When retaining walls are added to make a flat spot for the house that does not work when the retaining wall crosses one of the elevation lines. I have a topographical map with elevation lines ever 2 feet of elevation change. My take is if you take a home design and add simple elevation terrain data with retaining walls and elevation line this program can do that pretty well. I have mostly used the terrain feature so far and have been fairly frustrated with there behaver. I have not actually used the home designing feature of this program yet. Probably a lot easier to do with an empty lot and a Total Station to set a hundred elevation points. I was very happy to have been able to get that dialed in, though it took some work to get the terrain slopes right. It’s based on a pretty dead-on representation of my yard’s elevation changes. It’s being built over the old driveway and pavestones that already exist in my yard. I’m attaching a drawing of one of my deck ideas. The software is still pretty close to a 5-star. Another example is that sometimes the auto deck framing does wonky things with exterior walls until you manually adjust them. Elevation altogether is a pretty tricky animal that takes some time to tame. Sometimes, you really have to work with elevation lines and shapes to get them to look right. Secondly, every once in a while, it takes a good bit of nudging around to get certain things to work right. ![]() Thankfully, the Pro version lets you change the framing and supports manually. Adding that would be nice because a lot of lower decks need it. There’s no way to have the deck automatically build the framing with a flush beam instead of a drop beam. I wish I could give it 4.5 stars because it’s worth more than four, but not 100% perfect. The software is just too fun to use not to. On top of all that, once I’m done finalizing whichever deck design I decide to go with, I’m sure I’m going to want to design a “dream home” from scratch. So now I have an even more accurate version of my home in the software and can build even more accurate and code-compliant deck designs along with their accompanying drawings. This time, I had a lot more control over things (the roof controls were especially helpful) and was able to get laser-sharp accuracy of all my fences, retaining walls, exact pool location, driveway and patio shapes, etc, by importing my survey DWG file. So much so, that upon purchasing the Pro version, I completely started over and modeled my home again from scratch. During the course of my home modeling in the Architectural version, I watched more and more tutorials and learned more and more about the software. I also needed to be able to customize my unusually built roof. When I was halfway through modeling my house, I knew I’d want to be able to save it, so I bought the software only a few days into the trial.Īfter I completely modeled my home and built a few deck designs, I realized I needed to be able to edit the deck framing elements individually and make the layouts for the permit drawings, which only the Pro version could do. It’s hard to find the words to describe how well the software just makes everything come together with such detail, even in the Architectural version. ![]() ![]() I have to say – this is one of the most impressive feats of software engineering I’ve ever seen. I was pretty shocked at how easy it was to do so for someone who never used architectural software before (thankfully I have a copy of my survey, which helped figuring out the terrain perimeter and home dimensions). After watching a few of their massive library of tutorial videos, I endeavored to model my entire house in the software. My intention was to just poke around, but I very quickly dived into the deep end. I started with a trial of the Architectural version of Home Designer. I got this software a month and a half ago because I need to rebuild the deck at my house and wanted to play with some designs and be able to easily make quality drawings for the permitting process.
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