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Posted by Puybaret
at Mar 3, 2013, 8:28:17 AM
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Re: Sweet Home 3D 4.0
Denis, Hans, Szymon, thanks for your feedback. From you answers, this ceiling computation feature doesn't feel perfect, and I agree. 
what about an option to exclude a wall from ceiling calculation ? Maybe a checkbox in the wall's properties dialog ? Nice idea but still too complicate for basic user to understand, as well as the wall's properties dialog is already quite filled with a lot of information. One of my idea was to add a Flat check box in the Ceiling section of the room modification dialog. A more simple option placed among other user interface options relative to ceiling. If the users wonder what it changes, they can test it and undo/redo it, or look in the help. The biggest problem with ceilings is that they are visible only from below, and I'm not sure that playing with that 3D feature was a good idea for people unaware of it.
don't recalculate the ceiling after every change, but make a Recalculate button, just as for the walls around a room. Sorry but I feel it wouldn't be consistent with the way Sweet Home 3D works for other features: the user sees the effect of its initial drawing or its change at once, and recomputing walls around a room is just a shortcut of something the user could do with existing features. Following your idea, what would happen if the user would move a point of a room? It would keep always the same elevation until he clicks on that button? And if the elevation of some room points is incorrect at the initial creation of a room, recalculating them won't resolve any issue.
I would enable this nice mechanism when there exists only one way of spanning a ceiling (e.g. 2nd from left in top row, or second from top in first column). Sorry but I'm not sure to understand what you mean. 
However, in some complex situations one can do it in more distinct ways. I would disable the mechanism if different strategies of triangulation result in different ceilings. The triangulation is computed by Java 3D itself. So if I want to test different strategies, I would have to study its algorithm and reprogram it some way, without guaranty that there could be more than one possible strategy at the end!
The mechanism doesn't work fine for low walls. The Flat option I proposed could help to resolve this issue. But in the case you reported, you should actually create a room for the floor, and a second room for the ceiling with only 4 points at the room corners.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
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