Let Your Fingers Do The Building

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DIGITAL DRAWING

I decided to take each product through the typical design process, starting with the drawing of floor plans, then adding doors, windows, furniture, staircases, decks, and roofs, and finishing with a 3-D walk-around of the final design.

Right out of the gate, the product I found to be the easiest and most fun to use was Sierra's CompleteHome. The major difference between this product and the others has to do with what I would call its "drawing tool." It's the virtual implement you use to actually draw walls and rooms on the screen and, though every design program's got one, each handles it a bit differently. For example, when drawing walls in a product like AutoCAD, it is necessary to draw every single line—inside, outside, and each end of the wall are all drawn individually. With CompleteHome, on the other hand, you simply type in the desired room sizes when prompted and the program draws the room's walls for you. It will then place your various rooms on a layout toolbar so that you can drag and drop them onto the drawing field. If you want to change the size of any of these rooms, you can either click on that particular room and stretch it, or use the edit dialog box to pick individual walls, access their spec sheet, and type in new sizes. This method allows the user to make design decisions quickly and easily, without having to do a lot of work.

By comparison, Autodesk's Planix Home Designer and Compton's Bob Vila's Home Design both use a drawing tool not unlike AutoCAD's, but much more simplistic. In fact, Autodesk, the company that markets Planix Home Designer, is the same group that developed AutoCAD, so some of the commands, like snapping to different types of points (mid-point, endpoint, etc.) are similar.

Home Designer's drawing tool also allows you to draw curves, circles, and other complex shapes. This method of drawing is not necessarily all that difficult, but be prepared to spend a considerable amount of time familiarizing yourself and becoming comfortable with these slightly more advanced drawing tools. I strongly recommend that you plow through the tutorials for these products before attempting-your own designs.

DOORS AND WINDOWS

Next it was time to see how these design tools deal with the tricky subject of holes in the walls. I was hoping it would be as easy as picking doors and windows from a menu and popping them onto a wall. I was stunned to discover that it was. In every case, all I needed to do was select the type of door or window that I wanted from a toolbar or menu. I would then be given a dialog box with all of the different parameters of that object. Once I was satisfied with my door or window, I simply picked the wall in which I wanted to place it and in it went. I could then adjust the position of the door or window by sliding it along the length of the wall. As nice and easy as this procedure is, it's important to point out that all of the windows and doors used in these programs start as generic symbols. Fortunately, Planix Home Designer and Bob Vila's Home Design provide you with the opportunity to change the size and shape of your windows and doors, as well as to choose the type: casement windows, double hung windows, French doors, etc. CompleteHome does all of that as well, but then takes it a step further by allowing you to change the materials and colors on the windows and doors through the spec sheet. It even provides you with "hotlinks" to connect to the Web sites of various window and door manufacturers.

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