Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Deluxe Description:

Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Deluxe review:
4 stars (Good for Basic Planning) - I am not an architect, but I enjoy designing houses for fun. For my purposes, this software is good enough (better than I expected, actually) and I have spent happy hours laying out floor plans for various designs.



It is true that it is not entirely customizable, by which I mean (as another reviewer pointed out) you cannot customize wall heights easily, have a limited range of roof options, etc., and this can be frustrating. You can still do quite a bit with the specifications dialogues for each object and by fiddling around, and I have been able to do most of what I want, if not perfectly. There are more expensive products out there that give you more flexibilty. However, I am not planning to build from these designs myself, and am not so interested in getting all the specific details into the designs that I develop--probably because I know what I have in mind and can make a note with the text tool on the plan to remind me.



What I am interested in is laying out floor plans and seeing how they work. This I can do with this software. You can draw the floorplan by using the house wizard, which has preprogrammed rooms (that can be resized by clicking and dragging) that you select and simply place, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, into your design. Or you can draw walls with your mouse and build your design that way, as if you were drawing it on paper (which is what I prefer).



Once you have drawn your floor plan, you can see it in various views. The dollhouse view lets me see a 3D image of any floor of the whole house with the "roof off", as it were, which I really like. There are also glass house and floor camera views. The way it works is you select one of these, click on the floor plan, and draw a line of perspective. The program then converts this view into 3D to give you a view from the inside of that perpective.



The glass house view, though not a walk-through per se, gives a pretty good sense of what rooms look like from the inside from one to the next (imagine an Xray image in grey tones of a 3d house design--and like an Xray, from one perspective). The floor camera view gives you a 3D close up of a room interior from the inside. This is also from one perspective, as if you took a photo, but you can use the "camera orbit" or "mouse camera" tools in either view to move from the wall in front of you to your left, right, up and down, and can move forward and back.



This works to a point in the glass house view, but is less successful in the floor camera view. The problem is that the software is not smart enough to let you select a specific room and view it as if you were inside it turning around. While you can do this with careful mouse actions, often you will find youself pulling the point of perspective backwards as you try to control the panning view, in effect moving the "camera" into the next room (which can you give you the disconcerting sense of not being sure where you are or how you got there, particularly if you have not decorated the rooms with materials or objects that distinguish one from the next). So, it's often simpler, if more time comsuming, to readjust the placement of the "camera" on your floor plan (which means switching back to the floor plan window)--at least until you get your panning skills down.



One nice thing, though, is that you can change the dimensions of objects such as doors, windows, etc., from within this 3D room view. To do this, click on the "select" arrow (on the left side of your toolbar across the top )and then click on the object. You can then drag and click to change its size or placement in the wall (I use this, for example, to make transom windows). You can also specify dimensions to a point by double clicking on objects to bring up that object's specification dialogue, or can change dimensions on the floor plan by clicking and dragging a door, window, etc., to a different size.



You can also use the 3D tools to see the whole house with (or without) the roof from outside (and you can "spin" the whole house design to see it from all angles). It does have a walkthrough feature, but it is not a true walkthrough and basically requires that you take "snapshots" of each room in 3D and and then play them back as a movie--too much trouble for me, and I have not done it.



The graphics are as one would expect. What you "build" is a bit cartoonish (by which I mean, not photorealistic). The library of objects is large, but the selection within each category is not huge, but has been enough for me (i.e, 6 styles of queen beds, but if you want a canopy bed, for example, you're out of luck). For me--since I am not interior designing with this, per se, it's fine as I have enough objects to generally get an idea of what something would look like-which is what I am after. You do have a reasonable range of materials and colors for walls and floors and such--the greater limitation is in the options for the objects design/style.



However, the bottom line for me is that I was not willing to pay $300+ for the Pro version and even less willing to pay $1400+ for Chief Architect (though if anyone from the company is reading and wants to give me a copy of CA to review from the general consumer perspective, do get in touch). What I wanted, as I said earlier, was software to help me design and envision buildings for fun--and for the price, am really happy enough.
2 stars (Over Priced...!!!!!!??) - Not all that much. Lacks some basic features like varying wall heights and the Terrain functions not user friendly. Like I said...for what you get...to much $$$.

It can be fun to use, but for anyone seriously looking for a House "PLANNING" program...keep looking. You will most likely pay mnore for a good tool, but you know/knew that anyways...;)



btw...

To qualify my opinion/rating:

I have combined experience in Carpentry of 30 years and Software QA Engineering for 12 years.
5 stars (Peerless at the price) - This software is easy to learn and use. I was up and runing the first day. That said any software competance comes from the end-user but the provided CDROM Tutorials, Users Guide, Web and Tech support I was able to make it do everything it is designed to do reasonabley quickly (You get out what you put in)for the more advanced tools.