Product Description

Whether you're building your dream home from scratch, remodeling or landscaping, 3D Home Architect Design Suite Deluxe 6 delivers just what you need every step of the way. Combining easy-to-use creative tools with professional-grade design capabilities, it's the essential starting point for any serious home project. Combines everything from home design, remodeling, interiors and landscape into one collection!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5001 in Software
• Brand: Encore
• Model: 383204
• Released on: 2004-03-22
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Me
• Format: CD-ROM
• Number of items: 1

Features

• Fully integrated home and landscape design tools
• Ideal for new homes, remodeling projects, and landscape design
• Create ready-to-build plans; unlimited custom design options
• Visualize your project in bold 3D; new 2D designer's view
• Convenient wizards and tutorials; user-friendly tabbed interface

From the Manufacturer
Whether you’re building your dream home from scratch, remodeling, or landscaping, 3D Home Architect Design Suite Deluxe 6 delivers just what you need every step of the way. Combining easy-to-use creative tools with professional-grade design capabilities, it's the essential starting point for any serious home project.

More than just a layout program, 3D Home Architect Design Suite Deluxe 6 gives you the ability to fine-tune every element of your home design or landscaping project. Convenient wizards and tutorials help you achieve your goals fast, while unlimited customization guarantees that your dream home will be perfect in every detail. Easy to use, yet powerful enough to generate buildable blueprint-style plans, it’s the only design program you’ll need.

• NEW! Point-and-click Materials Paintbrush! Now you can easily apply materials to your designs with the new Materials Paintbrush in just a few easy clicks. Carpet, countertops, concrete, and more--it’s all within easy reach!
• NEW! House Builder Wizard! Now it’s easier than ever to design your dream home! Select from the size, style, and element configuration you like best and 3D Home Architect Home Design Deluxe 6 will generate your new structure already equipped with walls, floors, and a roof.
• NEW! Kitchen Builder Wizard! It’s our most requested upgrade feature and you’ll soon see why. Simply select the style, shape, and orientation for your new kitchen and watch as it appears before your eyes--complete with cabinets, a sink, refrigerator, and cooking area! It’s perfect for visualizing your new home or remodel project!
• NEW! Easy-to-use tabbed interface! Countless hours of testing and research went into redesigning 3D Home Architect’s user interface. And we couldn’t be happier with the outcome. Now it’s easier to get started, easier to access and use your tools, and easier than ever to design the home of your dreams--down to the very last detail. Just wait and see!
• NEW! Project trace! Scan in your favorite layouts--even from your own sketches! Or, export images of floor plans from another home design program. Then trace over them and create scalable, editable plans. Your new plans work seamlessly!
• NEW! Stylish name-brand materials! Enhance your interior design with actual materials. Try out leading manufacturers' products in your virtual designs.
• NEW! 3D Home Architect Learning Center! Design like a pro in no time! With video guides, extensive tool tips, and status bar prompts to give you help at every turn, 3D Home Architect Home Design Deluxe 6 makes it easier than ever to design the home of your dreams.
• NEW! Rendering capabilities! Activate ultra-sharp rendering capabilities to view your plans onscreen with unparalleled depth and dimension using 3DTrueView technology--including new surface properties that make mirrors reflect, countertops shiny, and more.
• NEW! 2D designer's view! Enjoy accurate top-down representations of furnishings and other design elements in the new 2D designer’s view.
• IMPROVED! Enhance your home’s interior with more stylish furniture, lighting fixtures, customizable cabinetry, sinks, appliances, window treatments, and more.
• Create the ideal landscape to complement your home, complete with plants and trees, slopes and grades, fencing, gazebos, pools--even exterior lighting!
• Learn about plant care, growth zones, plant diseases, soil concerns, and more with the complete plant encyclopedia.

A major construction, remodeling, or landscaping project can be overwhelming without the right tools. Trust 3D Home Architect to deliver the capabilities and guidance you need to stop dreaming and start planning. Your home or garden masterpiece is closer than you think!

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Customer Reviews

So much promise, so much frustration
I have come so very close to getting this program to work for me, and have even gotten exploratory value out of it, but you should know that the database is often corrupted by the tool, and requires program re-installation and design recreation.

In the words of the help file (on line at ...):

MBuilder Has Encountered a Problem...
When using the program, the following message appears:
"MBuilder has encountered problem." There are several possible causes for
this issue. The remainder of this note describes how to proceed.

Determine If the Plan Is Corrupt
1. Launch 3D Home Architect® and create a new plan.
2. Add a basic structure to the plan.
3. Save the plan and close 3D Home Architect®.
4. Launch 3D Home Architect® and open the plan created in Steps 1 & 2 above.
5. Choose from the following:
* If the error message does not reoccur when working with the new plan,
the previous plan is most likely corrupt. Recreate the plan or restore
a backup copy of the plan.
* If the same error reoccurs, continue with the following procedures.
These suggestions will help to prevent corruption in future plans

-- Further instructions tell you to turn off large displays, accelerations, etc.

As long as you have separate backups every 15 minutes or so (not just saving the file, but saving to a set of many different files) then you may be able to recover some of your work.

