Who has found good drafting program for your computer? I need a good program to do floor plan drawings for customers and code officials. I have only used 1 or 2 low priced systems in the distant past and wasn’t impressed. Now the scope of my business demands that I have one and I would only like to spend the time and money to become proficient with one good system. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
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What is your budget and wht kind of work do you do?
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About a grand and I build single level duplexes for the active retired with the occasional single family thrown in. Our business is semi-custom, every property is customized for its owner. Of course, this usually necessitates floor plan changes and I was hoping to speed up the redesign process a bit.
I use Softplan. The full package is close to three grand, but the basic Lite version is in your price range and you can upgrade later when you fall in love with it.Chief Architect is a very popular one also here. I am not sure of the price on theirs.Mike and I were both impressed with the capabilities of a newer one at JLC Live. I am not sure of the name - Envisioneer, I think. It was around eight hundred bucks IIRC
Vectorworks is another I have considered in the past. It seems that I used to get a lot of architect and interior designers drawing files done on that. They have various modules that can make the price step from within your budget to as high as Softplan, I think.Try a search here for the terms CAD and drawing and the programs I named above. You wil find a lot of older threads on the topic.
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I just recently picked up two Chief Architect licenses for about 3700. I think they are going for $2200 right now for each copy.I think the basic versions of Chief would work for simple basement partitions. I think the Home and Garden thing is about $100. Sketchup would probably work great too and thats free. Bob's next test date: 12/10/07
That may be more than I want to spend going into our slow season, but I have received several suggestions to look at Sketchup, so I think that may be a place to start. Thank you for your help.
Who has found good drafting program for your computer
I have to echo Piffin here, "good" is in the eye of the beholder. Good for me was $3000 worth of AutoCAD for my very own licensed copy closeto ten years ago. Mind you, I've been working with ACAD on and off since 1984--there are few products I'd know quite as well (barring things with K&E ot Staetler logos on them).
What you want the products to "do" matters too. Most will not make you a better drafter than you are now. Might make you faster. Might make you less prone to mislabling things. Might help you organize information.
But, "magic bullets" are thin on the ground. You will probably find that you still have to make one set of fiels for client approval, and a separate set for reviewable plans. Or, you may find you need two products--that's sometimes the best thing to do.
After all, you can imports certain kinds of CAD info into Sketchup, which will then let a skilled person do some spiffy graphics from those 'raw' plans.
Your situation will be different from mine--I have to do this drawing plans for the ungratful and miserly for a living, even if it pounding me into an early grave.
I am not a horrible drafter, but I would like the ability to "try" things in a floor plan without having to spend the time with the pencil. For instance, a customer wants to finish a 2,000 sq. ft. basement and would like several rooms of a certain size, and we have to work around the HVAC, etc. Maybe this will not be the way for me to go and I just need to suck it up and sharpen my pencil. I would like to spend around a grand or so if I could, this is something I will use maybe 6 times a year. I don't have any training beyond a high school drafting class and that was before CAD of any type!
AutoCAD LT, or whatever their light version is now; seems like every supplier site you go to has drawings in .dwg format.
Not easy to learn, but kind of a masochistic pleasure
Forrest
sidejack alerthttp://forums.taunton.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=tp-breaktime&msg=97841.7good place for you to show up
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Well, I wasn't looking for that kind of fun, but I will check it out. Thanks for your help.
I went through all the cheap samples of cad, chief, 3d, all of them, I finally settled on autocad lt.
Edited 12/5/2007 8:11 am by brownbagg
I've been learning Sketchup (free surface modeler) and ArchiCAD (not free 3D CAD). I got ArchiCAD educational version for free from the website, but I think it has a limited lifespan. Both have their perks, but I figure at this point ArchiCAD to be more versatile.
At this point, I am not to worried about 3D. Thank you for your suggestions.
Hey mapleboy,
I picked up Home Designer Pro, which is a dumbed down version of Chief Architect. You can get it today at Amazon for $420 (typically the best prices are now till Christmas). You might not "need" the 3D, but if you're dealing with clients, it's a really useful tool. My wife and I used it to design our dream house and one of the benefits was the ability to test "sight lines" in the floor plan. Not being a "3D thinker", it helped us check the changes we made in the plans. It also helped with our builder. When he saw the plans, he asked if he could use them instead of his drafter (mine were more professional looking). The savings go to MY bottom line.
What if changes are a cinch; I've got 10 to 20 versions of each of the 8 plans we considered. Even though the software limits the print paper size there's a simple work around that lets you print any scale on any size paper. There are other quirks in the software, but on the whole it's a lot of power for under $500 and we've used it far more than anticipated, even designing the outbuildings on our new property. BTW it does framing and material takeoffs. Pretty cool.
Frank
Thank you for your help, if I may ask, what level of experience did you have with CAD before you started using this program?
Mapleboy,I've used AutoSketch, a $100 dollar, super lite version of AutoCad for about 10 years, mostly for cabinet design; it was too tedious for floor plans and we couldn't easily examine questions like sight lines between rooms. Honestly, Chief Architect was sufficiently different AutoDesk that the learning curve was a bit steeper than I expected. The 2D stuff was very simple; it's the 3D stuff that I've spent the most time on. Roof planes, dormers, anything with changing angles in all 3 dimensions, have given me pause. But floor plans are very simple and there's a forum and FAQ and help section at the Chief Architect site that has answers to most all of my questions. The program lets you set up defaults on wall types, to the extent that you can define the different layers of the wall, (e.g. siding, sheathing, studs, drywall) and their individual thicknesses and materials.Last week I redid the plan to go from 2x4 stud walls to 2x6 for added insulation. It took about 2 minutes. Expect to invest some time; the program is much more powerful than I imagined at first. This is both a source of frustration and delight...
Edited 12/5/2007 10:24 am ET by Doctor Science
Mapleboy: I also have the Home Designer Pro around $500, great for floor plans and kitchens ect. If you think you need more Chief Arch will give you a credit on their $2200 program $500 for the HDPro. Easy to use. AutoCad LT is great for some things but I don't care to use it in house plans. Also another program very similar to HDpro is 3D Home Architect bought it for like $20 found it on Ebay works like the HDpro. These are pretty easy to learn. Draw a wall click the wall tool drag out twenty feet, click the ends make a corner ect. for $20 you can see what you need and decide if the next step is $500 or 2500 bucks to spent.
Frank, I have a $49 program called Home Architect that I used on my windows 95 machine that would whip out a 2000 sf basement in minutes. I could snap in all the doors, windows, plumbing fixtures and even click in the electrical plans and kicthen cabinets too. I could do a 3d walkthrough and print renderings. It's actually a very powerful program. I couldn't get it to do complicated roofs and elevations though. Maplewood could probably find one of these old programs on Ebay and it would work fine. I'd sell him mine but I don't know what I've done with the files. They'll turn up somehwere....I used that program as recently as last year to do simple floor plans. I submitted one of the floor plans to a city adminstrator and he complimented me on it and asked if I had done it. He was shocked when I told him I used a $50 program to generate it. Bob's next test date: 12/10/07
Jim,That sounds like a great little program. I wish I'd come across that earlier. That could satisfy a lot of users and I do think many of the simpler programs are more stable. I sometimes wonder if software, like tools, is more useful when it's simple and the user is skilled....Even so, we needed roof lines for elevations.Frank
It actually did simple roof lines and did them well. The task I was asking it to do was complicated with different pitches, fascia heights, heels, etc. I agree, there were many windows 95 programs that worked great and later were useless in later versions because they added so many bells and whistles. Bob's next test date: 12/10/07