Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 6.0 [OLD VERSION]

by Chief Architect

Product Features

• Inspire your designs with the Design Planning Center
• Create a virtual walk-through of your house
• Design and visualize in 3D
• Choose from a library of more than 4,300 items for your designs
• Generate automatic material lists for project cost estimating

Product Details

Data Sheet [2.51mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000DIEKZ
• Item model number: 045-501-CAN
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 25, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,908 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #31 in Software > Home & Hobbies > Gardening & Landscape
  • #99 in Software > Home & Hobbies > Home Design

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

No matter your level of design expertise, Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 6.0 will get you moving toward a stunningly visulaized design of your dream home. The Getting Started Tutorial will guide you through basic design projects. Watch more than 30 videos for step-by-step instructions. Select from over 1,500 sample home plans or use the House Wizard to design your house. This is The complete home design solution. You can create your dream home today with the look and feel before it is built with styles, colors, wallpaper, flooring, and materials. Plus, you can quickly place and arrange walls, windows, doors, cabinets, and architectural objects from a library of over 4,300 items to create a 3D Model in minutes. Use the Library content to size your rooms, evaluate traffic flow, and create a visual model of your design.

Create your Dream Home Design your dream home today with Home Designer. Quickly place and arrange walls, windows, doors, cabinets, choose colors, place furniture, create decks and landscaping. Design and visualize your home with 3D Models and Virtual Tours.	Choose from Design Templates Begin your design by choosing from one of six Better Homes and Gardens home style templates that range from traditional to contemporary, complete with colors, cabinets, and moldings.

Powerful Home Design Software Enjoy the same building and design tools the professionals use – Home Designer is made for the home enthusiasts. Powerful building tools like automatic roof generation, stairs, decks, framing, CAD, dimensioning, realistic 3D models, and Plan Check makes it easy for anyone.	Create Floor Plans Select from over 1,500 sample home plans or use the House Wizard to design your house. Open sample plans and customize to your specific needs.

Design Tools Enhance your designs with the Better Homes and Gardens Design Planning Center. Use Material Painter to create a virtual look and feel of the design before it is built with actual colors, wallpaper, flooring, furniture, windows, and window treatments.	Building Tools Complete automatic building tools for roof generation, framing, dimensioning, foundations, and more. Automatically generate a materials list for project cost estimating. Includes a complete set of CAD (Computer Aided Design) tools to detail designs and Plan Check, which automatically validates the design against standard building principles.

What's in the box:
Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 6.0 on CD, with a guide to getting started.

Product Description

HOME DESIGN SOFTWARE HELPS YOU DREAM, DESIGN, PLAN

Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 6.0 is software developed by Chief Architect® for home enthusiast remodeling and home design projects. Home Designer is based on the award-winning 3D Home Architect® and the professional Chief Architect® products created by Chief Architect. Combining the leading edge home design software with the consumer design editorial expertise of Better Homes and Gardens, we have produced the best software tool for home and remodeling design.

• Inspire your designs with the Better Homes and Gardens Design Planning Center
• Create a Virtual Walk-Through of your home design
• Design and visualize in 3D
• Choose from a Library of more than 4,300 items for your designs
• Generate an Automatic Material List for project cost estimating

3D MODELS AND VIRTUAL TOURS

• Produce realistic images of your designs and remodeling projects
• Glass House™ View provides a translucent view of the interior & exterior
• Doll House™ View, a 3D view without the roof, provides a tool for space planning
• Create and take a Virtual Walk-Through of your house
• Individual picture (renders) of your design can be saved in any image format
• Visualize your home with day and night views
• Print and assemble a scale model of your design with Model Maker™
• Generate shadows from the sun for realistic 3D views

DESIGN TOOLS

• The Design Planning Center helps guide you with decorating guidelines and tips
• Over 1,500 sample plans to inspire your design
• Create a virtual look and feel with colors, wallpaper, flooring, furniture etc.
• Material Painter™ allows you to apply different materials to individual items
• Define your own lighting and electrical plan

BUILDING TOOLS

• Choose from 6 Better Homes and Gardens style templates
• The Build House Wizard™ provides a quick way to layout adjoining rooms
• The library contains over 4,300 items including windows, doors, cabinets and more
• Automatically generate a Materials List into a spreadsheet for project estimating
• Automatic building tools for roof generation, framing, dimensioning, foundations and electrical outlet placement
• Easily design kitchens with plans and 3D layouts
• Create complete customized cabinets with drag-and-drop
• Detail cabinets with wood type, countertop material, door/drawer styles and more
• A complete set of CAD tools to detail designs
• Plan Check™ - automatically validates the design against standard building principles

LANDSCAPING AND DECK TOOLS

• Landscape design tools to create hills and valleys for custom landscapes
• Fence, Garden, Driveway, Path, and other Terrain Feature tools
• Create Plot and Perimeter Plans on flat or hillside lots and generate a 3D model
• Deck tools; post-and-beam foundation are automatically generated to match your lot
• Select from over 1,000 plants, terrain and outdoor items from the landscaping Library

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

268 of 270 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very solid product, October 27, 2003

By 

E. Guang "Lost and 24 fan" (Phoenix, AZ (USA)) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 6.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I was looking for a software that would let me create a good design of my new house. I am not an architect and I am not interested in details such as plumbing, electrical, framing etc. I just wanted to create the walls, add the doors windows, furniture, stairs, roof, etc.

