Richard Braun says:

Zippy but pinheaded I gave up on 3D Home Architect (look for my other review; hereinafter called 3D HA) and decided to try out one or two others. Next up is Total 3D Home. As expected from other reviewers’ comments, it won’t work for me but I’ll try to give a bit more detail on what you’ll find. Unfortunately the “professional” reviewers at Consumer Reports and the PC magazines won’t tell you what you’d really like to know.The good news with this one: it’s a heckuva lot faster than 3D HA. You can click and drag things around much more speedily, and it doesn’t hog your processor and memory anywhere near as much.Now the bad news. Plenty of that, starting with a rather piggish software installation (it says on the box you need 1.8 gigs, and it really isn’t kidding. You’ll save a modest amount by telling it not to load all of the 3rd CD but still…)Let me back up by pointing out the overall workflow flaw found in ALL of these home-design programs: they don’t work with you the way an actual architect would. What’s the first question that a professional (whether it’s the guy at the Home Depot kitchen department, or the Martha Stewart’s personal designer) going to ask? Well, it all starts with measurements. Generally, a guy will come out to your house and measure everything down to the inch, in all three dimensions. The professional will start with a mockup (be it in pencil or in a CAD system) with the precise details of your existing structure, and if they’re really good, they’ll come back through your home on a second visit to double-check all measurements. Only then will changes to your home be proposed.Well, that’s not how these programs work. Total 3D is really different from the others so I’ll try to describe the data-entry process; this procedure will be helpful whether or not you buy this package because the embedded help is no help at all. When you start the program, you’ll see 7 tabs across the bottom of the screen. Three of them are relevant for creating a sketch of your existing structure: “Space Plan”, “Design Plan”, and “Walk Through”. If you have used other programs, the “Design Plan” screen looks pretty much like the others. With Total 3D, you’re expected to input your floor plan in the “Space Plan”. The first thing you’ll notice is that the proposed rooms (Kitchen, Hall, Bedroom, Closet, etc) are all rectangles. And you’ll walk around your own house and conclude that most rooms resemble rectangles but aren’t quite…so how do you get this program to recognize your reality?Here is a key hint not mentioned in this program’s help: if you overlap two rooms (a real one and a fake one) in the Space Plan, then momentarily click on the Design Plan tab, then go back to the Space Plan and delete the fake room, you can generate a real room with a corner taken out of it. You can chop multiple corners out if you use multiple “fake” rooms by this technique. No need to be precise with dimensions at the outset: I’d recommend starting out with the “Wall and Room Snapping” pref set to 6 inches, getting the whole floor plan roughed in, and then setting the snap spacing down to 1 inch before clicking and dragging walls (in either view) to match your measurements.That allows you to get the basic layout entered; if your home is all 90- and/or 45-degree angles, on a single floor, and the floors/ceilings are level, you should be able to develop a decent model of your structure. If you’re trying to model complex walls, or have multiple floor levels, there are features in 3D Home Architect which go well beyond what you’ll find in Total 3D. (I made a very precise model–with difficulty–of my home in 3D HA but quickly concluded that I can’t do the same with Total 3D.)As luck would have it, I helped a friend move last Sunday and I decided to throw together a sketch of his new kitchen. With Total 3D, I ran into the following problems:* I couldn’t get a couple of the cabinets to stay in place. When I switched from Space Plan to Walk Through and back, the cabinets snapped to a different position along the wall. (Exiting and restarting the program doesn’t clear this condition.)* The program doesn’t remember what directory you keep your files in. To open an existing plan anywhere other than a subfolder of My Documents, you have to re-navigate to your directory every time. VERY annoying.* Cabinets snap to a side wall even if you don’t want them to. I can’t figure out how to turn this off.* In the Design view, if you want to modify/move an item, you have to go into Select mode (one of a half-dozen small tabs at the upper right). OK, fine: but sometimes instead of selecting an item it switches to Add or Measure mode, and then if you click again it’ll do something completely different from what you intended.* The font sizes in Annotate are hilariously oversized. I really…

Belle708 says:

Biggest Waste of Money I bought this software to help design my lanscaping. Before I could start that, I had to build my house room by room on the program. Tedious and frustrating! You can use a sample house, but good luck finding one that looks like your house. While I was building my house, the program froze several times, and I had to start over. Finally, the house was built – sort of. I have a cape cod with dormers, couldn’t figure out how to make the roof look right. I called tech support. After calling several times and hearing a recording saying no one could take my call, I finally reached a tech support rep. He clearly hated his job and didn’t want to help. When I complained about walls and windows disappearing and the program freezing, he said “Yeah, that happens alot.” I emailed him my design and he said he would work on it. That was a week ago. No response. I am computer literate, so this is not a case of the program being too advanced. It is poorly designed. I would reccommend a pencil and graph paper over this program.