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Re: Contributing/Patch for walls with sloping base
When I need a dormer I always create a custom full dormer object that is inserted in a gap in the roof. Easy to copy for multiple dormers and I can use it in multiple houses.
A wall, by definition, is usually a load baring part of the house. If the sides of a real dormer have a triangle gap at the bottom they are usually made of wood or another material that is not too heavy. A stone/concrete wall is too heavy for this type of construction. There is nothing to support the 'floating' high end. That we want to use a wall for the sides of a dormer is because it's convenient to draw. A wall in Sweet Home 3D has specific properties like the ability to create a hole for a window. If your patch can let the wall keep all it's original properties this might be useful for some users but it would be better if you can reproduce this in a plugin that adds a special type of wall.
Did you take into account that a wall sinks into a floor at a level? You can't see that but it is to have full walls on the outside of a house. Otherwise there would be a gap where the floor is. A 250cm wall on a floor of 20cm is actually 270cm. From the top of the floor to the ceiling is still 250cm so you don't notice the added height at the bottom. You can see this when you export such a wall, the resulting object will be 270cm high, not 250cm.
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Re: Contributing/Patch for walls with sloping base
Thanks for proposing to contribute to Sweet Home 3D, even if... I'm not sure that I would accept your idea to be able to change the elevation of the base of a wall. Sweet Home 3D must remain quite simple and the Wall modification dialog is already quite busy! Anyway, you can propose your patch in a feature request or elsewhere if you want.
The FAQ has a whole paragraph about contributions, proposing to developers to program plug-ins if they want. Years after years, 48 plug-ins have been proposed by talented programmers, without counting the few ones that I developed myself (marked as "eTeks" developer here). But plug-ins doesn't allow to program everything and the patch you want to propose must imply modifications in the core program itself. Actually, the few programmers who proposed their help for the core program (for example in this thread and that one) never went very far, so it has not been very motivating for me to support this kind of contribution and plug-ins proved to be a good way to add many features until now. Still, a few programmers used Sweet Home 3D in projects proposed elsewhere as GitHub.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
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Re: Contributing/Patch for walls with sloping base
Keet,
A wall, by definition, is usually a load baring part of the house. If the sides of a real dormer have a triangle gap at the bottom they are usually made of wood or another material that is not too heavy. A stone/concrete wall is too heavy for this type of construction. There is nothing to support the 'floating' high end. That we want to use a wall for the sides of a dormer is because it's convenient to draw.
I realize that it is nice to have a physical basis for the software model, but invisible windows aren't very "realistic" either. And a wood-framed wall is still a wall, even if it is not as solid as masonry.
A wall in Sweet Home 3D has specific properties like the ability to create a hole for a window. If your patch can let the wall keep all it's original properties this might be useful for some users but it would be better if you can reproduce this in a plugin that adds a special type of wall.
Did you take into account that a wall sinks into a floor at a level? You can't see that but it is to have full walls on the outside of a house. Otherwise there would be a gap where the floor is. A 250cm wall on a floor of 20cm is actually 270cm. From the top of the floor to the ceiling is still 250cm so you don't notice the added height at the bottom. You can see this when you export such a wall, the resulting object will be 270cm high, not 250cm.
The patch does keep all of the original properties of walls. The reason I initially went for a patch over a plugin was to get the already-existing functionality of walls for "free" (such as cutouts for windows).
As to the floor thickness beneath walls. For these new "floating" walls I decided not to generate separate geometry for the floor beneath such a wall. Since rooms also generate floor geometry, I do not believe this will be much of a issue in practice. I did account for this fact in the room generation code (i.e. floating walls do not contribute points to room boundaries).
Puybaret,
Thanks for proposing to contribute to Sweet Home 3D, even if... I'm not sure that I would accept your idea to be able to change the elevation of the base of a wall. Sweet Home 3D must remain quite simple and the Wall modification dialog is already quite busy! Anyway, you can propose your patch in a feature request or elsewhere if you want.
Yes, I can see how the addition of more properties could make the wall panel a bit much. I theoretically could toggle the visibility for the elevation controls based on the checkbox that indicates whether the wall is floating or not.
The FAQ has a whole paragraph about contributions, proposing to developers to program plug-ins if they want. Years after years, 48 plug-ins have been proposed by talented programmers, without counting the few ones that I developed myself (marked as "eTeks" developer here). But plug-ins doesn't allow to program everything and the patch you want to propose must imply modifications in the core program itself. Actually, the few programmers who proposed their help for the core program (for example in this thread and that one) never went very far, so it has not been very motivating for me to support this kind of contribution and plug-ins proved to be a good way to add many features until now. Still, a few programmers used Sweet Home 3D in projects proposed elsewhere as GitHub.
Based on the response here, I think the easiest path forward would be for me to look into writing a plug-in that generates a "floating wall" geometry.
I will still make the code available on my github page so you or anyone else can look over the changes if there is interest.
