Home Designer Suite 8
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This allows for a simple building block design so you can move and reposition things how you see fit without positioning individual walls. Once you have things the way you want a good idea is to save before building the walls and if you don’t like how it looks after the walls and roof are up you can change things around a bit and try again. Simply click on the Build House button of the House Wizard section in the Tools drop down menu and the program will draw in walls and door according to the block design you started with.
The House Wizard is a great and quick way to design a house with the rooms and floor plan you want as long as there are no restrictions on how you design the building. This is a great tool if you are designing an entire home or just fooling around with a remodeling project and want to add on several rooms. Being able to move things around so quickly and easily gives you a better idea of what you can do and make things as far as planning much simpler.
For a remodeling project you can start with a simple floor plan of the existing house and add on or try out various designs to see which ones you would like. You can even use the new House Wizard on existing floor plans to try out various room arrangements without messing with walls and doors, just start out with a floor plan and use the House Wizard in the tools drop down menu to add rooms and then move them around how you want. This adds a very flexible tool for remodeling designs and allows you to try out new configurations with specific rooms quickly and easily.
The Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite also includes a new import function that allows you to import 3D objects from sites like Google 3D Warehouse in certain formats directly into your home design. These importable objects are obj, skp and 3ds formats that are popular with not only SketchUp for Google 3D Warehouse that people upload for others to use but programs like 3D Studio Max.
People have been creating and uploading 3D objects for others to use in programs just like Home Designer so you get the added benefit of others hard work to allow you to import and use their objects in your designs. There are a whole host of objects from cars and furniture to paint and other materials, many companies like Sherwin Williams have color palettes uploaded.
Other than these new features the same great features of the previous version are here like quick and easy wall and roof designing. The simple and easy to use library that continues to grow is also here for you to quickly choose furnishings, fixtures, materials and colors of objects.
Building with the Home Designer is simple whether you use the new and much faster wizard or just work building walls from scratch. I have used this program since receiving the first one for several projects and just plain old fooling around and having fun. My wife’s daycare needs floor plans for those fire evacuation routes and using this program and the simple design tools for laying out the floor plans with walls and doors is a simple and easy way to quickly design an evacuation plan.