This software can do all of these easily, no bugs, no frustration, everything fits or can be rezized. So far I am 80% done with my house. I have had no crashes when I use it with my desktop (2.6 GHZ P4, 256 RAM, GeForce FX5200). But it crashes when I use it with my Laptop (P4 1.8 GHZ, 512RAM but a mobility ATI radeon). The error message says it crashed because of my video card and it happens when switching to 3d view.

To see the good about this software read the marketing review, I strongly agree in all of them. I'll list only my complains:
- Not 100% of the objects can be copy/paste from one plan to the other.
- When you start a design make sure you carefully select the template plan. The template plan gives properties to the objects (cabinets, tables, walls, etc). Because when you are half way in your design and realize that you want some object (ie fancy railings) that is not available in your template but it is in another, you also realize that you cannot change the template of the plan you are currently using. You can open a new plan with the correct template, add the object and do a copy and paste, but not all objects can be copy and pasted (ie. Railings).
- When you switch to 3d view it recalculates everything. This gets annoying and slow when your project is almost finished.
- So far i do not see a solution to adding new objects. For example a new door style, a new sofa style. The publisher does not have an online database where they can add new styles for users to keep their design updated.

The software is pricy but it is the best I have used. Granted that I have not used the punch software. I have wasted 15/20$ at a time buying low cost software on the software bins

230 of 247 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Leaves much to be desired, February 23, 2004

By 

C. Raff "curtis_r" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 6.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

A few years ago, when designing 2 rooms at my office, I became fluent in most of the off-the-shelf, under $100 design programs. I recall switching between 2 applications that each had great features, and would have made a perfect product if merged. One was 3D Home Architect 3, the other (which I can't recall the name) had some similarities to Home Designer 6. Having just tried 3D Home Architect 5 & Home Designer 6, I still have the same feeling: each has very strong & very weak points.

Having now sampled both applications, I can't seem to figure how so many people posted hate for 3DHA. I think it's a tie between the two.

My big criticism w/ HD6 is that you cannot manually change wall dimensions. It was incredibly tedious to recreate rooms based on the dimensions I had. Apparently, the pro version ($500) allows this function, but I wasn't going to pay that for my little project. When you click a wall you've created in 3DHA, it displays measurements to every other nearby wall. You then can click any of those measurements to resize it manually. This is the absolute most logical way to get exact measurements.

In HD6, the library of items is pretty skimpy compared to 3DHA. 3DHA easily allows custom items to show in the 'library' so it's easy to reuse them.

As for the 3D rendering, 3DHA really sucks. It is incredibly difficult to get the camera view into custom positions. This is where HD6 is best. You can arrange multiple cameras in your layout, each corresponding to another rendered window. You can also double-click the camera in the layout & it brings up other view settings such as height & field of vision angle.

As for working w/ your layout, 3DHA allows you to drag a selection tool over multiple items, creating a multiple selection. You can then move all of those items at once, or select their properties. For changing the color of multiple items, this is great. HD6 does not allow you to select multiple items & then change characteristics of them. Imagine having a room you want to change the color of all of the cabinets. According to my findings, in HD6 you'd have to change each cabinet one by one. In 3DHA you would just hold the shift key & select all of the cabinets, then make your changes.

Maybe I'm asking for too much from <$100 programs, but it sure seems both programs make it much harder to do things then they have to.

54 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It was very helpful, but limited in scope, November 24, 2004

By 

B. Keller (Granite Bay, USofA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 6.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

After reading each of the reviews for this product and competing products, and then purchasing and using this software, I would suggest to any potential buyer that they use an old statistical averaging method to get a fix on the Home Designer software. Read all of the reviews, and then throw out the "OMIGOD! THIS IS THE BEST SOFTWARE EVER INVENTED!" noise, and do the same with the slam reviews.
This is a three to four star product, depending upon how deep is the level that you want to go in configuring your project. The program is fairly intuitive and easy to learn on the fly, with useful help information and a user manual that allows for quick reference instead of tech-speak, however the available features and the library are very limited.
I needed a program that would allow me to visualize the essence of the remodel work that we are planning, and this product did achieve that goal. The various perspectives are a fun way to view your project after you have completed the setup work, and you can remodel in various ways and compare the views. This program would also be useful for someone who wants to provide a "sketch" of their proposed work to a designer or contractor and then let the pro take over from there, hopefully with a much sharper idea of what you are trying to achieve.
In a nutshell, it's a little pricey for a hobby software (check for rebates or discounts), but when compared with the overall cost of a remodel project or home building project it may save you significant costs in midcourse design changes and mistakes. It has some WOW factor with it's 3D, dollhouse and glass house, interior and exterior views, so you can amaze and delight your friends and neighbors, who will put you on the technology pedestal we all crave so much (yeah...c'mon...admit it). Sit down with a cold beer, plug it in, learn it, use it, enjoy it, just don't expect too much.