Self Build & Development ReviewsSelf Build & Development Reviews
Read the Complete Lets do DIY Review
7th August 09
"...beginners will find it easy to make a rough, general plan and experiment with different additions. Those requiring very precise measurements and touches have an intricate degree of tweaking at their disposal.
The level of detail here is extremely impressive: it’s possible to adjust the size, shape, colour and texture of objects as well as tidy up finished designs by adding reflections, light sources, landscapes and other fine-tuning."
Read the Complete Computer Active Review
Issue 253, Mar 09
"A pen and paper is all you need to start designing your dream home. However, this is a relatively affordable alternative. This easy design application can help you visualise your ideas in 3D before you bring in the professionals."
"Self Build & Development can be intimidating at first glance. It's fairly easy to get started, though, thanks to the three bundled manuals. It took us a couple of hours to work through the basics with the 50-page quick-start guide. Then there's a 140-page guide to common tasks, plus a 320-page reference manual. We found all these resources incredibly useful. They're well written and full of step-by-step guides and screenshots...."
Read the Complete Computer Shopper Review
13th January 2009By Master Baker "Mong"
At last, a package that can handle almost all aspects of home design.
Coming in a huge box with a massive manual, this is impressive right from the start. Installation was perfect and as simple as can be. Only when I got into the application itself did I realise what a professional piece of software this actually is. This also means it is quite complex and requires a lot of effort to learn how it works (as does any new design program). You can control every aspect of your design, in fact the options are almost endless...I ended up trying to make the most horrendous building possible, and even this was a lot of fun.
To anyone who has any interest in building or renovating a property, all I can say is BUY THIS, as it's a small amount of money compared to what you'd have to pay an architect to render your design.
There is currently nothing this good on the market for anywhere near this price, which makes it excellent value.
A rare 5 stars from me!
AMAZON Member Review
27th December 2008 By MightyBoosh
This designer software package is faultless. I am designing a house with this system to be built somewhere in europe and I have to say it does the job spectacularly.
The CD Rom loads glitch free and from the kick off explains each step, using various icons, with clarity.
The interface is easy to use with drag and drop facility to aid in the complete design of anything, from a split level building to a loft conversion!!
Supports metric and imperial measurements. Has the facility to design windows and doors to your own spec and all in 3D.
Should you become completely 'flumoxed' by the design interface there are very useful help programs which will, literally, 'talk you through' the design process.
I am drawing up plans for the new house project and this tool is so good I am submitting the plans from it to my architect for her to have a look through for any 'snags', not that I visualize any as this is the business, a designers design tool. If you are not convinced, just give it a try. Thank you for reading my review, I hope it is useful to you.
AMAZON Member Review
9th January 2009 By Murray "Murray79" - UK
GRAND DESIGNS 3D has no steep learning curve and allows for non-qualified CAD users like myself to very quickly produce instant results. In 2D mode create your plans by accurately dragging and dropping elements such as walls, doors and windows. There is also a room planning tool allowing you to quickly place walls to further modify. If you want to create new floors, you can easiliy do this by transferring all elements from existing floor to further modify. The visualisations created in program are very impressive. In 2D mode you simply click a button and hey presto you have a 3D model. Furnish the model with choice of objects and textures from catalogue. You can even walk through your project and experiment with lighting conditions. Collision control stops you walking through walls. Placing furniture objects is easy and can be modified to suit e.g. size and orientation. I suggest placing objects in plan view as manual suggests - this is much easier to control and position objects. Some objects e.g. kitchen units can even snap to one another.
AMAZON Member Review
8th January 2009 By Mr.M.P.Duffy - Littlehampton, West Sussex, UK
I'm currently redoing my bathroom & kitchen, and planning an extension, so this actually came in useful. When it arrived I was a bit daunted as the package was heavy & the manuals (in the plural!) were thicker than London fog. However, once installed the programme runs through the basics, which was actually more than adequate for what I wanted to use it for. I found it very easy to put together a basic layout, furnish it out with the furniture I would like, and then what I could actually afford(!), and then play around with the lighting etc. It was also quite exciting being able to 'walk through' the layout, which gave me a better idea as to how it will all look. Now it's just a case of funding it all!
