Home Designer Suite 8.0
Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite just keeps getting better with new added content but the same easy to use home design and remodeling software that is great.
Ease of Use, Performance: 22/25, Look & Feel: 23/25,
Features 25/25, How much I enjoy 25/25
Total: 95/100
I thought they would not be able to improve much on the Home Designer Suite but I was wrong, they not only added the libraries of useful new content that you would otherwise have to download but added useful features as well.
Being able to import Google and other third party content has to be the best feature they added but others are the new groups of objects for easy building and the new automated building and design tools of the Home Design Wizard. The core home designer is basically the same so you get the great functioning and fully featured home design software and all the general usefulness of the suite of products but the new additions are great as well.
The new libraries make it easy to have the additional content that you would have had to download from the site, they still have some things that you can also download that came out after this version though. They have also added some great groups of furniture and fixtures for already finished rooms or sections as well as the architectural blocks like kitchen islands.
The new additions like the 3D design and editing tools that allow you to work in 2d or 3D are great for the most part but some things just naturally work better in 2D and the top down view than others. When designing walls and other larger objects it really is a bit better to work in the top down 2 dimensional mode to give you a more accurate positioning of these larger things.
When you’re working with some things like decks and landscaping using the 3 dimensional view works better for these odd shaped objects. In landscaping it really helps to have the 3D view to be able to position and see what you’re doing and how things look instead of continuously switching from one view to the other.
The same goes for deck design and placing parts of the deck so you have a better idea of what things look like while you’re working with them. Working in either 2D or 3D gives you the choice to work how you can with the sections or areas and this option just gives you more choices with your design and remodeling on the computer.
The really great additions in this version are the Automated Design Wizard that starts out as blocks you get from a wizard and you can position the blocks as you see fit to design the entire house. In the beginning of the wizard they have questions you answer and fill in how many bedrooms, halls and other rooms you want on a floor of the house and you get the blocks of each room to move around and design the house from there.
