Browse Forums General Discussion Re: Design software 3Jan 23, 2013 4:47 pm Sketchup is good if you have had previous cad drafting skills and you spend some time researching a few of the add-ins designed to home building. I write software for a living and find sketchup very powerful but just too generic for my liking. Tried 3D Home Architect, Punch and eventually settled on turbofloorplan3d. Retails for $99 but can be found for cheaper (try Harvey Norman). Try to get the Australian version as it has metric windows, australian-type walls and australian flora. All three as purpose designed for house design. Turbofloorplan3d is the consumer version (primarily the 3d rendering component) of Envisoneer (http://www.cadsoft.com.au/products.php). Very easy to do floorplans, and with a little effort can produce 3D renders of rooms and exteriors. Very handy if your other half is hopeless at visualising a room. Samples of my kitchen and front elevation from turbofloorplan3D Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ and there is an excellent forum at http://forums.turbofloorplan.com/index.php Regards RiH edit: ah there we go...pictures. Dropbox photos need to be in the public folder to allow anyone to view. Re: Design software 4Feb 02, 2013 9:34 pm I used and recommend Sweet Home 3d ( http://www.sweethome3d.com/index.jsp ). I imported floorplans / pre-plans (as a background image) and used this software to trace the plan for each of the floor levels. This allowed me to get a feel for the sizing of the rooms with furniture/fittings placed in them. In my case I have been predominately talking with a custom builder. The plan that I eventually arrived at is quite different from the plan I was originally given, so it was very useful for visualising concepts. Their designer then used the layouts I came up with to produce a more accurate pre-plan. The image below is an example of the lower floor layout I produced shown in a 3D view. Build thread: here Land Nov 12, Contract 6/07/13, Consent 15/08/13, Start 20/09/13, Slab 25/09/13, Frame 4/10/13, Brick 21/10/13, Roof 2/11/13, Lock-up 17/12/13, Handover 3/3/14 Re: Design software 5Feb 02, 2013 9:39 pm surfprado Google sketchup is pretty good Google sold Google sketchup to another company. From memory, some of the features were crippled ( like export ). At least based on my attempts with it a few months ago. This is obviously to try to get you to buy the 'Pro' version. That was my reason for finding and then using Sweet Home 3d. Build thread: here Land Nov 12, Contract 6/07/13, Consent 15/08/13, Start 20/09/13, Slab 25/09/13, Frame 4/10/13, Brick 21/10/13, Roof 2/11/13, Lock-up 17/12/13, Handover 3/3/14 Re: Design software 6Feb 03, 2013 4:32 pm +1 for SweetHome 3d I also used it to measure out everything in the house including all rooms with furniture to ensure the house had same look and feel. Landscape wise it is not that good but good enough for me. Simple to use for an accountant as its like MS Visio..... If your house has multi levels like mine you can achieve it by making walls heights using lowest reference point and then add boxes (cubes) with teh right dimensions to raise the floor height. I did the same thing for stairs and all. Its free so take a look.... Thank you so much for the effort. We will use it to talk with builder. We also had idea of building duplex instead and seeking suggest ions. viewtopic.php?f=31&t=106744 11 13843 Once you know the basics, the rest is easy. Read my post in the thread linked below. viewtopic.php?p=1919271#p1919271 2 19517 |