Chief Architect Home Designer 9.0
- Chief Architect Home Designer helps you with the basics to design, remodel or add landscaping to your home: Home Design, Remodeling, Interiors, Kitchens & Baths
- Design in 3D and 2D Plan View simultaneously and visualize your design ideas in 3D
- Visualize flooring styles, countertops, cabinets and new interior design styles
- Standard CAD tools, automatic roof generation, dormers, stairs, framing, foundations
- 3,600 new realistic plants with plant encyclopedia data from tropical to desert
Product Description
Home Designer 9.0 is the latest release from Chief Architect, leader in the Professional Home Design Software Industry, now with a new consumer focus just for you! Creating your dream home has never been so easy with Home Designer 9.0. Choose from one of over 500 sample plans to inspire your ideas or build your own. Quickly place and arrange walls, windows, doors, furniture, create decks and landscaping. Then visualize what your project will look like with 3D models and Virtual tours. When remodeling, you can move a wall, change a color, add a room, redesign a kitchen, and estimate the costs before you build. You can design in 2D or 3D and automatically calculate square footage. Customize windows and doors with lites, sashes, casings, and shutters, window treatments and more. Automatically generate roofs, framing, dimensioning, foundations, and stairs. Use Edit Area to select, move, edit, and copy entire regions of your design and Create Rendered Cr… More >>
Chief Architect Home Designer 9.0
was able to download program but it wouldnt install. hours on the phone with amazon technicians and chief architect technicians, both of which didn’t recognize the error message and blamed the other company for the problem, and both of which refused to refund my money. Amazon really dropped the ball here, and I will not be ordering from them again. I have never been so unsatisfied with any business transaction in my life.
I love this application, and have been using it for years under older versions (4.5 and earlier). Upgrading to version 9.0 is a HUGE improvement over the old ones – there are so many more features, and the graphics are unbelievably fast compared to the old versions. I love the huge number of library items you can add to customize your design. The improved camera tools make looking at your design very easy. I like the ‘glass house’ view too. And the final rendered views look great. Deck and landscaping design has greatly improved too, with great flexibility.
Minor irritations: It is very frustrating trying to build a house to exact measurements, due to the overpowering ’snap’ feature, which I can’t seem to turn off effectively – you can temporarily disable it, but it also disables all the other features so the wall you’re resizing winds up separating from all the other walls. Very frustrating. Also, in trying to create a section of a room that is slightly raised from the rest, it doesn’t display correctly on the views – the room is drawn without any floor.
These are minor inconveniences in an otherwise fantastic product.
I purchased this software and could not get it running due to the MacAfee Security Center software that I have installed on my machine. I spent a substantial amount of time with the Chief Architect software support engineer. He was unable to help me get this running. He acknowledged that this is a problem. As a test, we were able to install the software on my wife’s PC that has Norton security software installed on it. It was able to work but that is not the platform for which I purchased the software. Please note this limitation.
I’ve been working on a rather large project involving the design/layout of several custom buildings. I’ve been using some pretty old CAD software, both 2D and 3D to rough out my designs. A year ago I splurged and bought a program specifically for house/architectural design.. I was excited about it. and it took a while to get comfortable with the new format and eventually I got going on redoing all my previous drawings.
Though it was much better than what I had, it was still lacking…
About mid summer I was watching for the upgraded version of that same program to be discounted…and was nearly ready to buy…..
Just a few days before I had intended to place the order I got an email of features from Amazon and just on a lark clicked on the link for the Home Designer software being offered.
I went to the page and saw the video and just sat here gap jawed.. then I read the reviews.. and I was sold…
Now.. to be fair the video is a bit misleading. It shows all the features of all their programs, not telling you just exactly what you can, or can’t do, with a given package. I bought the low end product and I admit that I was disappointed when I found that it didn’t do EVERYTHING in the video… and when you go through the tutorials.. you have to watch for the little logo on the bottom of the screen to see if what they are discussing is included in your version.. but other than that….
It’s wonderful. The learning curve isn’t too bad. Watch the tutorials and play around a bit with a practice project until you get used to how things work. Once you get the hang of it layout and customizing goes very quickly…
The detail in how you can do interior layout of the rooms and even outdoor areas makes it really fun to work with, you can SEE what the furniture will look like in the room.
There are plenty of ways that you can customize objects and such within their software so that you can get pretty close to furniture size and such to approximate your own pieces.
One feature that I VERY much wanted, and found is not in the version I purchased.. was to import objects that I created in my other software. Since this package doesn’t include that feature, I’m saving up to upgrade. Since the drawings that I’m working on now can be imported into the upgrade I’m not wasting my time in continuing to work, and when I am able to upgrade I will then be able to use my own object designs as well.
The walk through feature, I must add, is a blast… to layout a ‘dream design’ that has only lived in your mind.. and then be able to do a virtual walk through… makes it all worthwhile!
I purchased this for my 11 Year Old Daughter to design houses. It is very addicting and easy to use. She self taught herself how to use it and is now designing dream houses. It is a good product for getting down the dream so others can see it.