Android Studio change build folder

AS does not seem to support changing the build folder. I found some suggestions on the net. One involved adding a few lines to build.gradle in the root project folder. it seemed to work fine, until it came to loading the app onto my phone, at which point I was inundated with error messages from my phone (param such and such undefined), so I went back to having the build in place, and things are working well (I only need to tell my backup software to exclude the build folder). Has anyone else dealt with this?