Chief Architect 12
Silvana Fleischacker
Smart building technology makes the design process easy. As you draw walls, the program creates a 3D model simultaneously. Ceilings and floors form automatically and the program generates a materials list that continually updates along with the design. When you add windows and doors, they automatically insert into walls creating the openings and framing. Cabinets bump to walls, countertops merge, and cabinets update when placing fixtures and appliances. Need client design options? Use the Style Palette tool to transform the look of a room with colors, materials, and architectural elements.
For all aspects of residential and light commercial design. As you draw walls and place smart architectural objects like doors and windows, the program creates a 3D model, generates a Materials List, and with the use of powerful building tools, helps produce Construction Documents with Site Plans, Framing Plans, Section Details, and Elevations.
For kitchen, bath and interior renderings and virtual tours for interior design professionals. Help clients visualize with 3D, specify materials and produce Plan and Construction Drawings. Realistically design every detail in 2D, Elevation, or 3D perspective views. Select catalogs from a 3D Library with thousands of cabinets, appliances, furnishings and textures.
Chief Architect is 3D software for new construction, remodeling, kitchen, bath and interior design. Discover why millions of people use Chief Architect as the home design software product of choice for 3D visualization and construction drawings.
Chief Architect uses smart design objects, such as cabinets, to quickly and easily create various styles, shapes and sizes. Chief Architect partners with specific manufacturers (cabinets, appliances, doors, windows, countertops and flooring) so that styles, finishes and other product-specific design details can be accurately drawn and rendered. Learn more about Kitchen, Bath & Interior Design features.
Chief Architect provides the best Interior Design Software for both 2D and 3D design and visualization. Design in 2D wall elevations, house plan views or in 3D. Choose from thousands of styles, colors, and materials to create realistic interiors from our 3D Library. Experiment with your interior design ideas using 3D models, virtual tours and advanced design tools.
As you draw walls, the program automatically creates a 3D model and supports full 3D editing. With Chief Architect, you can design in any view for seamless and simultaneous editing between 2D & 3D. Advanced rendering provides both Photo Realistic and Artistic styles such as Line Drawing and Watercolor. An extensive 3D Library of architectural objects and tools make it easy to detail and accessorize your designs so that styles, finishes and other product-specific design details can be accurately rendered. See our Samples Gallery. View Gallery
Chief Architect has a powerful CAD software engine that includes tools for lines, polylines, splines, arcs and solids to produce objects that range from custom entry columns to a deck ledger detail. Quickly manipulate objects with multiple copy, align, reflect and replicate at specific intervals. A CAD-to-Walls tool imports AutoCAD files and provides mapping for layers so you can quickly see the model in 3D. Draw custom CAD details, import as DWG/DXF/PDF, or choose from over 500 CAD details in the premium SSA catalog to overlay on your design.
3D renderings and virtual tours help you sell the project and construction drawings help you specify, permit and build. All views in your project - Floor Plans, Framing, Electrical, Section Details and Elevations have a user defined scale and link to a specific drawing that updates as your design changes. Layers control what displays for each of the drawing pages to help create professional detailed construction drawings. See our sample construction drawings.
Chief Architect Software is a leading developer of 3D architectural design software for builders, designers, architects and home DIY enthusiasts. For professionals, we publish Chief Architect Software and, for the consumer DIY market, we publish Home Designer products.
I do Design and Estimating for a lumberyard and demo'd SoftPlan, Chief Architect and Envisioneer before deciding on SoftPlan. All 3 do a good job of creating floor plans, elevations and sections. What sold me on SoftPlan is it's Material Take Off capabilities. Their SoftList module is leaps and bounds above the others in regards to customizing, accuracy and the ability to synchronize with our Point of Sale software. There is a bit of a learning curve with SoftList, but between the documentation, videos and their VERY patient and knowledgeable support team I quickly had it up and running. Once I have a house properly modeled in SoftPlan I can have a very accurate and detailed take off in less than an hour. I could not do my job without SoftList and SoftPlan.
