Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)... but still not quite great.
The short version: About the closest I can come to a recommendation for it is this: everything else I've tried is much worse. Punch! is a waste of money and the 2 or 3 other packages I tried before that were even worse. So Chief Architect wins the race but only by default.
It has a pretty decent user interface but I get so annoyed by the constant signs of money grubbing by Chief Architect. They don't add features to make the more expensive versions valuable enough to buy, they disable trivial/expected features in the cheaper versions in the hopes that you'll be so annoyed with it that you'll spend money for the "better" version.
Some examples:
They disable ledger sized printing in Home Designer Essentials. I have a really nice 11x17 color inkjet printer. The paper size is there in the printer properties dialog, but they prevent it from being used. It pops up a dialog telling me I can't print that size. To get around that I have to make the Home Designer window full-screen, hit Alt-PrintScreen and then open Paint.NET and paste the screen capture as a new image. Then I have to crop the window borders and menus from the image. Then I can print it ledger sized. Every time I want to print our plan I get that little jab in the eye from Chief Architect saying "give us more money and we'll stop jabbing you" :\
Another dumb one - it doesn't save your toolbar settings when you exit the program. It's not the end of the world to have to keep restoring the tape measure, the door styles, the window styles etc. every time I start it up but it's just another reminder every time I use the program that "for only another $250 we'll stop poking your in the other eye" mentality.
They just pick really pointless things to disable and they do it just for the annoyance factor, not because it costs them more to produce or support. If it had a limit on the number of square feet in the design or if they added extra libraries and the ability to do spiral staircases in more expensive versions then it would seem reasonable to charge more for more capable versions.
The good news is that if you can ignore the constant reminders that they want more money from you, it works pretty well. The user interface for constructing the plan is quite good, definitely light years ahead of Punch! It can usually figure out what you're trying to do and the objects behave pretty much as expected, cabinets try to stick to walls, walls join together as expected.
The less than wonderful technical bits:
It has fairly limited libraries and is missing some pretty obvious objects in them. For example it has no bathroom vanity. If you want a standard vanity like at the home improvement store you have to build it out of multiple cabinets, add a counter top and add a sink and faucet to it. I'd guess that about 30% of the items you'd expect to find in the libraries won't be there.
If you fiddle around with the camera position/height/angle too much you'll get it into a state where the perspective is so distorted that you'll have to close the 3D view and open it again.
The rendering is slow and pretty low quality - it's about video game quality circa 2000 which is to say somewhat crude looking/pixellated. The default coloring and lighting is really bogus, floor coverings and wall colors that look okay in the library browser look very dark and muddy when applied to the model. A faster video card doesn't help the rendering either, I'm running a $300 HD6950 video card. The rendering is CPU bound. Even with an E8400 processor it takes more than 30 seconds to render a fairly simple model in high quality. That's on a 2400 sq ft ranch style without any landscaping or terrain. If you're planning on designing a three story 5,000 sq ft McMansion you better bring an alarm clock.
The upgrade from V9.6 to 10 corrupted some of the library objects and textures. It also seems to have fewer objects in the libraries though I don't know that for sure.
It uses a binary file format so you can't search plans or compare alternative designs using text tools like you could if it were in .xml. You laugh, but after you've been working on your plan for 6 months and you've got a bunch of different .plan files saved you'll really wish you could search the plans for the one with a note in it that says "With bathroom rotated 180 degrees" or something like that. It doesn't generate previews so you can't quickly flip through the plans to look for the one you want. The only way you can find which file you've saved a specific change in is either use that for the file name (which isn't feasible if you've made more than one change) or else keep a separate .txt file with your own crib notes on which file contains which alternatives.
Putting the "get off my lawn" factor aside, it's a decent quality package and it's *much* better bang for the buck than anything else I tried.
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Home Designer Essentials is an entry-level title to help you with your home design, remodel and landscaping projects. With over 4,000 library items you can create your perfect design. It's fun and easy--start your project today! Professional tools for designing your dream home. View larger.
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