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Home Designer Pro 7.0 Upgrade

Background

What is This?

For the past 2 years I have been heavily using Home Designer Pro 6.0 to create house designs. Last fall an upgrade version became available, and like the Luddite I can be, sometimes, I elected not to rush right out and upgrade. Well, that has changed. On this page I will chronicle my experiences in making the upgrade to Home Designer Pro 7.0.

I am an experienced user of Home Designer Pro 6.0. For the past two years I have been spending an incredible amount of time designing houses with this tool, and though I have my gripes, I can recommend it for anyone who wants to design their own home. It's easy to use, powerful, and produces some really nice images.

Starting today, June 30, 2006, I will be upgrading to Home Designer Pro 7.0. For the time being I will have both versions installed on my computer, but eventually I will turn in the old USB key "dongle" in order to obtain my $400 rebate from Art, Inc. Chief Architect, Inc. (makers of Chief Architect).

I will document my experiences (hopefully all good) on this page as things proceed.

Vital Statistics

In case anyone is curious, or cares, I thought I would itemize my computer hardware. I run HDP pretty well, though it's possible with a better (read this as: more expensive) video adapter I could do a little better.

Dell Dimension 8400, 3.2 GHz Pentium 4, with Hyper-Threading
2 GB memory
160 GB SATA hard drive
ATI FireGL V3100 PCIE video adapter (128 MB memory) Now changed to XFX nVidia GeForce 7300 GS (w/256 MB). EVGA nVidia GeForce 7950 GT KO 512 MB.
Dell 1701FP flat panel monitor (the brightest flat panel I've seen)
Dell 207WP wide-screen flat panel monitor (1680 x 1050 resolution)

I really wanted the FireGL V3200 adapter, but it was almost $400, and I have to save my nickels and dimes. Some day, maybe. Now I will probably buy an ATI X1600 or nVidia 7600 with 512 MG. Already upgraded the video card. I probably don't really need the extra gigabyte of memory, but anyone who wants to run HDP really should have a minimum of 1 GB. On some renderings I've seen it use about 500 800 MB of memory while running.

The Package Arrives

Contents of the box:

Plastic CD case with 6 CDs inside: 2 program CDs and 4 tutorial CDs
User's Guide (208 pp)
Reference Manual (802 pp)
USB program lock "dongle"
$500 upgrade offer for Chief Architect (some day!)

First Impressions

The user's guide is much, much improved. The user's guide for 6.0 had limited, absolutely trivial instructions that I found severely lacking. The new user's guide contains a very large section (I have only scanned it, so ...) on "how to design a house" that's reminiscent of a similarly named section of my web site. Not that I had any influence on things, but it's very good to see that they have gotten down into much more of the details. On this point alone I think most users will find the new version much better than the old one.

Installation, etc.

I spent some time and read through (well, scanned through) the user's guide. I also read the chapter in the reference manual about what's new in version 7.0.

ATI Catalyst

The program installation went smoothly. It first installed ATI Catalyst, which I found curious since there were no dialog boxes explaining why or what for. That's OK, I thought, I have an ATI video card. Then it occurred to me there might be ATI driver updates I should get, so I went to the ATI site and sure enough, there were. I downloaded and installed the latest and greatest.

While I was installing the new FireGL drivers, I noticed that ATI Catalyst was uninstalled for me. Hmm ...

The First Tryout

Once installed, the first thing I did was port over the Country Home #5 plan. I created a new directory to contain plan files. In my old version, I used My Documents\Houses for house plan files. Finished plans and rendered images were all placed in My Documents\Houses\Finished. It has become very cluttered and large, so soon I will need to begin ZIPping up renderings, etc., to reduce the number of files. I have not found it useful to put every plan in a different folder. For the new version of HDP, I created a 7.0 Houses subdirectory. I copied the 4 pl* files for the plan into this new directory, then opened the file.

This specific plan is almost a split level. That is, there is a bedroom over the living room, and said living room has a 12' ceiling, while the rest of the first floor has a 9' ceiling. So, this one bedroom and bath are at 156", while the rest of the second floor are at 120". There is also a third floor at 226". A cross section image is below. The lower red line is the nominal second floor elevation. The upper red line is the elevation of the bedroom over the living room.

Why is this important? Well, some of the walls surrounding this bedroom and the stairwell next to it (which is difficult to visualize in the cross section) were not properly sized. I tried setting all the walls to "Default Wall Bottom Height" and "Default Wall Top Height", but some wall would not cooperate and enclose the bedroom and stairwell as I expected.

Rendering Problems

Then I tried producing the exterior rendering (the same one I show on the Works In Progress page) (design is now done!). Not only did the saved cameras port over, but now they can be named, and you can set and/or change the camera's central focal point. This is the point about which the camera rotates if you use the Mouse Orbit tool. Very cool.

But I had a few problems. First, I tried to select the Object Select tool in the tool bar. As you may know, tool tips display for any tool. When the tool tip tried to display, HDP 7.0 went into an extended "rendering" mode that seemed to hang the program. I mean, the program wasn't reporting anything in the status bar other than "Rendering..." and it refused keystrokes or mouse clicks. This is despite the fact you are supposed to be able to press Esc and stop the rendering. I tried minimizing the program, which eventually worked. When the program was restored to full size, the rendering completed. What a pain.

However, whenever I would hover the mouse over one of the toolbar buttons (and a tool tip would try to display), the system would lapse into a very long delay where not even the CPU was being used. Apparently it was thrown into a re-rendering "loop" that never seemed to return.