The problem is, you may work for a long time with the program working, but with save files written by the program that are corrupt. Once written out, it can't be read back in.

I have worked with their on-line help system, and have been referred to the instructions: just reinstall and recreate what you did.

My question to them was, "How do I know what to avoid?"

Part of the problem is that the design may be OK in memory, but when it gets written out, it is corrupt. There is a "repair database" command that sometimes works, but only if the file is still in memory, and not always then.

Identifying what caused the problem has eluded me so far (50+ hours of use, design not finished)

A hint for you if you do use the program: you should know that small pieces of walls can be left behind as remnants. When walls start to act funny, expand the area, pull all of the walls back out of the intersections, and delete the little pieces that are left. You can then rejoin the wall segments and continue. (you will need to redo roofs ceilings and floors, but you will be used to that by then.

Try it, many parts work extremely well, but make all your decisions up front, because changing is tedious.

Just a few things would enhance the utility of the program tremendously: a copy/paste that works between files, a robust database, and a format painter that can work on trim.

Good luck.

Only got to the roof
I had purchased "Punch! Professional Home Design" and found it too indepth for what I needed. "3D Home Architect Design Suite 6" seemed a bit more for the lay designer. I built the outside layout of my tri-level easy enough and was impressed by the ease of setting the different levels of floor height for different areas of my home. I found colors and textures for my home's exterior that closely matched my actual home. All was well until I tried to put a roof on. It wasn't the different levels that threw off the software but the fact my home isn't rectangular. My home has a bit of character. The software has an auto 'roof by perimeter' option and a manual 'roof by picking points' option. Do not be fooled, there is no manual option. As soon as the edges of your roofs get close enough together the software merges them as it pleases. It resets angles and/or creates new and/or deletes existing edges as it sees fit, no matter how many times you reset them using the 'custom' option. Another undocumented feature is somtimes when you change the settings on a wall another wall on the other side of your project will disappear or may elongate through the boundaries of your project and off the screen. When drawing internal walls if one wall intersects a second it divides the existing wall into two and resets the both wall behavior values (i.e. 'elevation' or 'extend to roof') to defaults forcing you to go back through and redo all your settings. I run an AthlonXP 2200 1.8 GHz machine w/ 512 ram and a GeForce4 Ti 4600 w/128mb ram, well above the system requirements listed on Broderbund's website. The program crashes about every hour and a half which, by the way, is covered in the t-shooting guide. It says turn off hardware acceleration. This will then slow down 3D rendering to a painfully slow pace. Maybe this is because NVidia is such a small-time chipset manufactuer. If something happens often enough to be covered in the user-guide maybe it should be fixed? I rated two stars vice one because there are features in the software I didn't get to see and can't judge because the disc now protects my coffee table (along with a plethora of discs from AOL) from water rings and no longer is in use on my PC. I am disappointed in this Broderbund title and it will be some time before I purchase another. If you want to design a square house, this software has all you need. If your home has any character at all, do not buy this software.

GREAT UPGRADE TO PREVIOUS VERSIONS
I've seen some of the reviews on this forum. They range from very bad ones to excellent remarks. The last one from "A Software used from Seattle" is exagerated and obviously he did not take the time to read the manual. When you render a 3D image with the 3DTrueView option, the BMP file with this image is saved in the "Samples" Directory under "Program Files/3D Home Architect/Design Suite Deluxe6/Samples". Also, if all you want is a snapshot of the 3D image on the screen, you can press the Alt key, hold it and press "Print Screen" on your keyboard, then you simply "Edit-Paste" the image into Word, excel, etc.

Now to the review part:

RESULTING IMAGE
I've used Punch AS3000 extensively, and while the rendering of shadows is much faster than with 3D Home Architect, AS3000 lacks the ray-tracing engine therefore cannot render surfaces that reflect such as mirrors, glossy marble, etc.
The resulting images from 3DHA Design Suite are VERY, VERY close to a photograph. The ones from AS3000 tend to look Dull because of the lack of reflective surface support.

Also, 3DHA allows for many different views, 2D with textures, 3D from top view, real-time editing in 3D of the location of objects, etc.

FLEXIBILITY OF THE TOOLS
First of all, Punch's software is VERY limited in the configuration of items such as Doors, Windows, Kitchen Cabinets, Fences, Stairs, and all pre-loaded objects in general.
3DHA has all the dimensions and features of each object available for change.

Punch AS3000 offers a built-in 3D object editor but cannot import popular industry-standard formats such as 3DS files, whereas 3DHA does, giving access to thousands of free objects available on the WEB.

Textures are all pre-defined on Punch AS3000, meaning you cannot easily (without messing with file sizes, pixel counts, directories, etc.) add textures. On 3DHA you can add a texture from a BMP file with a few clicks and apply to object on the screen. Also, Objects have their surface groupings defined so you can for example, change the color of the wood of a Sofa without going leg-by-leg.

3DHA can also export to DXF AND 3DS, allowing your design to be used / rendered on industrial / professional level software. Punch AS3000 can only export to VRLM in 3D and to DXF on 2D.

I sincerily believe 3DHA is a more professional software (actually it is a down-sized version of a professional package from CADSOFT).

This is to me the best VALUE for the $99 retail price.

Marco.