3D Home Architect Deluxe 4.0 [OLD VERSION]

by Riverdeep

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005B0BW
• Item model number: 380865
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 12, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,147 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #30 in Software > Home & Hobbies > Home Design
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Consumer-grade home design software is no substitute for the services of a skilled architect, but it can certainly aid in expressing your idea of the perfect home. Broderbund's 3D Home Architect Deluxe 4.0 is a competent tool for creating sophisticated home designs.

Designing a house with 3D Home Architect is fun. Users can start from scratch or modify one of dozens of included plans into a dream house. Thanks to a snappy drawing interface, scratching out a floor plan is almost as simple as sketching a doodle in Microsoft Paint. Detail work, like laying out doors, creating complex staircases, and restructuring already plotted walls, is a little more tricky, but 3D Home Architect's friendly help system supplies thorough explanations of even the most complex features.

3D Home Architect not only helps users lay down floor plans, but it also tries to deal with the less obvious tribulations of home building. For example, it keeps a running spreadsheet listing the building materials required to construct a design, which can be edited as needed. It will look over a design for common code violations and other technical problems, but warns that it's unaware of local housing codes.

Having hashed out a basic floor plan, users can populate it with furniture, counters, plumbing fixtures, landscaping, and other household items through a cool drag-and-drop browser. It's also possible to run electric wiring and a plumbing system, although those facets aren't quite as simple.

The program becomes clumsy when you leave the 2-D floor plan module and go vertical. Some folks may wish for the simple interface of the floor plan workspace when they try to, for instance, adjust the heights of doorways, counters, and windows. And, although it allows users to see a 3-D-rendered representation of a design and create walkthroughs of a house, applying colors and textures to floors, walls, doors, furniture, and other items is tedious.

Even worse, the 3-D engine is incredibly slow, taking several seconds to render each frame--even on a fast PC. That's utterly inexcusable, considering that Broderbund could have licensed a simple 3-D game engine, or even used one of many public domain 3-D engines capable of fluidly rendering dynamic 3-D environments.

Despite its more clumsy aspects, 3D Home Architect Deluxe 4.0 makes home design easy and enjoyable with a minimal learning curve. If you're thinking of building a new home, it's worth spending some time with this program to visualize your ideas. --Joel Durham Jr.

Product Description

Guide to the easier, most complet home design software. Tech Manual, clean tight copy.

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

138 of 143 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible upgrade to a good product..., May 26, 2001

By 

Timothy E Campos (Los Altos, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: 3D Home Architect Deluxe 4.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I just installed 3D Home Architect Deluxe and I want to warn anyone else from buying this product. It is a worthless upgrade and I have actually chosen to downgrade back to 3DHA version 3. First of all, the new functionality provided in this product is nothing to write home about. There are more plans, and a copule of new visualization modes, but other than that, it's the same product. The big problem is that the 3D mode is INCREDIBLY SSLOOOW. The programmers of this product obviously failed linear alegebra miserably as it can takes 15 seconds to paint the 3D screens on a Pentium III-500Mhz machine, regardless of the options. It's much worse than version 3. So bad in fact that it makes the 3D view totally useless for editing (one of the features I found very useful in the previous product). The final reason to avoid this product is stability. In the 20 minutes that I used the product it crashed on me at least 5 times.

I purchased this product based on the recomendations on amazon. However, after using it myself, I'm convinced that the recomendations were probably posted by marketing staff and not actual users.

If you're buying this product for the first time buy version 3. If you're upgrading, save your money and don't.

Tim

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very helpful for my application, September 29, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: 3D Home Architect Deluxe 4.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Reading over the other reviews was surprising for me because there are so many bad ones. I've installed the program on NT4, Win2KPro, and Win98. I've probably spent at least 50 hours actively using it and it never once crashed in either Win2KPro or Win98. The 3D engine crashes my NT4 box every time, but if you stay away from the 3D it works fine. It will depend upon your video driver more than anything else.

The other problems people experienced seemed to have more to do with their expectations than the product itself. I sat down with a friend who has an architecture degree (but isn't yet a licensed architect) and lots of AutoCAD experience. We tried to develop a design in AutoCAD and, of course, made lots of progress, but I couldn't have done it myself. Even with him at the helm, the going was very slow. I bought this product to try to speed the process up and put it in my own control and it performed admirably.

I think it would be very hard to design a highly detailed home with it, and there's no way it will replace an architect if you actually need the level of design an architect can provide. However, if you're designing a relatively simple home and you mostly want to work on floorplans, windows, and furniture placement, it's just the ticket. Very easy to use, maybe a little clunky here and there, but certainly functional. The 3D views are useful but nowhere near video game speed and quality.

It's not going to be very useful if you're doing something more sophisticated. It's not very useful for interior design in terms of colors and textures. The roof capabilities are very limited. But none of this was very important to me. It does the other things very well.

92 of 101 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better graphics with the same easy to use interface., May 4, 2001

By 

Angela Binkowski "OakParkGirl" (Oak Park, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 3D Home Architect Deluxe 4.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I have been using 3D Home Architect since version 2. I just recently decided that version 3 was just not cutting it anymore and started looking for another product. Luckily, I found that 4.0 was coming out so I bought it as soon as it was available. I love it!

It has a great wizard for those people who want to be more creative with theri design but still has a huge number of plans that you can copy or modify. For really industrious people, you can do everything down to the wiring from the ground up. It is much easier to change materials and do interior decorating, although that can sometimes be confusing. This is probably because I tend to install and use immediately without reading directions - until I screw something up. I accidentally reset a bunch of colors and somehow all of my furniture defaults to being bright red :) That's what I get for not reading the manual first.

Also, the view is much better graphically. Instead of being blocky and primitive, you see everything in applied material view which in previous versions was slow and restrictive. Of course, you'll need a serious machine or else this could be very slow. I have an Athalon 733 processer and 256MB of RAM. There are views that are faster but I like to see everything as close to the real thing as possible. The possibilities are endless with this new version. And considering the performance improvements and how much better everything looks, you won't be disappointed. ...