6th January 2009 By B Smith - London, UK
This is one BIG package when it arrives, there's a shed-load of stuff in it.
Sometimes you just get products "endorsed" by others etc. and this is fully what I was expecting with this product, just a normal CAD program re-branded.
In fact the brand link up works fantastically and one of the key highlights of the program is ready made templates of different properties that have been featured on the Grand Designs TV Shows.
Obviously this is a bit of a low end solution compared to others on the market. But I feel this is perfect for people who maybe enjoy watching grand designs on TV and think hmm. I wonder how they went about building that. You can see the plans to the houses and basically just go into much more depth than they are able to on the TV program. You are also able to customise the designs, so maybe see how other projects could fit in with your existing ideas. It's got almost 5000 built in objects and it's basically just perfect for the first time CAD user and fans of the show. It doesn't have the advanced features of more expensive programs, but if you're looking to take Grand Designs to the next step like me, this is exactly what you want!
AMAZON Member Review
5th January 2009 By Mark Webb "marcos cu" - Chorley, UK
This product feels like the up market product it is. It is not cheap and has Photoshop or Quark level pricing but unlike those two products is more clearly aimed at the non professional market.
This software installed quickly and easily on my test machine running Vista Ultimate SP1 and seems stable in normal use. For obvious reasons it runs better on a higher end machine but I found it also ran well on my recently purchased mid range Asus laptop.
To an extent the application relies upon wizards to help with the design process. Most of the time these work fine but I did notice a few minor glitches, the sort of thing that would not be tolerated at in a product aimed at construction industry professionals. But this is not that sort of a product and is targeted clearly at the ambitious amateur who wishes to take a hand in the design of his own house. I would not like to build a house just on the basis of this application but it would be perfect for designing 3D views and projections which could then be passed on to your architect.
This is a great product for those building or considering building their own house but it is not a replacement either for an architect or professional level CAD software.
AMAZON Member Review
3rd January 2009 By David Burton "aenikata" - London, UK
For a full review, I'll start with the bad - the system feels rather dated compared to some modern software. The Serial Number, as always, is a pain to type in and more damningly offers you a limited number of activations - with no immediately visible way to de-activate an installed copy, so good luck if you need to sell or transfer a copy, or even re-install it after an OS reinstall.
Minor niggles include issues when hiding floors partway t Also, performing some operations (such as hiding a floor) while partway through a paste operation seems to cause problems.
Using some of the wizards returns an error when searching for one of the selected objects, saying it cannot be found. (N.B. The offered 'Search Entire Path from now on' option seems to resolve this, and doesn't seem to take too long despite the warning that it slows the system down.)
Minor niggles include ending up in rather different modes when using the project wizard compared to the plan assistant (Design mode - 3D vs Construction - 2D modes), and some non-standard controls and view limitations such as not making good use of the mouse right or middle buttons and relatively unhepful use of the scroll wheel.
When you're planning a house, you'll probably want to enter the correct measurements, but if you were hoping to use the wizard to get most of the way there, the selection of room layouts for the wizards is somewhat limited - I'd be mor keen if you could specify an number of rooms for the floor and then to be offered a number of layouts for that number of rooms, for example. If you're expecting to plan your next building layout using wizards, then this isn't the package for you - this is clearly more aimed at providing a rough basis from which to adapt a more accurate plan.
For this £200 edition of the software, you would perhaps expect the conservatory expansion to be included, but this is separate - surely for many the appeal of software like this would be to plan not just internal rooms but an extension project such as a conservatory, so you would then need to look at the conservatory designer as well for the true cost of the software.
Some of the default floor plans have an issue with the default snapping, as you'll have a default layout that when you try to move a wall will then snap so that the wall no longer correctly connects with the joining walls, preferring instead to snap to the grid.
Equally the image quality when 'raytracing' seems to provide little only a rather crude representation, relative to proper 3D modelling packages and modern 3D CGI standards, and often seems to look worse than the basic 3D preview, aside from some reflections being represented.
