House plans to 3d

AceHigh

Could anyone tell me if there is a program I can buy to convert my house plans (in Cad) to a 3d format to allow me to get a feel for the size of the house.

foamcutter

You could try Google Sketchup. Free to download and reasonably easy to get a grasp of quickly. A lot of video tutorials as well

Mellor

for a basic 3d of the house, to size it up and try out differnet views then sketch-up is the best thing to use. Shouldn't take long and CAD plans can be opened with it.

kadman

Architectural desktop , runs on the Acad cad engine, and is excellent for instant 2d to 3d cad line conversion

kadman

Mellor

to a complete layperson a think that sketch up would be easier to use that Arch desktop

kadman

Sorry, did not see anything that suggested a cad programme for a complete layperson. I thought OP asked for a cad programme that converts house plans to 3d. Adt does. Easy to use. if you can draw a line . then you can convert your plans simply in ADT.

But thats just my opinion;)

kadman

Mellor

I agree that AD is easy to use, the newer version especially. And you can get better results from arch desktop too. but sketch up imo is faster, it is less detailed and it you wanted a photorealistic 3d, then you would need to export it from sketch up to another program.
the fact that the op was asking the question suggest they were 100% new to drawing software, i could of been wrong.
the only down side to arch desktop is the cost, its €4000+ and sketchup is free.

antime a thread like this is started sketch up is the first program suggest. most of the time it is suitable and shouldn't be used. for example somebody asking for a 3d render program. i normaly post and advise that sketch up is unsuitable and there are far better programs,
but this is one of the only times that i think that sketch up is the best suited to the OPs description, if the OP gives a more detailed description of what they need then this could change.
Mellor

kadman

I think you.ve just sold ADT ."you said easy to ,use better results, no need to export to another programme, photo realistic all in one".:p ADT is fast at converting the 2d cad to 3d walls, so your full 3d model is ready in a very short space of time.

Autocad offer an educational version of Autcad 2007 for less than 200 E, and fully functional. Not too sure about the printing aspect tho. Maybe there is a likewise offer on ADT.

I suppose its down to the OP specific requirements. Sketchup is free, but so is Chief Architect demo..now there is a superb programme which would leave sketchup in a cloud of dust.

End of rant

kadman

mnolan

I was pretty pleased with ShowHome3d. You'd need to start from scratch though - it wont convery your existing plans.

galwaytt

Mellor wrote:

...the only down side to arch desktop is the cost, its €4000+ and sketchup is free....

...the other downside is the horsepower required to run ADT07. We just had to fork out 4k on a suitable machine for it.

An architect would cost less !!

Mellor

thats true, I was doing a very large 3D drawing during the summer, basically a 3D of a whole village to show impact of certain proposed buildings altogether, and the plan ws to do the layout, including site elevations in skechup and the rest in VIS, but the file was too big for Viz to open, so I finished it in sketch up, got very detailed, and then selected a view point, deleted what couldn't been seen, save as to Vis and repeat. Ended up with loads of smaller files that contained only a facade or so, and then rendered these to Vis

kadman

galwaytt wrote:

...the other downside is the horsepower required to run ADT07. We just had to fork out 4k on a suitable machine for it.

An architect would cost less !!

Hate to tell you galwaytt, but if you forked out 4k:eek: to run adt, you were ripped off. Adt will run on 1 gig of ram, but will shine on 2 gigs.


kadman