Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design & Renovation

The good news is that the number of sample homes that can be created with the design wizard is pleasingly varied and variable, allowing a high degree of customization even in the blueprint stage. For those who want to play with decorating ideas for a fairly expensive home with no regard to specific layout, these samples can provide hours of entertainment and lots of design ideas. What's more, the gallery of objects--furniture and other decor items--is satisfyingly large. Control over size, orientation, and placement of these objects is again cumbersome and again worth the effort. Complete Home Designer tries hard to make the objects workable. The result? You are somewhat less likely to have to stretch a coffee table to bizarre proportions just to make it work next to other furnishings. More importantly, when you are done, the rooms you have created look remarkably like places where real people might choose to live.

Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design and Renovation also has all the standard features for software of this type--you can make a short video tour of completed homes, import photographs of people and furnishings, animate images within the home, and do limited landscaping. Users with lots of time to devote to learning the program's eccentricities and designing the home of their dreams will find, ultimately, that this program offers all the tools they could want... at least until the overall standard for home design software reaches a new level. --Alyx Dellamonica

Amazon.com Product Description
Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design & Renovation includes 12 fully integrated tools for every home project, including construction, renovation, redecorating, expansion, and landscaping. Get started immediately with the six-step building process for small or large home projects. See your ideas come to life--from plan drawings to fully rendered 3-D perspectives. You can even experience your designs with real-time walkthrough movies, complete with ultra-realistic lighting and shadowing.

Start building with the auto-construction function, giving you millimeter-perfect measurements for accurate dimensions of frames, floors, and walls in standard or metric. The Floor Plan Pro feature lets you choose a predefined floor plan or scan and import a custom design. Click and drag windows, skylights, doors, and siding, or change the color of your home. Build a deck or balcony onto your home and easily add railings.

You can do interior design as well. Redecorate the master bedroom, update your kitchen, or experiment with hardwood floors. Quickly create basic layouts and add a room with a click of the mouse. The Furniture Gallery lets you select from thousands of furniture items and accessories, or create your own using the 3-D Furniture Workshop.