Description:
Let's get the bad news out of the way first: Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design and Renovation tends to crash--a lot! It is tough to learn and has a counterintuitive interface. Intended to allow users to explore housing designs and renovation possibilities, this package definitely requires time and patience. However, users familiar with home design software will already know that many of the packages on the market fail--at least to some extent--to make it easy to create and experiment with a home. Room placement remains a chore in Complete Home Designer, certainly, but no more so than in comparable programs. In fact, those users willing to do the painstaking work of re-creating their real-world home or designing a new one will be pleased to find several imagination-friendly features, including the means to fine-tune irregular and L-shaped rooms and the ability to build homes with as many as 10 floors. The good news is that the number of sample homes that can be created with the design wizard is pleasingly varied and variable, allowing a high degree of customization even in the blueprint stage. For those who want to play with decorating ideas for a fairly expensive home with no regard to specific layout, these samples can provide hours of entertainment and lots of design ideas. What's more, the gallery of objects--furniture and other décor items--is satisfyingly large. Control over size, orientation, and placement of these objects is again cumbersome and again worth the effort. Complete Home Designer tries hard to make the objects workable. The result? You are somewhat less likely to have to stretch a coffee table to bizarre proportions just to make it work next to other furnishings. More importantly, when you are done, the rooms you have created look remarkably like places where real people might choose to live. Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design and Renovation also has all the standard features for software of this type--you can make a short video tour of completed homes, import photographs of people and furnishings, animate images within the home, and do limited landscaping. Users with lots of time to devote to learning the program's eccentricities and designing the home of their dreams will find, ultimately, that this program offers all the tools they could want... at least until the overall standard for home design software reaches a new level. --Alyx Dellamonica
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