Customer Reviews

Better Homes and Gardens Landscaping and Deck Designer [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

After extensive research, I eventually concluded that nothing really good existed in the low end consumer world of Landscape Design software, but I held out great hope that Better Homes and Gardens Landscaping and Deck Designer would be different.

So I took a chance and bought it from Amazon in April. and After some initial delays in actually getting the product, it was worth the wait! This software has blown me away after using it just two days now!!

This is the newest 7.x version of the landscaping modules first introduced in the BH&G 6.x home designed suite. The new version, just recently released in Mar/Apr 2005 by Chief Architect for BH&G is now standalond landscaping and deck design product. I suspect a 7.x home designer suite will eventually follow.

It is clear that this software has inherited many good things from its more professional rooted product line at Chief Architect.

This latest Landscape and Deck designer is really easy to use. It comes with a program CD and tutorial CD. After a quick and easy installation process ... I found myself able to use this software quite quickly.

This worked for me, since I despise reading confusing manuals and going through endless tutorials ... this software was easy enought to "figure out", with a little help from the tutorial videos and the help subsystem.

Each video clip on the tutorial CD is only 2-4 minutes in duration and shows how to do several useful things at a time. This "show and tell" approach to learning really worked for me. I watch a quick video -- then I go do it myself.

Unlike other tutorials, this one is quick and to the point. You won't spend more than 30-45 minutes to watch all of the videos included. I reccomend watching the first 1-3 videos, then go try the program yourself, then come back to the tutorial videos a finish them off after you have an initial grasp of the program.

There is also a more comprehensive help utility where you can look up individual topics by topic or search for things within the help system ... very good overall.

This program is easy to use and the 3D capabilities are very impressive. I had my new home' irregular shapes lot laid out and my new home located on that lot to within half foot precision in the first night of use. You almost fool yourself into thinking this program is more than just landscaping, but there are certainly limits, but reasonable ones.

I was zooming around my lot and house in 3D on the first night of use. The house roof wasn't exactly correct, but very close ... and thats where the landscaping program meets its limits ... you can't really make the house architechturally correct from top to bottom, but very accurate dimensionally and certainly good for planning your landscape and/or deck.

You can even take an actual picture and mask out the surrounding and paste that picture onto your 3D model of the house. That really makes the product yield realistic looking models. And I did that one side of the house on my first night of using it.

You can save pictures of your 3D drawing to files, you can even make a motion video tour of your landscape ideas. I was blown away by the capabilities. I can't wait to get home and see what else I can do.

I didn't get into the landscaping till day 2. By the end of Day 2, I had an initial landscape layout 80% completed. This program is very usable and probably could be used by a pro if they didn't have the budget for the $1000+ software out there.

I can't say enough good things about this software. It should be a top seller within 1 year, if others feel the same as I do. My hats off to BH&G and Chief Architect -- "home run" guys.

As a designer and general contractor who has for many years relied on Chief Architect professional level CAD software, I nevertheless decided, when it came time for me to research consumer-level home design and landscaping products (as I am frequently asked to recommend these products), that I would evaluate those by other companies, as well.

I'm happy to report that the BH&G products won out. I was amazed to see how much Chief Architect capability has been incorporated into its consumer level products, marketed under the illustrious Better Homes & Gardens name. I am thoroughly impressed with how useable these programs are and how quickly non-professionals are able to learn them. The quality of the output is stunning and, as far as I'm concerned, the Chief Architect based products far surpass the competition in terms of integration and useability.

The unexpected outcome of my evaluation is that I deem these products, despite being consumer oriented software, to be of sufficiently high quality that I can use them in the office as ancillary products for interns and short-term employees to use. The output from Home Designer Pro can then even be opened in Chief Architect for further work by professionals. The Home Designer series is a boon for the consumer and the professional alike. In this day and age it's nice to see software developers who take their craft seriously and who are responsive to their customers, and to acknowledge that rare quality I've taken the time to write this review.

Jay Palmer
New York, NY

I've bought Landscaping & Deck Designer to play with what-if scenarios in our back yard. It is a simple yard, with a lawn, patio, retaining wall that doubles as a bench, and a few plant beds on the side.

The program worked well for architectural-type tasks such as specifying rooms, decks, doors & windows. It was quite cumbersome for any landscaping tasls. For example: you couldn't easily specify a foot-tall retaining wall. I had to resort to hacks such as hidden wall creation with a mystery polygon overlay to create an illusion that the wall is there.

To lay down a patio, you'd create an room in your backyard, and paint it with flagstone texture. There was no tool to help you lay down a path, or a couple of stones, everything was a "room".

The designers obviously grafted a landscaping module onto an house design software. It works well if you'd like to see how a few trees & bushes will look next to your house, but is not suited well for detailed landscape design, with curvy paths, flagstones, fountains, or retaining walls.

I bought this software with high hopes but ultimately ended up returning it after running into limitations that made finishing my design project impossible. My situation: I am landscaping my backyard with 4 raised planter beds, a flagstone path, small paving stone ground-level patio, and a small fish pond in a raised planting bed surrounded by stone. Existing backyard features include a fence, tree, raised concrete porch attached to the back of my house.

Creating a serviceable exterior facade of my house was reasonably straightforward, after I got the foundation offset right. The caveat - when editing default dimensions in your plans, be sure to delete the (d) symbol. Merely changing the number will not affect the dimensioning, and it will revert to the default value. This is not documented in the included booklet, but I found it on the support website.

