag along the inside of the wall, release my mouse,
come up slope, and then left-click.
The ceiling again comes in at the same default pitch as the roof.
We can double-click to open up the ceiling,
make sure that we lock the Bottom Height where it's going to pivot,
109 and an eighth, change the pitch to 3 and 12.
And now you can see both of those ceiling planes in this view.
When I draw my ceilings manually,
I usually don't worry about being too specific.
You can see how these don't stretch to fill the room.
Once I'm comfortable with this,
I'll then go in and resize these by simply snapping them edge to
edge against both of the walls.
You can then drag the ceiling until it meets the pitch of the roof.
You will also find another tool in your menu that will allow you to join
the two ceiling planes. Click on the edge.
In your lower edit menu is a tool that says Join Roof or Join
Ceiling Planes - It's the same tool. There's also a number two on the shortcut.
You can click on that, click on the opposing ceiling,
and it will automatically join those two vaults.
To curve or barrel vault the ceiling planes is very similar to what we did with
the roof earlier. Click on the ceiling plane.
You may need to press the Tab key to actually get the ceiling plane and not the
roof. I'm going to hold my Shift key down, move to the inside,
and grab the other ceiling plane.
Using the Open button in the lower left hand edit menu, come up here,
click Curved. At the Ridge,
put in 0 to create the barrel vaulted ceiling.
Here's an example of a barrel vaulted ceiling. Separately,
I used polyline solids to create the soffit like structure.
Now for the last portion of the video segment,
let's take a look at shelf ceilings or plant shelf style rooms.
As you can see in these two different renderings, in this case,
the closets have a lower ceiling inside of a larger room.
And in this case, we have a kitchen pantry in the corner with a lowered ceiling.
Let's go back into our example and take a look.
I've drawn a small room that would represent a shelf style ceiling.
Over in the section view, you can see that the walls go all the way to the top.
Let's double-click inside the room. On the Structure panel,
underneath the ceiling section, I'm going to mark this as a Shelf Ceiling.
The other thing I'm going to do for the purpose of the video is let's go ahead
and lower the ceiling by 12 inches.
When you define the room as a shelf ceiling,
it can be self-contained inside of a larger room. And in this case,
you can see where it has lowered the ceiling,
and kept it inside of the larger room with a plant style ceiling.
To learn more about ceilings, please see our other videos,
our built-in Help file, as well as our support articles.
Thanks for watching the video!