The designer is also very much oriented towards doing a basic room layout. There are a selection of tables, chairs, beds, etc, which you can load into a project, but if there's only so many variants they can provide, and they don't offer anything really by way of options for customising the pre-defined objects. Instead, the manual makes frequent references to objects designed using 3D Studio. That will certainly increase your budget significantly. As such the impression is then that while this package is good for designing a building layout, and has the flexibility to plan stairs, dormers, etc, without the conservatory element it's missing an essential component of the house extension requirements, while for those more interested in just visualising changes to their house, this version of the software is almost certainly overkill compared to the cut-down versions. There is a reasonable but not stunning selection of inbuilt objects (and a lack of a good object browser), so any interior design furnishings will generally only be a very rough approximation without substantial additional expense.
None of those niggles are game-breakers, though, for the main target market, at least. As a result it seems that the package is targetting a very specific niche - self-builders who wish to create accurate building plans suitable for architects reference or planning applications. More advanced users will probably and to use higher level tools (perhaps in combination with something like this to use the strengths of each tool, and in that situation this is not expensive compared to the other pieces of software you'd be likely to use then), while those who do not need to create submittable reference plans, just visualisations, have no need of this version and would be better off using the more limited other ones.
Within that narrow niche, there is a complete set of manuals, tutorials, tutorial files, and so on, along with some Grand Designs reference buildings. The documentation is fully indexed, and much more comprehensive than many pieces of software, including various as (or more) expensive than this. As a result, I can recommend that self-builders who want to create at least a first draft planning application design may want to investigate this tool, and certainly the manual and tutorials will help get to grips with the software, if they're willing to get used to a fairly complex software package. For other users, I'd expect that the tool is liable to be either too limited or less suitable than other versions.
AMAZON Member Review
1st January 2009By Norman Cheeseworthy
This is one in a range of software releases, all based around the vision that you don't need to be a professional designer to achieve professional results (although I'm sure it helps!)
First off, let me say this is a very powerful bit of software - we're not talking Ikea kitchen planner here! It will let you do just about anything you want before you commit yourself to doing some serious development (and spending lots of money in the process!).
Although not overly complicated, you'll need to have a fairly comprehensive grasp of computers to master this, and it's certainly not something you'd want to jump straight into without reading the instructions.
It's quite a sensible set up, developing your plans in 2D, with drag and drop construction elements, then you can view the finished project in 3D with a single mouse click - the results of which can be very impressive, so I'm told (my efforts for the purpose of this review were, shall I say, laughable!).
Although very expensive, if you take into account the fact that any designs you produce can be saved in a format which a real designer can work with, and which could be used for planning applications, you should be able to save yourself a fair few pennies in the long run.
At this price, it's not something for your casual DIYer to play around with, but for those serious (and confident) in creating a design project, I'm sure it's invaluable (just make sure your computer specification is up to it!)
AMAZON Member Review
30th December 2008 By Julikat - Surrey, UK
This is a very solid and professional-looking (heavy!) package. The program loaded without any problems on my HP desktop (running Vista Home Premium), and was quickly ready to use. The step by step 'start up' guide takes you through the basic functions and use of the software before you run off to create your own dream home. If the 'start up' guide isn't good enough, there are several tutorials to help you through the process.
While this is a fun way to get creative and design your own house, most architects use more professional software, such as AutoCAD, which is cross-compatible across the building industry. However, it's far more expensive, and doesn't really offer any help for the novice designer. Grand Design 3D is a fun way to experiment with house design, and it's also very helpful to understand the fundamentals of design and building.
You can add floors, doors, windows, and view everything in 3D, which is useful for people who have difficulty visualising how something will look. You can switch from 2D to 3D view with a single click, and you can even play around with lighting condtions to get a more accurate idea of how rooms will look under different lights.
To a builder, or someone with construction experience, this would be a cheaper and more time-saving alternative to the more expensive professional software which requires training courses for its use. All in all, this is a decent piece of software which is fun to use as a first step to designing your dream home. I knocked off one star because there are cheaper alternatives around which might be sufficient for the majority of novice users.