Home Design Concept to Reality Workflow
Hi -
I am a non-professional that has been visualising my ideal house for the past twenty years and actioning the design this year. I'm looking for the best tools and process in bring this to reality and am looking for some guidance.
1: I am fairly technical but have very limited CAD or architectural experience. I would prefer to use Home designer from a budget perspective and don't need to learn anything too detailed just for one house
2: I am based in Zambia so don't have access to good local talent to help me. I want to get something done over the next year as a concept then hand it to a professional to come up with the plans.
3: I am quite familiar with ray based render tools and would really like export my model in 3d (something I understand I can't do with home designer?) and come up with photo realistic renderings of my model - outside of the chief architect range of products. ie 3ds etc
So my question is:
Based upon the above statements => What tool and process would be ideal for me to create my concept to a reasonably detailed level, then hand such file(s) across to a professional to create the plans that could just be then just given to a builder?
firstly apologies if this is the wrong thread - I've been looking for the answers to the following for a couple of weeks, secondly if my question shows my relative knowledge and experience in the subject.
Shaun
reply to dshall question re Chief vs SoftPlan learning curve
Finally getting back to dshall about my experience with learning Chief and SoftPlan.
Chief seems easier to get started. When you are first learning, the basic fuctions seem more straightforward in Chief. If, or should I say when, you don't know how to do a function it is easier to find and more closely follows the functions that an experienced windows user would expect.
Chief seems to be more like Corel Draw or Designer and many other windows programs. It seems like $100 consumer house designer software that was developed into a professional tool. I mean that mostly in a positive way. You can quickly create a quick drawing of your house idea and then refine it later.
Softplan seems to be more like AutoCAD that was stripped of flexibility with many functions automated around homebuilding. I can also imagine that it would be easier to come back to Chief after not using it for a few months. I'm an experience AutoCAD user that struggled to get comfortable with the program again after not using it for a few years.
I want to be real specific that I have no opinion of the ability of either to be an excellent tool in the hands of a thoroughly trained user. I ran the demo and played with the training of each for about 30 hours. I'm still very uncomfortable with SoftPlan but made the decision to stick with Chief. I spent the next 10-15 hours producing a pretty good plan of my house, ready for minor cleanup and work toward remodeling.
To be specific, I was running a licensed copy of Home Designer Pro 2012 and the Demo of Chief X4. I may upgrade to Chief, but that is a bunch of money for what may end up being one house, even if I add an extra garage/shop and patio structures on a large lot. Chief seems to have more flexibility in importing Sketchup items and I'm probably going to need more realistic renderings particularly of the entire lot including landscaping.