Customer Reviews

Total 3D Landscape Deluxe 3.0

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Landscape and garden designers, whether amateur or professional, are STRONGLY CAUTIONED against buying this product. In addition to being difficult to use, it contains numerous bugs. The program will crash repeatedly, even with the most current computer equipment and video drivers. Worst of all, it has a tendency to crash and produce an irretrievably "corrupt" file when a plan has gotten large and detailed. This then prevents that file from ever being used, and it cannot be reversed. This happened to this review's writer after having invested over two weeks of work on a landscape design. Broderbund software tech support could offer no help other than to state that this apparently happens all the time! STAY AWAY FROM THIS PRODUCT!

Unless you want to be completely frustrated, I would not recommend this program. The 'handles' used to shape terrain, ponds, etc. often do not work and you can not work within a grid when laying out the terrain so you have no idea where the hills are in relation to the house. Building the house is very confusing because of the way the program has set up 'levels' for the house. Sometimes you see the house, sometimes you only see the fence, sometimes you can modify existing structures, other times you can not. Definitely not a user friendly system. Also, the plants are mislabeled: an iris is labeled as a clematis, a verbena is labeled as a stokesia, the same photo is used to portray two aster varieties, etc. As far as I know, you can not make a plant cascade over a wall. I could go on....The technical support people do not answer emails and the help phone number is computerized; I waited for 15 minutes and then hung up.

Clumsy, unstable program. Persistent crashes and lots of run-time errors. No one available at tech support. Not worth the trouble it takes to install.

My husband spends hours trying to get a simple layout completed. His biggest complaint is that every few minutes an error message appears and then the software closes by itself. This causes him to lose all his work since his last save. I bought this for him thinking it would be a great tool, but I didn't realize the frustration it would put him through. We used a similar software to design the interior of our house. It cost less than this one and worked so much better.

This is an extremely poor program with lots of bugs. The program often does not work, items added to your landscape often do not show up in all types of views, some "jump around" and become unattached to where you placed them. Often it is impossible to delete items that have been improperly placed. This product is NOT ready for sale. It needs a lot more work to remove all the bugs. This is an extremely fustrating and time consuming adventure, with very poor results. Further, the advertised "see your landscape in different seasons" doesn't work. I expected my deciduous trees to change colors and lose leaves. This didn't happen. I couldn't calculate my light for winter planting. I'm going to have to start over with other software.

Not user friendly! Look elsewhere. Continues to lock-up with windows XP. The packaging is deceiving. Refused to honor rebate (no leeway for mail time).

I purchased this software to help visualize basic landscaping ideas for my home. I found the overall usability to be poor. Simple things like grouping several plants and moving them together is not supported, the 'grow' feature didn't work in many cases, and the overall navigation is poor. I did like the 'arial' view that allows you to zoom over and around your plot and view plants in 3-D from all angles. I also liked the plant library to lookup and research basic information on plants. Overall, I'm disappointed with this product.

The program started lagging for me real bad after getting only a few things built. I'm using a 450 pentium with 256 meg ram and a 16 meg voodoo video card. The package came with a decent users manual and a small tutorial to get me started but don't expect to import a picture of your house and yard and start throwing shrubs and flowers into it. You'll have to cut sections of walls from a photo of your house, and remove obstacles such as tree limbs hanging in the photo and resize them to fit sections of walls on the house that you made inside the program. The complete yard will have to be constructed from scratch inside the program unless you want to use one of theirs. I was also surprised not to find the standard privacy fence and chain link fence in the fence section among other things. I keep going back to it and trying to give it another chance but the lag just kills me. On the upside. The program comes with a 90 day money back guarantee if your not satisfied.

Spend the cash and buy Design Imaging Group, Inc software. www.designimaginggroup.com. It is expensive, powerful and works flawlessly. You cannot get good landscape design software cheaply. I have tried them all. Good luck.

I'm running this on a high-end Dell Latitude. 525mb ram, 1ghz processor. It appears that this software was written by hackers. There is no way a professional software company would release a product with this many bugs in it. You have to save your work constantly to multiple backup files, since the program simply crashes and exits without so much as an error message displayed. It does things that are totally weird. I added a single fence section to the yard and it deleted the entire house. There a bugs throughout. It's hard to believe that whoever authorized release of this software at Broderbund actually used the product themselves. They were probably given a demo by a developer or a product manager who was under the gun.