Home Design Concept to Reality Workflow

[GregB]

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.

[sicamore]

Greg - thanks very much. I have bought a version of Architectural and going through the programs now. I can say that I am very very impressed with the software and it's capabilities. You hit the nail on the head by saying it is easy to use but has detailed capabilities if needed. Just the tool that I was looking for and the ability to upgrade is great if I want to expand the skills or features.

cheers - Shaun