Broderbund 3D Home Architect Design Suite Deluxe 6 review:4 stars (Good but not excellent) - I have tested a lot of programs for house design, and this one is one of the easiest to use, it is remarkable that there a lot of functions missing like copy and paste objects in the usual way , but it have the duplicate option (what im talking here is that some standarization is missing) you canot change the attributes of multiple objects, so you need to change the color of every single piece of wall one by one.
Apart from theese little interface details, the resulting images in 3d are very nice and realistic, the product is discontinued by the company which is now selling all the components separately, so there must be a limmited quantity of copies of this package remaining.
To end my review let me say that between all the programs i tested i decided to buy this one and im happy with my choice4 stars (Really not that bad.) - I've read these reviews and some people love it and some people hate it. And I disagree with the person that uses it just to fool around with it, and said that anyone who would use this for a real life project is stupid. I have been using it for the past month in my spare time (which isn't very much with a 4 month old), I have used it to draw a plan to renovate the first floor of our house. Sure, some things are a pain, like having to block views of walls, floors, etc. to move a chair or table, but overall, I think that if you really want to draw up a plan, this program isn't that bad. I'm sure there are other programs out there that will do a better job, but for 80 bucks or whatever, you get what you pay for. If you really want to have a good program, plan on shelling out the 250-300 dollars for the better ones.5 stars (Major Improvement!) - I found this software to be absolutely faultless. It does have the same drag around interfaces as before, which allows houses to be designed at lightning speed; only your menu choices are not put into two menu systems which allow more comprehensive choices. Once you figure out to click the top row as before, and then choose your comprehensive choice on the right, as not before, then you are off and running.
The programmers for this software are much better than the instruction book writers. For example, you can eliminate 98% of the problems with this product by "opening up" outside walls and then "closing" them again to make floors that have disappeared reappear, and to make walls that aren't attached all the way up to the cathedral ceilings, all of a sudden attach themselves.
The only drag around interface that seems to have been lost is that you can no longer resize windows in 3D mode by grabbing their edges, however, you can still click into them while in 3D mode and resize them, which is not quite as convenient as before. However, in return, you now have more options. You can now add skylights, curved walls, curved staircases and irregular windows.
The program has also been enhanced to allow true construction details. If you want a beveled footing and an actual buildable foundation set to various heights, you can now have it.
Furthermore, one of the most annoying features of the previous releases, which was having to set "invisible" walls to get staircase openings to appear in the second story floors (which always crashed the plans) has been revised and you can now simply draw in an opening into your floors.
The 3D walk through is an absolute joy to use with the product and you can zip your view height up and down and walk around and zoom in and out with perfect ease.
Having the ability to do true rendering, wherein the sun shines through the windows is my favorite new feature, as all good designs take into the account where the sun shines. For example, an awning over a south facing window will allow the sun to shine into the room in the winter when the sun is lower in the sky but block the sun in the summer when it is hot.
I don't much care if older plans cannot be imported, as I am busy on new plans with curved staircases and skylights which were not possible before.
Any roof can be made with this product. But you have to draw the roof on first, before you put in the interior partition walls, otherwise it will distort the automatic roof centerpoints, which are needed to change roof types which is annoying. But this is all due to their not well documented feature in which the roofs and floors automatically attach themselves to everything, which saves a lot of time. And you do have the option to draw your roofs "out in space" and then drag them into place to eliminate this automatic attachment feature. Therefore, just about any roof can be created, and easily at that.
I suspect that the people experiencing crashes do not have updated computers. It works perfectly on a Pentium 4 - 3.00 GHz with 512K RAM. |