OK, I am not totally inexperienced, so I went to the Render Preferences dialog (shown below). I began making adjustments, mostly among the Options (on the right). I turned Optimizations on and off, and toggled H/W Backdrop on and off, but to no effect. The only thing that would get me back in operation would be to minimize the program. Once minimized it would work normally. That is until, of course, I hovered over a toolbar button.

Note that the "OpenGL Renderer" shows as FireGL V3100. Well, according to ART, Inc. (the folks that make the program) this particular graphics board has been the source of some problems.

Long story shortened, because it took me several days and the purchase of a new video adapter (XFX nVidia GeForce 7300 GS, in fact) before my rendering problems were solved. Even the nVidia card has a minor flaw, but other than that it works quite well (and considering it cost $68 vs. the FireGL cost of $180, it was even faster!)

Update: All the above problems were due to the ATI video card. The 7950 GT is lightening fast and supports both monitors, but the video drivers seem to be interfering with Windows Explorer when performing final rendering. Otherwise--everything works fine.

Some Differences

Let me see if I can summarize some of the major differences I've noticed between the versions. And also note that these points contain some editorial commentary, so my comparisons aren't necessarily unbiased.

PITA (pain in the ass)

The biggest PITA I discovered was the fact that I used soffits to place moldings in rooms where they otherwise wouldn't be placed, and in the new version soffits aren't nearly as cooperative as they used to be. A thin soffit (1/16") will take a molding, but if you cross room boundaries or are above the ceiling, the molding disappears.
You also cannot select a soffit in 3D view if it is obscured by a molding. Previously the molding had no effect, so you could adjust the soffit (and thus adjust the molding) along its length.
I used to select multiple roof planes and adjust them vertically as a group. In fact, the Roof Plane DBX had a special field just for this adjustment. Now, you must select each roof plane individually and use the Transform/Replicate DBX to move the roof plane up/down along the Z axis. To be fair, the Transform/Replicate is much more powerful when it comes to manipulating roof planes, but it would still be nice to move them all at once.
Now there is a 1" grid that can be turned on, and in fact it is on by default. This is handy when you're placing walls and things initially, but with the Grid Snap turned on the Accurate Move function doesn't. Move accurately, that is. I find with experience that I turn off the grid so things can be accurately placed. What's nice is that previously most object moved in 1" increments unless you used the Accurate Move tool. Now, with the grid off all object move freely, though with object snaps (more below on this) they do sometimes tend to seek out intersection points with nearby objects.
Next PITA is the change in behavior of custom ceiling planes. Previously I used custom ceilings anywhere I wanted/needed a ceiling. They did not interfere with walls, floors, etc. Now, no floors or walls can be placed above a custom ceiling except attic walls. Of course, roof planes can be above a custom ceiling.
I have noticed that whenever I change an object in 3D render view, the view renders twice. Once to change the object, and once to redraw over the editing handles. With simple designs (or early in the design stages) this second rendering isn't much of a concern. But as the design becomes more complex, this time becomes quite noticeable.
I have run into problems (at various times) with the custom material applied to ceilings and attic walls being lost. No, I don't know why this happens. Update: Seems to have "disappeared".

Cool and New

They have opened the door to 3rd party libraries! Not only that, but some Chief libraries will work with HDP 7.0, as well. I have made some judicious purchases of libraries to add to the fairly large collection that came with the program, so there is no lack for interesting objects.
Did I mention that they added a bunch of new objects to the libraries? And now they provide downloads of bonus material. I have about 2000 wallpaper patterns and almost as many stock paint colors.
One new feature that is pretty handy is the ability to apply wall coverings (and more than one, as well) to walls. This provides a great deal of added flexibility, especially when you want wainscoting, wallpaper, and a wallpaper border. However, wall coverings don't "flow" to bay windows, though moldings (such as chair rails) do flow.
Previously, if you needed to rebuild floors/walls/ceilings (F12), any 3D views were automatically closed. While this might be a handy way of closing these windows, with the new version these windows remain open. I find myself having about 4-5 3D render views open, along with ... several cross section views, and making changes and noting the differences in the various views.
The Library window can be opened and docked. I find this to be very handy once you get used to it.
You can tile windows and so work with the Library docked on the right with both a floor plan and 3D render view open, but I find this aperture too small to be effective.
Three words: Material Eye Dropper. Ever wanted to make some object the same material as another object? Now it's easy. Simply pick up the material with the eye dropper, and apply it where you want it. Huge timesaver.
Two words: Object Snaps. This is very significant. In particular, when I'm trying to lay out objects in plan view, I tend to use CAD lines. Now, I can start a CAD line on the edge or point of an object--be it a wall or cabinet or roof, etc., and drag that line to another point on another object. The line snaps into place. If you want accurate positioning, this feature makes your job a lot easier.
The Display Options DBX has been made larger and better organized. Instead of two panes, now everything is on the same pane, and 2D and 3D options can be easily controlled from one place.
The Defaults has been reorganized, and some default options are improved, but if you think the "Show Lower Pony Wall in Plan View" option is on the Pony Wall Defaults DBX, you would be wrong.

Update After 1 Year

Hmm. Chief Architect saw fit not to give me my rebate. I did not mail it late, but it was "at the wire". They also did not return the dongle for v6.0. I could ask, but I really don't have the time or inclination to argue about it.

I would not go back to v6.0, regardless.