Ok so I'm working on my first home project, and I really like the design and layout of the dragonreach home. I started by duplicating the dragonreach home cell, and then started to delete all the red boxes, red x's, sweeping spots(blue pads) and all the npc's. When I load it up in game to test it out, everything's fine until I go upstairs. When i go up the stairs beside the yarl throne, the walls on the next floor dissapear, same with the floor until I walk over where they should be and the appear again, but the stuff behind me dissapears. When I look at it through the creation kit, all the walls are there and everything seems fine, I would really appreaciate some help.

Those are probably left-over room bounds.

On the toolbar you will see the roombound icons. I believe one of them will let you see the bounds so you can delete them.

I only found one roombound icon and it says create roombound

Portals, to the right of it, are also connected to roombounds. You need to remove the portals too.
I have not used these in Skyrim yet, but I did use them in Fallout 3.

well i clicked them all, nothing changed, problem is I cant see any portal markers.

To see roombounds and portal go to View... Show/Hide window... then check portals and rooms.

But yea it must be somehting to do with portals or soemthing similar. It seems like the whole downstairs is one section and when i step in it, its active and when i step into the upstairs it becomes active turning off other parts like the dining room balcony and stairs.

Yes! Thanks architect, and thanks willie for lighting the way! That did the trick

Im wondering, are portals used for anything important, or can i just take them all out?

I"m guessing they're for things like moving your Housecarl to the area by the door when you get proclaimed Thane and such.

Not sure really I'm no expert (so correct me if I'm worng), portals are like windows into the next roombound, I assume, with the culling of objects that are out of line of sight, unlike joined rooms which would just draw everything in those roombounds as one single room.

So I assume that joining rooms that make up a larger cave or tunnel network makes more sense then having a large portal across it if it's not too populated. The oppsite for small doors/windows which a portal would make sense to limit drawing objects in another roombound that are not in line-of-sight. Really depends on how much junk is in those roombounds, you don't want to join two over populated rooms if you don't have too.

Portals are the 'doors' between two roombounds. Everything in one roombound is loaded and visiable to the player. Nothing else is loaded which makes the FPS go up.
When a 'portal' is in the players view all objects in both roombounds will be loaded. All other objects in other roombounds are unloaded and not rendered.

Ahh makes sense.

So you would put a portal in a doorway, behind the closed door...when the player opens the door, only then would objects on the other side be rendered?

Yes, as long as the portal was on the other side of the door. But, it may cause a slight delay as it renders the now viewable roombound objects. But its a lot faster than trying to render your entire cells objects.