Aug 132013
Chief Architect Home Designer Suite 10 [Download]
- Design or visualize your dream home with advanced design tools that are fun and easy to use
- Home Designer can help you plan, visualize, and estimate the costs before you begin your project! Create a new room or addition to your home, remodel your kitchen or bath, and visualize floor and space planning
- Give your home the look and feel you want – choose from thousands of styles, colors, wall coverings, flooring and materials. Design and decorate your living, dining, kitchen, kid’s rooms or master bedroom. It’s fun and it’s easy!
- Creating your dream kitchen is fun and easy with Home Designer Suite. Create thousands of cabinet combinations, change your countertop material, add appliances and fixtures, create custom colors and materials, and more!
- Free Online Training Videos. Free Training Webinars. Free Technical Support.
Visualize what your home or remodeling project will look like. The software provides advanced design tools for Home Designer, Remodeling, Interior Design, Kitchens and Baths, Decks and Landscaping, Cost Estimation and more! Save time and money and start designing today!
List Price: $ 96.99
Price: $ 96.99
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Much better than Punch,
I figured if you’re going to spend several hundred thousand on a new house, why not buy a few different design programs to really see which one works best for you. I had owned Punch about 3 years ago and it was really un-intuitive, items were easily placed on the wrong floors, you had to manually enter the elevation of each item, hard to build the basic things like basements, stairs were painful. But I figured I’d try a newer version, so I downloaded Punch Home Design and Landscape V2 (NextGen) and gave it a try. Same stuff, kludgy to use, difficult to get good views in 3D mode, to adjust the camera angles.
So I downloaded Chief Architect Home Designed Suite 10 as well, and its a far easier, more intuitive, more flexible product. When viewing a floor, you place an item, and it attaches to that floor – no need to manually adjust the items elevation above a reference point. When you want to move up to the 2nd floor, to click “2nd floor” and now your items, modifications, etc, are all done on the 2nd floor, simple. Flying the camera around the 3D view is straight forward, just drag your mouse. If you make changes to your floor plan, just click “auto generate roof” again and it will adjust the roof to match your changes. There is a ton of objects that you can place like dishwasher, fireplace, furniture, etc, and you can grab more off the web if you want something not already in the package.
All in all after using both the Punch and the Chief Architect, I like using this one much more. I’ve got an entire house complete in a few days with this. For the price of the download on Amazon, under $100, this is a good value.
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See my review of Home Designer Pro for tips on learning,
I own and have rated Home Designer Pro v10 5 stars. Chief Architect Home Designer Pro 10 Most people probably don’t need the Pro version to try out redecorating or remodeling their home a bit in 3D. However, if you are interested in this product and are wondering how it works, there is no better way to find out than to download the 30-day free trial from the HomeDesignerSoftware.com website and try it out using the excellent video tutorials on the web site. Each tutorial tells you what version of the software the features in the tutorial apply to, Essentials vs Suite vs Architectural vs Pro.
I highly recommend Home Designer. The basic features in the Essentials and the Suite are pretty much the same as in the Pro version. Unfortunately, there is no free trial of anything but the Pro version. Wait carefully for the free trial offer to pop up in the home page web show or browse to the Pro product page and look for the trial download offer currently on the right center side of the page. If you’re creating plans from scratch, get yourself a laser measuring device like the one I got Bosch DLR130K Digital Distance Measurer Kit, measures down to a few inches and accurate to ~1/16th of an inch up to 130 ft. Enhancing googles help on bright light or poorly reflecting surfaces Bosch DLA001 Laser View-Enhancing Glasses.
The Suite is probably the sweet spot (pun intended) between price and features and you can upgrade to the Architectural or the Pro thru the HomeDesigner web site at discount. It’s fun and addictive. Google Sketchup is also a useful free tool that can be helpful, too. Read my Pro version review (link above) to learn more.
P.S. One of the best reasons for trying the trial version is to make sure you won’t be caught short on needed features in the version you decide to get. Here is a link to a detailed matrix of the capabilities of each version. [...](EDIT:since Amazon deletes links, see Comparison Matrix, lower left HomeDesigner site-scroll thru list). Some of the details may not mean much to you until you try the trial version with the tutorials. But for example, I got the Pro version because I have a complicated roof and I wanted complete manual control over roof design.
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Finishing the Basement,
The product works as expected. I have used similar product in the past but it was about 10 years ago. The product worked well, I am using it to show different layout concepts of our unfinished basement to my wife. In my opinion the library of objects is one of the biggest assets. Most programs can draw the walls and doors but dropping all the other items in to create a good 3D view requires a lot of library items, that’s what save a lot of time.
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