Customer Reviews

Chief Architect Landscaping and Deck Designer 9.0 [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

This is a great program considering the price. It is amazing to be able to view my designs in 3D. I am from South Africa, so there are a lot of plants over here that aren't in the program. But its so easy to import plants and pictures that this isn't an issue. It did take me some effort to learn how to use the program, but the tutorials are great and the online help forum is very useful. I have found most of the answers that I've needed in these. I have found a way to overcome all the 'problems' that were mentioned in previous reviews just by going to the Chief Architect Home Designer online forum.

The product seems to have a number of nice features. But even with the 'how-to' videos it seems difficult to use. I work with computers for a living so I'm not computer illiterate. Then there's the issue of support. When I installed it, it wanted me to shut down my firewall so that it could have unfettered access. Come on! In this day and age of automated bots looking for open ports every few seconds, who in his right mind wants to lower his firewall protection to install an application? Why should we have to? Anyway, I didn't, and the application had a problem 'calling home' to activate itself. I immediately put in a support request. It was a Friday at 6:00pm, their support is only open weekday 'banker hours'. I hoped I'd hear back from them at least by the following Monday. I didn't.

I finally, by myself found the right combination of firewall tweaks to let it get through. Either that or something on their end cleared up; I'll never know which it was. It activated and, other than the learning curve I mentioned, seems to work OK. Oh, and I didn't hear back on my support ticket until Tuesday: four days after I put the support ticket in. Not exactly impressive showing of consideration for the customer.

The product gets three stars. The company would get one.

Very nice and very powerful for the price. The only problem is the learning curve. It takes a while to learn but it works extremely well, has an enormous catalog of plants. Its great.

once you get used to it you will love it. but as with any architectual program you really need to take time to learn how to work with the different features.

First, I can't figure out why the previous user who rated this one star had so much trouble when the exact same program in the download version is rated 4 1/2 stars. Yes, this program is not for the casual dyi'er or those expecting a project with a beautiful and professional outcome would be easy to do. That's why landscape architects come at a high price. Sit down with this and go through the tutorials and it will work. Chief Architect website has excellent support and user forum where you can find your answers. Otherwise, just get some binder paper and a pencil and go down to the Home Depot to get your materials and advice. There's a reason why all the other landscape programs on Amazon only have 1 or 2 star ratings.

This is a horrid program, difficult to learn, difficult to use. Let me say that I have worked with various vector-based drawing and CAD type programs for years.

Chief Architect Landscaping and Deck Designer 9.0 is just a module of their full Architect program. Before the landscape can be designed, the house must be built, then the lot must be defined. Fair enough, but the home design function is simply their architect program with limited capabilities. It requires extensive technical knowledge of home construction, far more than the average user might have. Certainly more than I have. Really, can't I pick a wall exterior and height and draw the darned thing? Every facet of each floor must be individually defined and built, one wall section at a time. It's as if you were designing a home to actually be built and not simply an exterior as a backdrop for landscaping. I cannot even describe how awkward and horrible that is to try to do if you do not have extensive knowledge of building.

Once the floors are built, the foundation must be built, but I've never been able to get it to build correctly with the auto build function. Some walls get a raised foundation, others drop to the ground lowering the roof line, doors and windows accordingly. This causes doors to open through exterior steps. Other walls, inexplicably, float in space. I've not been able to find any differences in how these various walls are defined.

One can manually draw the foundation, but on a blank screen. Not with an image of the excruciatingly built house to go by. That foundation will appear wherever it was placed on the screen, relative to the invisible elements. If the foundation is drawn where the driveway would be on the lot, that's where it will appear. Of course, the lot cannot be seen, either. It is very difficult to properly define and nearly impossible to properly align the foundation in this manner.

Of course, one must have a roof, and the horrors of that are simply beyond imagining unless one has a simple, box shaped house.

I don't want to be an architect, just to design some landscaping, print plans to take to the Architectural Committee, get my permit and get started.

Defining the lot was difficult, as well. One cannot simply draw an oddly shaped lot and add the features. The advertised GPS import doesn't accept GPS coordinates to search for data, but will accept some GPS file format I'm not familiar with. Certainly not the GPS data from my cell phone.

After spending several weeks of pure frustration, I called in my son, the engineer, who is quite skilled with any number of CAD programs. He cannot make it right, either, so it's the program, not me.

Seriously, parts of the roof shoot off to infinity, the steps go through the carport slab, with the entire structure floating two feet above the ground because the foundation will not build correctly. There are too many oddities to detail here, or to deal with. I have begun from scratch 4 different times, always with bizarre results.

Gave up on the house with only the outlines of it and other structures placed on the lot and tried to lay out the landscape elements. Simply cannot find a way to draw curves. There are presets for a circle garden bed, kidney shaped or retangular, but one cannot just put a garden bed up against a straight surface (wall or fence) and curve the opposite side. You can reshape a circle or kidney shape, but with only 4 points to drag, cannot get the shape you want. No curved garden paths. There are not even the most rudimentary drawing tools.

