Your Custom Home (DVD-Rom)

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $5.99

Features:

• 11 complete products to help build a new home, remodel, or refresh tired decor
• Learn about home design and decoration; import home photos to decorate around
• View professional floor plans and fully decorated rooms
• Design and tour dream home in realistic and stunning 3D
• Choose from over 6,200 home plans; stay on budget with Cost Estimator

Customer Reviews:

Well worth the purchase price [Posted on 2005-07-15]
I haven't compared this to other products on the market, and am new to home design software. But based on its purchase price, I was expecting far less than this product delivered. In terms of getting a better idea of how your designs will look, this set of programs is simple and very useful. With a highly intuitive PowerPoint-like interface, I was immediately building 3D architectural models, walking through them, and flying over them. Pretty cool. An included deck-design program is also easy to use and allows both 2D and 3D viewing. The program set also includes a bunch of information programs, like plant databases and how-to guides for home projects. Though so much of this is generally available on the internet now, these add-ons were useful and seemed pretty comprehensive. There's also a photo-based landscape design program, which lets you do things like take a photo of your house, import it, and then add plants and hardscape, either from included images or images you import.

So why is all this so cheap? My guess is that it's not recently developed. The copyright dates were in the 1999 to 2000 range. But this is a great basic package that blew away my expectations for what I would get at this price.

Not worth it [Posted on 2006-04-26]
If you are serious about designing your own home, do yourself a favor and invest in a better package than this one.

The feature that drew my attention to this title was the plan tracer. You can load a plan graphic and draw walls over it - but the program isn't smart enough to recognize closed four-sided boxes as rooms. Additionally, the grid-snapping is arbitrary - sometimes you can move a wall at will, sometimes not. This is true when designing from scratch, too - the system is inflexible and awkward to use. Fortunately the 3D camera is self-intuitive.

The other programs included in this package are equally weak. The interior photo designer is clever but unrealistic, and so on.

A word of caution: if you're used to house-building in the Sims, you will definitely find this lacking. And if the construction engine in a computer game is better than in something you're supposed to use to design a REAL home, are you sure you want to spend the money on this product?

Very limited [Posted on 2006-06-10]
I picked up this program because it was cheap and I wanted something to test out some ideas about features to put in a house.

The program has a fun little camera that lets you walk around the house and see the room from any perspective. You can play with furnishings and hang pictures on the wall. All in all, it felt a little like playing with a little girl's doll house.

However I don't want to play with dolls, I want to design a house for me to live in so I went at it with this program.
Lets play with some fancy rooms like octagons and circles... oops the program only has a set number of room shapes and they all have straight walls and 90 degree angles.

OK, so I won't use their canned rooms, I'll put the walls together to make my own... oops the program won't let you draw a room inside a room: the walls refuse to close. The program also won't recognize your ring of walls and a floor as a 'room' so you cannot build anything around it and fit the roof over either.

Hum well maybe I'll try a split level or a sunken den... ooops- you cannot define the elevation of the floors you get first floor and second floor and nothing inbetween. Funny, there default steps are 3 feet high, but stairs always take you one whole floor, not two or three steps.

Oh well, I guess all just have to make do with a 2-story house with rectangular rooms... oops the closets have to be 'rooms' since the extra walls refuse to join inside a 'room' and what happened to that door I put there- oh its buried under 15 walls that spontaneously popped up right on top of each other. Hope you don't mind the roof in the middle of your stairwell from the wing of the house. And you just stretched that wall 1in too far now your room won't fit until you pull all of them apart and why is that exterior wall sticking out 6 inches when the rooms were sized identically why do I keep seeing daylight at the junction between these rooms even though they have 25 walls stacking up there and ARGGG!! I give up.

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