Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Pro 6

Rating:
Summary: DIY Home Remodel
Review: I am not an architect or builder. But I consider myself handy and cheap. My motto is give me a book (or program) and tools and I'll do anything. My remodel consists of adding a garage and increasing the size of a single story home. Me and my conscripted nephews plan on doing most of the work ourselves. I originally bought the Punch software and was very satisfied with the intuitive ease of use and the 3D design renderings. But when the rubber meets the road and permit requirements become reality, this software was the most affordable one I could find to bypass the professional services usually required for that process. While not easy, meeting the goal of saving that considerable expense has made it worthwhile. Now if I can just figure out a way to build things square...

Rating:
Summary: Mostly good with a few flaws...
Review: I started looking into the home CAD software market when I decided to remodel one floor of my house. It didn't take long to discover that remodels of the kind I had in mind require building permits. Building permits in turn require plans, plans require architects and architects typically require lots of money...

Home CAD software seemed to provide a solution to this problem, by allowing someone like myself, possessing absolutely no drawing talent at all, to produce professional-looking floorplans and blueprints that might convince the local planning office that I knew what I was doing.

I quickly discovered that there are a range of home design products aimed at the consumer out there, ranging in price from about $30 to almost $500. HD Pro is right at the top of that range and the price put me off intially, so instead, I bought a copy of Home Designer Suite (same company, cut-down product), for about $100. Almost immediately I ran into problems: HD Suite is not very flexible when it comes to the ingredients that make up your house. In particular, I couldn't represent the stuccoed concrete block walls that make up the exterior of my house. After banging my head against a 2x6 wood framed wall for a while, I figured I'd try the upgrade to HD Pro.

Small aside: ART offers an "upgrade" path to Pro that, in my mind, is pretty unattractive. Essentially they offer you the opportunity to throw away your $100 copy of Suite, and then credit you a mere $50 towards the $500 HD Pro. And you have to do this within 30 days of purchase. Some deal! Strangely, ART runs a parallel offer to refund _all_ your money within 30 days if you're unhappy with any product, so it doesn't take a genius to work out that instead of "upgrading", you should just return Suite and buy Pro independently. Go figure.

Anyway, HD Pro is a pretty sophisticated piece of software on the whole. It comes with lots of documentation, tons of features, and even a bunch of training tutorials on video. There's a lot of stuff there and it takes a while to get into. Getting your house mapped out with any degree of accuracy is going to be a long job, largely due to the amount of time you'll spend measuring every inch of your house with a tape measure (assuming you don't have existing plans), then entering that data into HD Pro, then trying to work out why things aren't matching up, then remeasuring, and so on. You'll also have great fun trying to figure out how to use HD Pro's stair tool if you have anything other than very simple straight stairs. It's possible to get there in the end, but it takes a lot of patience!

HD Pro allows you to model a great many details, from the width of your window sashes, to the placement of your framing members, to the slope of the surrounding terrain. While I couldn't always get a perfect match with reality, I could generally get as close as I cared about.

Having said all that, HD Pro has a few flaws, some minor, some serious. For starters, you're stuck with the furniture, appliances and objects that HD Pro provides. There's no way to import or create new objects. Sure, HD Pro's library has thousands of objects, but when you consider the range of things that that library has to cover, there's really only room for a few objects of each type. Still, there's probably something that's not too different from what you have/want.

Occasionally I just couldn't work out how to represent some architectural quirk of my house. Staircases in particular are problematic since they can be fairly complex 3-D shapes, but HD Pro's stair tools are essentially 2-D. I also found that the fireplace tool was not sufficiently flexible. Again, you have to accept some degree of approximation.

A more serious problem only emerged after I'd finished all my plans, laid them out using HD Pro's friendly layout tool, and then tried to print those plans at the standard (and required) 1/4" to 1 foot scale. For some reason, HD Pro restricts you to a maximum paper size of 11"x17", which is way too small for most architectural drawings. For me, this was very nearly a showstopper, and I was only able to work around it by the tedious process of printing to a reduced scale file and then enlarging it as I printed it out. When I contacted ART's tech support about this, they helpfully suggested that I might want to buy their $1000 Chief Architect product instead! I hope that ART will remove this seemingly arbitrary and annoying restriction in the future.

