Home Designer 9.0 is the latest release from Chief Architect, the professional software design company and the software of choice by more builders, architects and designers. Home Designer leverages the same professional quality from Chief Architect making it the most powerful and easy to use home design, remodeling and landscaping software. Design your dream home today!
Fun & Easy Home Design Software
Chief Architect Home Designer is Chief Architect's entry level title that can help you with the basics to design, remodel or add landscaping to your home. With over 4,000 items you can create your perfect design. There are 500 sample plans all of which allow you to create a virtual walk-through of your home. The program enables you to easily visualize your project in 3D.
Home Design Software
- Floor and space planning--use to size and visualize rooms for remodeling or redecorating
- Quickly place and arrange walls, windows, doors, furniture, create decks and landscaping
- Easy to use automated building tools for roofs, stairs, framing, cabinets and more
- Generate various styles of Automatic roofs for your home
- Automatically generate a complete spreadsheet for your project costs, broken down by category. Calculate the amount of lumber for your deck or concrete required for your new patio.
- Use House Wizard to choose your rooms and then drag them to your design layout configuration to generate a floor plan
- Choose from over 500 sample floor plans to help generate ideas
REVIEW PRODUCT
What were the problems with the Punch? In no particular order:
1) The OOBE (out-of-box-experience) was not very good. It installed and ran OK; and the initial start-up scheme they have developed to get the rank novice going (that of dragging boxes (rooms) into rough locations) went OK; but the process began to bog down quickly due to my inexperience with the program. That's to be expected, but viewing the tutorials and then digging deep into the manual were often more frustrating than illuminating. Hey Punch: suggest you hire someone with ISD (Instructional System Design) experience to solve this problem.
2) No support for adding a fireplace? YGTBKM! Maybe it's in there, but I searched and searched, and the word "fireplace" was not to be found in the index, nor the reference manual, nor the search function.
3) No ICF support. This is becoming far too popular a modern green home construction technique to ignore.
4) I found the program to be far too finicky in such simple functions as "snap-to-point" when building a wall; I was wasting a lot of time trying to get it to do the simplest things. This is where Punch drops the ball the most; they don't appear to have designed the tutorials and training to overcome the most common errors of a typical beginner. (I have a Master's Degree in Educational Technology, so feel qualified to judge).
I then bought the Chief Architect 9.0 from Amazon for $53. At least for me, I'm having an easier time of it. (I'll grant you that the struggles with the first product made me somewhat more skillful with the second).
Not everything is perfect with CA 9.0 however. Expect some learning curve and frustration.
1) Very disappointed that the Punch had a 300+ page printed manual, while the CA 9.0 has only a .pdf.
2) I liked the fly-around camera function much better in the Punch than the CA 9.0; it's simpler and more intuitive. Quite often with the CA 9.0, with just a gentle flick of the mouse I get crazy gopher's-eye-view of my house from underneath, or sometimes a termite's-eye-view from inside the wall. Sheesh.
For $53..... thumb's up!
Price:$59.99
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