3d Home architect 3.0 vs 5.0

[suzq]

Hello, I'm looking for input from those of you who may have used 3Ds 5.0 version and how your experience was.  I know that John recommends 3.0 but I was able to purchase a new copy of 5.0 for a fair price and am hoping it will do what I need.

[n74tg]

I don't mean to rain on your parade, but I've used both versions 3 and 5 and found both of them to have a "steep" learning curve, ie a lot of effort has to be spent to learn to use the software, and if you're only going to design one house, it probably isn't worth it. 

So, now not to leave you completely in the lurch, I found that using just a plain old Excel spreadsheet does a wonderful job as a drafting software.  Just shrink all the column widths down until they are equal to row height and you just created yourself a piece of graph paper as big as you could ever want.  You can make the graphpaper squares any size you want.  I like selecting one such that the full size drawing prints out on two pieces of letter sized paper.  Tape them together and you have a 11x17 sized drawing, pretty close to normal blue print size.

If you think about it, drawing most anything in a house (like walls), they are really just rectangles.  How hard can it be to learn to draw a rectangle. 

Now, if you don't have Excel, or any other spreadsheet then you are out of luck,

Here is a piece of my home design done in Excel.  This piece is the second bathroom, the utility room and the kitchen.  At the bottom of the pic is the scale.  To get a full sized view of it, hit the "full size" tab at the pictures upper left.

https://s53.photobucket.com/albums/g73/Lovett1/?action=view&current=ScreenShot002.jpg


Good luck

[suzq]

You're not raining on me. I bought it to fiddle around with because I do most of my drawings in my paint program, just wanted something that gave me different options and it was pretty inexpensive. My husband has me drawing up this and that for him and it gets tiring using a pen and paper or paintshop. I never thought about doing it your way but it seems simple enough. Thanks for the input! That's why I posted.

[glenn kangiser]

suzq, to the forum.

Have you tried Sketchup?  It's free.  I don't have time to mess with any of them but just wanted to mention it.