I haven't actually tried any of the other home CAD offerings so I can't compare HD Pro to those, except to say that HD Pro is invariably much more expensive. I did download the free trial of 3D Home Architect 6 and it seemed OK, but limited in a similar way to HD Suite.

In summary, HD Pro is a sophisticated tool for planning out a house and producing 3-D renderings. It's unlikely to be able to model the most complex of custom houses, but it can get close for most. As a tool for producing building permit plans, it's limited by the restricted paper size, though with effort you might be able to work around this.



Rating:
Summary: very stable and is fast to work with
Review: I tested the cheap old version - 3D Home Architect deluxe 3.0 just for getting a feeling of this kind of software.
I then spent quite some time looking around at the Internet at e.g. Punch, IMSI floorplan and finally chose to buy Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Pro 6.
I chose the product because it is the actual upgrade to Home Architect and it is made by a company that also makes professional products - which in my mind makes them able to use theirs skills while making a stripped version from the professional product.

After getting the product my I could confirm that this is a professional home design product with very good documentation. And the program is easy to use and it very fast to draw a sketch of the house and later easy to adjust if needed.

No crashes and the 3D workes fine.

I have only tested the software om my new PC with 1GB RAM, Pentium 4 -3GHzHT and ATIRAdeon 128MB graphics - so I do not know yet whether it has good performance on my old PC.

I chose the Pro version (5 times more expensive) instead of the suite because I needed conversion from DXF and some of the other things that are extra in the Pro version - see the comparison matrix at the manufacturers site.

I think that if you don't need the extras - which I guess most people won't - then the suite is the right product for you!

/Jan

Rating:
Summary: This is the best product I have ever seen!
Review: I was on the beta test for this program. This product blows away every other consumer product I have ever seen. Don't even bother with any of those other cheaper products, it's just not worth the trouble. It's like comparing a Geo to a Hummer. There is no comparison!

Rating:
Summary: This is the best product I have ever seen!
Review: I was on the beta test for this program. This product blows away every other consumer product I have ever seen. Don't even bother with any of those other cheaper products, it's just not worth the trouble. It's like comparing a Geo to a Hummer. There is no comparison!

Rating:
Summary: Depending on what you want to do ...
Review: I've been using HD Pro 6.0 for about 9 months now, and as a hobby I've done probably 25 complete home designs of various types and configurations. I also have about as many more that aren't completed, yet.

There have been very few things that I haven't been able to figure out how to represent graphically. But if you're planning to build--hire a professional after you have realized your concept with this program. The program (which is feature-reduced from Chief Architect) isn't quite sufficient for accurate materials lists or for showing proper construction techniques. For those you will need the Chief Architect program, at least. And you will also need to suddenly become a skilled, professional builder or architect. So, if you're not one of those already, go hire a professional and show them what you want (by using the program).

As for the program, it is as complete and as easy to use as any of the others. I have used 3D Home Architect (the current version), and HD Suite/Pro are superior. The "Pro" version, at about $500, isn't for the beginner, but I do question exactly who it is best positioned for. Pros would need Chief, and the tinkerer cannot justify $500. I bought it mainly for the abilitiy to create custom roofs (which Suite won't do), among other things.

As for defects in the software--there is NO defect-free software. The question is: do the defects seriously imapct your ability to get useful work done? I would say no, but if you're doing anything with curved walls--beware! These are the most "twitchy" part of the program, and I have easily crashed the program a hundred of times. Fortunately, the program does auto-save, and I habitually save my plan many, many times while editing, anyway. I can almost predict when the program will get into trouble, just by the way it behaves. For straightforward things you should not have a problem. Really.