The 3D views work well, although (perplexingly) this product is not hardware accelerated and supports real-time 3D only in a low quality mode. Still, the software developer in me chalks this up to ease of implementation and widest hardware compatability, so this is excuseable.

Basic modification of the backyard was fine (placing the tree and fence), but at this point I ran into problems:

The raised planter beds - retaining walls are supported in the context of the contoured landscape mode, however my yard is flat, and the software does not consider low raised walls around planting beds as "retaining" walls. The hack is to use the generalized "landscape feature", which is drawing tool that allows you to create simple extruded shapes. However, these are not "walls" from the software's perspective.

The raised fish pond - same issue as the planter beds.

Flagstone path - the 2D overhead view of the path worked well, but to my surprise there are no tools for estimating the amount of materials needed. Have 16" flagstones and a curving path? Want to know how many stones you need? Me too. This ties into a general gripe I have with the software - lack of standard CAD features. The ability to measure areas, volumes, and so on is one of the main reasons CAD is even useful, and these features (by their phone support tech's admission) are completely absent in any meaningful sense. Other standard CAD features such as hierarchical groups of objects are also missing, as are copy/pasting of anything other than individual objects.

Paver patio - curiously, outdoor hard surfaces are implemented as "floors" with hidden walls, as documented in the (well produced) help videos. For a landscape program this feels like a strange hack, and falls prey to the CAD limitations above when attempting a materials estimate.

To summarize: I quickly hit a point where the lack of what I consider standard CAD features made the software irrelevant to my project. If you just want to get an idea of the general look of several design alternatives it may work quite well for you, but for serious materials estimates it falls short. Chief Architect's 30-day satisfaction guarantee is quite generous and their support reps are friendly, so I don't feel like the experience was a waste. However, I will probably not purchase landscaping software in the future without first verifying its ability to do "proper" area and volume calculations.

From the online reviews I decided to purchase Landscaping and Deck Designer ver. 7.01. I have to warn you that if you have an odd shaped lot you'll run into a problem with the software. If you have to make fence angles that aren't at 90 degrees perpendicular to each other you may not be able to draw a fence that is exactly shaped like yours. I have an odd shaped lot and when I tried to make the fence angles the same as mine the drawn fences only rotate in 7 1/2 degree increments. This means you either have to make a lot size bigger or smaller than what your actual lot size is. The work around is to draw a lot size bigger than yours then manually draw your actual fence lines. I confirmed with their tech support that the software works that way.

All in all This program appears to be the best of what is available for landscaping and deck design. I found it easy to learn and implement except for some roof and elevation problems (which were unable to be resolved adequately). For Californians and many western region locales without gable or hip roofs it can be difficult to design your exact building, but this is the landscape and deck portion and not the entire building program. It does allow you to quickly design most landscape and deck designs possible and the 3D is drawn quickly and the detail is excellent. Trees and plants for many California locales are lacking, but it is possible to use a variety of trees/plants that will give you a good idea of what you are after. I found minor imperfections that were difficult to overcome in elevations but compared to what is available without learning a CAD program this is a bargain for the money paid.

If you could buy, from Better Homes and Gardens, supplemental lists of plants and fence designs commonly seen in California or the arid west, that would be great. Its plant selection is very Eastern/Midwest focused. There are no western junipers, star jasmine, mexican bush sage, lavendar, wisteria, salvia, pyrocantha, agapanthus, - very standard Home Depot type plants for us - I haven't checked yet for other favorites like bouganvillea or weeping Japanese cherry. It would not let me place fences on lot borders that weren't square - although I could approximate with curved fences - and the program couldn't handle our house roof, which is a very simple mostly flat-roofed Eichler with peak roofs in the central portion. Perhaps there will be a version 2. It worked for my basic need which is seeing how a new fence might look in the front yard. But the fence selections were meager, and to my disappointment there was no way to design a fence gate. What's a California landscape without its weathered redwood fence and gate? Nevertheless I had fun with it and like it as a basic "what if" tool. Worth $40. Be prepared to spend a lot of time learning to tweak it.

The engine behind this program is from Chief Architect, who, from what I understand, are developers of professional CAD software. It shows in this program.

While this program has one of the best 3D walk around and capabilities, I tend to judge this and others by the drawing tools that it possesses. And this one has some good usable tools.

Like most consumer level landscaping programs, this one has photo import so you can design around an actual photo of your home. Unlike other programs, the BHG software allows you to import and mask your own plant images. This is a great feature that my own program has which gives much better visualization with plants you might actually use.

All the important stuff that we need to create a sellable visual landscape is there. For now, and with the choices I know of that are available to you, I find this to be the best consumer level landscape and garden program out there.

This design software comes with an easy to understand tutorial CD. It was easy to install and start using right away. I think most folks would do quite well with this one.

I have tried several consumer landscape design programs and this one is better than most in some areas, notably ease of building houses and decks. But if you are looking for something for designing plantings, this is not it. Its plant selections was woefully inadequate. Most of the plants I needed (which are very common in the Southern California area) were not available, or in very limited varieties. I ended up having to import most of my plants from pictures and that works O.K., but it's a lot of work and a pain to find a good picture of the plant I need. I imagine the plant selection would be just as dire in other parts of the country, because this program has by far the fewest number of plants available.

Review the tutorials - that's important.
Annotate the book because it doesn't include some key commands used in the tutorial
Be careful to check dimensions of drawings; it's NOT as sophisticated as CAD and there are distinct limitations.
However, there are some handy pre-packaged tools.