Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Pro 6 review:5 stars (3D View Feature Helped Us Avoid Some Serious Design Mistakes) - I found Home Designer Pro 6 to be an excellent choice for software to design my new house. While this software does not have all the features of Chief Architect's more sophisticated software, Chief Architect 10, or AutoCad's architectural version, neither does it have the substantially higher cost. I found this software easy to use to design the floor plan. I was able to use either Home Designer Pro 6 tools or CAD tools. Since I had already drawn a house plan using AutoCad's AutoSketch software, it was easy for me to import the DXF file format into Home Designer Pro 6 and get started. My wife and I particularly found the 3D view feature to be an excellent one. Often, when we looked at all the angles of a room in our floor plan in 3D view, for example, our kitchen, we discovered that we needed or wanted to redesign the layout or size of that room. For example, we were able to view what a person would see once they entered the front door of our "new" house in a panorama of views. What we saw the first time caused us to move some walls, creating a more pleasant, "first impression" view. I would highly recommend this software to anyone planning to build a custom house. With our completed design using this software, my wife and I have something substantive that we can give to a draftsman to draw up a final set of plans. This should save us consider time and expense for drafting and get construction on our house started sooner. 4 stars (Depending on what you want to do ...) - 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.3 stars (Mostly good with a few flaws...) - 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.


Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Pro 6 Features:
Computer software (programs)
Home Design
Layout
House Floor Plans (Planning)
Interior Design
Improvement (1-2-3)
CD
High-quality software for home design, remodeling, and landscaping
Inspire your designs with Better Homes and Gardens design planning center
Create a virtual walk-through; design and visualize in 3D
Automatic material list for project-cost estimating
Library of more than 4,300 items; 70+ training tutorial videos included

Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Pro 6 is the CD-ROM version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around 459.99USD.