As for hardware, as long as your PC is 3 years old or newer, you should be fine. You might need to upgrade the memory to 512 MB and replace the video card if you don't have one that supports OpenGL, but an OpenGL video card is less than $100. These days, 256 MB of memory is also well less than $100. Just be aware of these things if you expect fast performance.

Rating:
Summary: Frustrating and not worth the money
Review: I've used a couple of the consumer products in the past; most notably, 3D Home Architect (v4 & prior) by ART and Architectural Series 18 by Punch. Both these products were probably the best in the <$100 market for the home user. 3DHA was sold to Broderbund and they messed up v5 so bad that I've never seen so many unanimous negative reviews for a piece of software. AS18 v6 is showing its age, although they have a newer AS3000 which I have not seen.
Fortunately, ART stayed together and started creating professional products (Chief Architect line)and now has home and semi-pro products marketed under the BHG label. The home user product is Home Designer Suite 6 and the semi-pro product is HD Pro 6 - which I am now using. ...
I went with HDP6 and absolutely love it! It blows away all the home user products. It's fast, stable, has a ton of features and is very configurable. Everything I wished I could do in AS18 is easily done in HDP6. I'll just give one example to illustrate: Exterior walls can be configured to have up to 10 layers. Starting form the inside you can define sheetrock, studs, sheathing, Tyvek and then siding. That's only 5 layers. Each layer can then be described more fully by width, material type, color, etc. This is typical of the rest of the program.
I know the Pro version is 3-4X the cost of the typical home user product but it can handle custom homes with ease. If cost is an issue, try HDS6. I would expect the core designing tasks to be identical, minus some options. They have a 30 day, no-questions asked, money back policy which got me to try it. Needless to say I'm not returning it and I doubt anyone else would if they try it.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Pro-sumer product out there!
Review: I've used a couple of the consumer products in the past; most notably, 3D Home Architect (v4 & prior) by ART and Architectural Series 18 by Punch. Both these products were probably the best in the <$100 market for the home user. 3DHA was sold to Broderbund and they messed up v5 so bad that I've never seen so many unanimous negative reviews for a piece of software. AS18 v6 is showing its age, although they have a newer AS3000 which I have not seen.
Fortunately, ART stayed together and started creating professional products (Chief Architect line)and now has home and semi-pro products marketed under the BHG label. The home user product is Home Designer Suite 6 and the semi-pro product is HD Pro 6 - which I am now using. ...
I went with HDP6 and absolutely love it! It blows away all the home user products. It's fast, stable, has a ton of features and is very configurable. Everything I wished I could do in AS18 is easily done in HDP6. I'll just give one example to illustrate: Exterior walls can be configured to have up to 10 layers. Starting form the inside you can define sheetrock, studs, sheathing, Tyvek and then siding. That's only 5 layers. Each layer can then be described more fully by width, material type, color, etc. This is typical of the rest of the program.
I know the Pro version is 3-4X the cost of the typical home user product but it can handle custom homes with ease. If cost is an issue, try HDS6. I would expect the core designing tasks to be identical, minus some options. They have a 30 day, no-questions asked, money back policy which got me to try it. Needless to say I'm not returning it and I doubt anyone else would if they try it.

Rating:
Summary: Frustrating and not worth the money
Review: The number of bugs in this program is unbelievable. After using it for 6 months, I have spent hundreds of hours fixing problems due to software bugs or restarting the program after it crashes. I'm running it on a new computer with XP, a faster processor and far more memory than the minimum that the vendor requires.

The print functions do not all work. For example, one function allows you to print a cut-out of your design, which you can then cut with scissors, fold, and tape together. That would be great...however only 3 of 4 walls will ever print. I have never therefore been able to use this function. Even more frustrating is the bug that does not actually save your work even if you have saved prior to shutdown. I have re-drawn the same features 4 times in one plan, simply because the program will not save the changes, or it will only save some of the changes.

Also, the hardware key (dongle) takes up one of my USB ports and only works if I reboot my computer after inserting it. Even then, sometimes I have to remove and replace it multiple times.

I wish I could recommend an alternative.