I currently have both and I never was a big fan of Chief Architect. The main difference to me is that while CA produces awesome 3D renderings the plan portion of the software is lacking. SoftPlan is getting much better in the 3D rendering game but I am able to produce much better looking working set of drawings. While the 3D is fun to look at for my clients, most people will never see them, while my plans are seen by plan reviewers, contractors, building material suppliers, tradesmen and of course the beloved building inspectors.
From a strictly learning curve perspective, SP was much easier for me to pick up and run with. As a carpenter, I've built from drawings produced by both. Final plan quality depends on what is put into it by the creator...whether it's SP, CA, ACAD, or any other software...I've seen crap from all. So for me, it boiled down to how fast I was able to learn the software, and then be able to produce a quality set of drawings in a reasonable amount of time. SP for me is far and away more intuitive and usable for my purposes.
I can only give limited feedback about chief. I knew about softplan long before I purchased and before I knew anything about chief. I downloaded their demo sometime around 2005/2006...spent no more than an hour with it and just couldn't wrap my head around how it worked. It didn't take long to decide that wasn't the software I was going to buy. I started on Softplan with V13 LITE...was easily drawing floor plans after just a few hours of learning the commands, and upgrade to the full version when v14 came out. I've been very pleased with not only the software but also the amount of support received from the support staff. Answers to questions or problems are answered quickly and clearly. The awesome support is enough to keep me upgrading each time and sticking with softplan!!!
I have to say, I am with Sam on this one. I know many Architects that seem to use a mix of several design programs, to this day, I've no clue why, except one did seem to like the plan presentation in a simple version. (no dimensions, only names and size notes) It did look kinda cool, a little sketched looking with line intersects extending slightly past the corners as in the old fashioned drafting way.
I started with AutoCAD back in the 80's, version 1.4. It was fun to learn and with a lot of time and effort, you could produce a decent set of prints, but a LOT OF TIME, and you (yourself personally) had to be very accurate, or you had just another average drafted plan set.
Having self taught me, around about a version 4 of SoftPlan, once I started using it, finally went to a class, and continued with updates, I never looked back. I did try Chief, Sketch up and various others, but after a day or so of attempting to even begin to learn it as fast as I did SP, I knew I had the right stuff.
I know that these other programs likely have their place, but with all you can currently do with SP, they just take up hard drive space for me. I have the full 2016 AutoCAD Architecture suite, BIM and all, but I normally use it to convert files and once in a great while, if I can't find what I want in a online 3-D site, I might make something.
I also have Illustrator and Photoshop, but rarely use them either, SP has such fantastic 3-D capabilities, even I am still learning them and getting better and better.
I've spent hours and hours watching videos, I am that committed.
I have also taught more than a dozen others over the years, guys/gals that worked with and for me, how to use SP, and once they learned it, they too question why anyone would want to use other programs.
I've even used it for a variety of engineering and tool and die design projects, steel detailing and so many things, building race cars as part of my number of business ventures, it even works for me in designing and making various parts.
I am just getting started with SoftPlan and have used Chief for many, many, many years. Like any program it has its good and not so good points. While I do find it (Chief) fairly easy to use, it has, in my opinion, about the worst file management system ever invented by man.
I really do not know if SoftPlan has the same issue, but with Chief if you want to alter an existing plan (say "House1") then save it as "House 2" for a different client, or just an alternative design for the same client, you must save House 1 forever, you cannot archive it, you cannot save it on a separate hard drive, it must remain active in your system for as long as you want to use House 2. You can save it as a different plan name, you can save it on a different location in our computer, but if you ever lose House 1, or if the file ever gets corrupted you are out of luck and have to recreate the entire drawing for House 2 . As I have a lot of plans over the years that are based on previous drawings, this is a real time consuming issue. I certainly hope this is not the case with SoftPlan, but since I am an brand new user, only time will tell.
One thing I liked about SoftPlan is how you create different floors. In SoftPlan it appears the first floor is copied to either a foundation level or second floor, and all of the walls and other components are copies along with it. You can then change wall types if it is a foundation, and remove the unused portions of the original floor plan. Chief derives a blank floor plan. Things like plumbing drops or fixture locations need to be refigured manually with Chief, as they will not appear from floor to floor.