It has a library of predefined plants, but is lacking quite a few of the ones needed for the xeriscape of our dreams. One can define general plant shapes, but that's a bit tedious and doesn't give the same results, were one actually able to use the 3-D features.

Gave up on using the landscaping tools, too, and tried to print out the lot/structure plan to draw elements in by hand. In order to get anything larger than about 4 or 5 inches, I ended up taking a screen shot of the plan, importing it to another program and scaling and printing from it.

The tutorials are obviously the ones from the full architect program. Features and controls are not well described, difficult to find and, sometimes, not named the same in the program as they are in the instructions.

I am not a stupid person, but this program makes me feel otherwise. Although it is advertised as an easy way to design landscaping, it isn't. My son agrees that this is a difficult program to use. As I said before, he has extensive background with quite a few professional and lower level CAD programs. The program will neither import nor export CAD format files. That means one cannot make the structures in a good CAD program and plant them on the lot. Nor can one export the disastrous structures and fix them in a good CAD program. Pitiful.

This may be a great program if you have a strong background in building, but I imagine even if you're that good, there are still better tools available to you.

On the good side, the landscape program doesn't use a dongle, which their full architect version does. If you ever happen to get your landscape designed, the program will "age" your various plants, so you can get an idea of how that pretty tree will look 20 years from now. If you are able to get features defined, it will calculate areas, perimeters and volumes, which is quite handy.

If ever I get brave enough to subject myself to the rigors of this stupid software again, and somehow manage to make anything work, I shall post an update to this review. Barring that, all I can say is to avoid this program like the plague. If you are foolish enough to buy it, as I did, you will feel as if you've gotten the plague before you're finished.

I wanted a basic deck design program -- just something to basically draw a deck, add some tables and chairs, and see it in 3D (walk around it). You can do all of this with the software however I found that after you set the basic deck size, any changes to expand it will leave a giant 'hole' in the deck when you render it in 3D. This doesn't happen every time, but enough to make it annoying. I found after awhile I just lived with the fact that my tables were floating in mid-air and i just imagined a deck there.

Also, there was no ability to draw decks with multiple levels, you could design it with the concept of "stories", and it just doesn't work well when trying to design something with a couple of different elevations. This is a major drawback in my opinion and rendered this software useless to me. Oh well...

The big drawback that I found was that I couldn't create custom objects nor import them from other design packages. I think that you can bring in creations from their larger CAD package, but I don't need to design a whole house just to be able to create a rock water feature or custom pergola. I think previous versions accepted objects from other packages.

It does have sufficient library objects to be able to enter my ideas and then be able to view them from various angles in 3D. For that alone, it is worth the price. Although it does have a massive database of plants, it doesn't have some of my native ones. There are enough to find something close.

I found that the automatic roof and floor system was cumbersome. I wound up using a modular approach to sections of my patio/deck and just left those as sort of an exploded view with separate roofs. When the sections touch, they get interlocked and some automatic settings interact with each other to make it harder to make changes and to tweak the roof shape.

All in all, well worth the money I paid but it just seemed to me that it could be more by being able to turn off some of the automatic modes.

This software is designed for houses and hacked to be used for decks; virtually all of the deck attributes are inappropriately named for house rooms, e.g. ceiling of room below, which sometimes makes them difficult to associate with the proper deck attributes. The software is user hostile, e.g. if you do not draw your house in a clockwise manner, the software does not handle it properly (the support staff said 'i should get in the habit of drawing rooms clockwise', as opposed to acknowledging a bug) so that adding a foundation results in a roof being generated for foundation, i.e. a roof below the house.

Their QA staff is clearly inadequate; if you do things outside of the basics that most people do, the software cannot handle it, e.g. i tried to design a tiered deck system to go down the steep hill of my back yard and when it got to a certain point, the software created ghost images that could not be deleted.

For the most part, their support staff is not very helpful, attributing problems variously to corrupt files and bad user methodology. On a couple of occasions they did provide workarounds to problems, but do not appear very willing to address the software bugs, so i expect the software to continue to be problematic for a few releases to come. I have had to spend many hours trying to narrow down the cause of a problem, even after presenting their support staff with easy bug reproduction scenarios.

Even when bugs are acknowledged, the support staff is not willing to provide a fix; at one point they indicated that the bug would be fixed in version 10, but would not provide me with a fix, despite the fact that v10 is still several weeks away (indefinite release date). Subsequently they said that the fix was too hard to do in v10, so they pulled it anyway (this after i demanded a free upgrade to 10)

There are also bad quirks that an unsuspecting user can run afoul of and that there is no apparent way to fix. I have had to start over from scratch several times, resulting in many lost hours in addition to all of the time trying to get solutions from the support staff.

I would definitely not recommend this software, or any of this company's software, to anyone. Caveat emptor.