Need to add a family room to your overcrowded house? If you’re handy with the PC, you can bypass the architect and do the renovations yourself.
These four new home-design programs can turn your dream house into working blueprints.
– 3D Home Architect. This one is the most intuitive of the design packages-and the easiest to grow comfortable with. To create a room, you simply pick a wall from the drawing palette and drag it along your plan to the proper dimension; it automatically connects to an adjoining wall. Pick a window, drop it on the wall where you want a window, and the wall is cut to accommodate it.
Once you have the floor plan constructed and the appliances and furniture in place, drag the camera icon to the plan and aim it in the direction you want to view. In just seconds the software will construct a 3-D color vie of the space you designed. You can move anywhere in the room to get an idea of what the space is like and even delete objects and make changes in color, all while in the 3-D mode. “Seeing” your design has never been easier.
Included in 3D Home are 30 complete plans of all sizes that you can modify to fit your family and lifestyle. Many home-drawing packages have plans that are little more than a boxy collection of rooms. Not 3D Home. The houses it offers are gorgeous, open designs that will fit perfectly within even the finest communities.
– Expert Home Design for Windows, Gold Edition. Expert Home Design, too, incorporates modular drag-and-drop drawing techniques and has huge libraries of appliances, equipment, and furniture for creating your dream house. The implementation is a little rough around the edges, though. Zooming in magnifies the line widths on objects so much that the edges of a stove, for example, become too thick to make the object recognizable.
The package comes with 25 popular home designs, some of which are identical (down to plan number) to those found in 3D Home Architect. Using a separate OLE-connected program called Cost makes estimating a snap.
– Expert 3-D Home Design for Windows. This one picks up where the Expert Gold Edition leaves off. The drawing techniques, libraries, and approach are much the same as in the two-dimensional package. The additions here are 3-D viewing capabilities that, unfortunately, are not as polished as they should be, and an interface that’s less intuitive.
You create your design in 2-D mode here, then click on a 3-D icon to see it rendered into solid form. Be prepared for a long wait, though: Rendering and redrawing are painfully slow. If you must have 3-D, stick to the wireframe view; it may not be as easy to visualize your designs this way, but it’s considerably faster.
The package retails for a modest $14.95, making it the least expensive 3-D home design tool, and it does give you some value for the money. There’s a useful Navigator tool that lets you move around your 3-D environment in eight directions, and you can create multifloor designs and view them one floor at a time or all at once.
– Planix Home for Windows differs from the other packages in that its roots are firmly planted in the CAD (computer-aided design) world. This is both a plus and a minus. It means that you can draw and measure with precision, but that the interface is a bit more complex than you might be comfortable with. Still, the package packs a lot of power.
While the other packages automate the drawing process by providing drag-and-drop symbols for furniture and walls, Planix goes them one better by adding an Automatic Builder that actually creates your house plan for you. All you have to do is select a drawing type and enter a few coordinates; the package will do the rest. Of course, Planix also offers editable drag-and-drop symbols for furniture and appliances, as well as for windows, doors, and landscaping.
Which package is right for you will depend as much upon how comfortable you are with drawing and designing on your own as it will on what type of designs you need to create. All bring your dream house one step closer to reality.
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3D Home Architect, $60. Requires: 4MB RAM, VGA display, Microsoft Windows 3.0 or later; mat coprocessor recommended. Broderbund Software Inc., 500 Redwood Blvd., Novato, Calif. 94948; phone 800-521-6263; fax 415-382-4419.
Expert Home Design for Windows, Gold Edition, $49.95; Expert 3-D Home Design for Windows, $14.95. Requires: 2MB RAM, VGA display, Microsoft Windows 3.0 or later. Expert Software Inc., 800 Douglas Rd., Coral Gables, Fla. 33134; phone 800-759-2562.
Planix Home for Windows, $99. Requires: 2MB RAM, VGA display, Microsoft Windows 3.0 or later; math coprocessor recommended. Foresight Resources Corp., 10725 Ambassador Dr., Kansas City, Mo. 64153; phone 800-231-8574.
