Dormer Opening_Pick wall

[mmiles]

Look at image file. In the 3D view I have cursor hovering over a wall that I want to select to cut my dormer. If you see the sketch line, it is selecting only a small portion of the wall, and the line runs in the opposite direction than it should. what is causing this? And, are there concrete ways, or tips and tricks to drawing dormers? It seems like it is a hit and miss process to me - sometimes it works smoothly, but other times it seems the programming is really particular about things.

thanks.

[ws]

FWIW my solution is to always have the dormer 'cheek' walls protrude beyond the roof line until I have the roof cutouts created - you can pick the inside face or the outside face of the cheek wall to provide the cut line in the roof.

Sometimes I place temporary walls sticking up through the roof just to give me the pick lines for the roof cutout.

[mmiles]

Yeah, I ended up doing a similiar trick. I had to split a wall, too. But, what I also did was attach the bottom of the wall to the roof that I was creating the opening for. And, once I did that the issue went away. I did not realize that I could place a temporary wall and then delete it as I thought the opening was associated with it - meaning if it gets deleted the opening become incomplete.

[ws]

I thought the same - that the wall gave the alignment for the cutout lines, but not so.

I seem to remember that you can edit and move the cutout once made but not during creation.

A neat trick with dormers which you probably already know is that by creating the roofs as 'by footprint' associated with the dormer cheek walls and by locking the cheek walls to vertical reference planes, you can nudge the width of the dormer, including the roof opening(s) via the reference planes and the roof will grow/shrink to match.

Copying dormers does work but seems to lose some connectivity.

[mmiles]

SWEAR SWEAR SWEAR, MOAN GROAN, HIT MAUL THROW THINGS!!!

I personally believe the functionality of dormers has become stunted over time. I am begining to think (again) the programers have decided to reach for the lowest common denominator when re-engineering how dormers work. Are the walls supposed to be attached or not (sometimes is a BS answer). Does the opening even relate to the walls I am picking - if not then why the selection method? A real dormer would not have a wall extend beyond the edge of a roof in order to define a opening, so why here?

I keep getting error: "Dormer Cut not fully defined. Dormer cut was not performed."

I need to be able to draw lines, not pick walls or roof edges which enevitably don't work. Does anyone else feel this way, or am I just way off with my thinking?