Raised heels should have been added years ago to this specific truss type but the squeaky wheel gets the grease and I was probably pulled away to the wall plugin before I got the chance to implement it. Needless to say I have all three raised heel variants now added for this truss type. I still need to add raised heels to a number of these more exotic truss types. It is not particularly difficult but it does take some time and a bit of testing.
I haven’t revisited this image in a few years but I still need to put together a complex porch roof module:
Time to put the old thinking cap back on.
As I look at this image from about 8 years ago, when I was just starting the Truss plugin, two things immediately jump out at me. Everything can be quickly modeled now except for:
1.) The porch rafter roof (complex shed roof with hipped ends)
2.) The opening in the floor for the stairwell
Note that the height of the collar tie is measured from the bottom of the ridge board. A zero height puts the collar tie against the bottom of the ridge board.
I will probably roll this out first for common trusses and then after some further testing and feedback update all of the other truss types and rafter roof types.
There has been quite a bit of interest in square cut tails for quite some time now but it is a hassle to add this in since it impacts soffit and fascia, gutters, sub-fascia, sheathing, cladding and a number of underlying methods. It will take me some time to roll this out for all roof types.
At the behest of some users who use this plugin for large agricultural buildings, I will be adding at couple more options for large trusses. Specifically a “Quad Howe” and a “Penta Howe” common truss option. The “Penta Howe” truss is suitable for trusses that measure up to 100’ in span (or greater). I had a little fun with this
The barn I show with the tractor has a 92’ span truss with a 36" raised heel. Top and bottom chords are 2x8 with 2x6 webs. The trusses are double ply (3" width) and spaced at 4’ on center.
After I modeled this, I thought, what could a guy do with a garage like this? Okay, realistically I don’t need an aircraft hanger for a garage, but 36’x36’ sure would be nice.
It’s too bad we don’t have the ability to use extensions in the web based version of SketchUp:
Probably should have added the wood grain texture a couple years ago so that it was up to speed with the Wall plugin, however no one ever complained about it until now so there was no impetus.
Note, the default behavior is to have the wood texture turned off, so it needs to be toggled on in the global settings for it to be active. Now I just need to enable this option for every other truss type and all the other rafter and truss assemblies. These plugins always seem to keep me busy.
I call this low hanging fruit, but it is actually quite a substantial upgrade, at least from the coding end of things. I have to get into each truss type (file) and make some significant changes. As I’ve gone through each file I’ve cleaned up a few things and I’ve also detected a few obscure bugs and remedied them. I’m also working to bring each truss type up to speed with the common truss module with all of its options.
With some of the trusses I’ve added more configurations such as the 10/10 parallel chord truss.
It would be really nice if I could hand off this more tedious of development tasks to another person, I could probably keep a full time programmer occupied for another six months just going through and updating each module of truss plugin. When I started all this 10 years ago maybe I bit off more than I could chew. As a one man show I do my very best but sometimes I wonder if it is enough to keep up with the competition.
