IMSI FloorPlan 3D Home Design Suite Version 10
FloorPlan 3D Design Suite 10 is a superior collection of tools for customizing, visualizing, and planning entire home-design projects -- from concept to completion. Work with over 1,000 customizable home plans, online 3D kitchen showroom & 1900 pre-drawn 3D symbols. It's also got an option to design and edit in 2D and 3D. View your design in stunning realism with gorgeous, realistic 3D walkthrough.
IMSI FloorPlan 3D Home Design Suite Version 10 Accessories
 Turbo Cad 9.1 Standard
Floor Plan 3D V11 Remodel & Home Design
Custom 3D Home (Jewel Case)
3D Home Architect Design 6.0 Special Edition (Jewel Case)
FloorPlan 3D Home Design Suite 9
The Owner-Builder Book: How You Can Save More Than $100,000 in the Construction of Your Custom Home, 4th Edition
Tips & Traps When Building Your Home
Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 7.0 [OLD VERSION]
The New Smart Approach to Kitchen Design (New Smart Approach)
The Pre-Foreclosure Property Investor's Kit: How to Make Money Buying Distressed Real Estate -- Before the Public Auction
IMSI FloorPlan 3D Home Design Suite Version 10 Reviews
regular Joe Home Owner. Might be a good product, but too hard to use for the.
I recently pulled the software off the shelf and reinstalled to work on another project. When an upgrade offer for Version 10 came in the mail I thought to myself, OK, maybe this will fix some/all the bugs (yeah, right). I guess to be realistic, if you want GOOD floorplan design software you'll have to spend many hundreds of dollars, not tens. After the upgrade joke, I'm certainly never giving IMSI another penny. It was a bad dream coming back, after about 10 minutes I remembered what a nightmare this software is and said "Never again." It is now shelfware destined soon to be given to some poor soul on freecycle. I did finally get some useful floorplans out of it. On the contrary, it was essentially the same package, nothing changed except that it was worse.
If you enjoy suffering this is the home design software for you. Now I couldn't get it to print floorplans with dimensions. I'm in the computer business so I'm used to battling with bad software to get it to work and wasn't going to let this package get the best of me. You can get it to produce something eventually, but you will put in hours trying to get the software to do what you want and have to give up on getting it do other things it says it does. The 3D modeling was helpful although certainly not as good as they say it is. I initially purchased Version 9 and nearly tore my hair out trying to do layout for a house remodeling we were working on.
Takes a lot of patience that I didn't have. Not as user friendly as say the Better Homes and Garden home designer, but it does convert to CAD.
Any advantage over old school hand drafting was nearly non-existent from my experience. As far as creating a working drawing with enough detail to build off of, this is not the program. My biggest problem with the software is that you have to export the drawing from FloorPlan to an included CAD program (TurboCAD) and then mark it up with dimensions, etc. I was probably expecting too much for a cheaper CAD program but this one isn't even worth the effort. If you want to move a window 3 inches, you have to go back into FloorPlan and move it, and re-import and start all over again with dimensioning. I used this "suite" to attempt to design houses for a Habitat for Humanity affiliate. If all you are looking for is a pretty "flyover" of an unrefined house design, this might work.
I was furious, but thankfully, I had the IMSI design captured. Even though I still had the IMSI software (Version 5) and it readily installed onto XP, I thought that surely there had been improvements. The manual is about an inch thick, but I started wading through, thinking that this was the learning cost of a really good package. Again, the viewing tools were weird and somewhat non-intuitive, but eventually useful.
I also liked IMSI's design methods using internal room dimensions. After spending many hours getting a complete design (from my working with IMSI) entered into a freshly-reloaded Punch, I again tried to save my work. Forget saving the data so you could work on a design again. Actually, I downloaded a free upgrade to Version 5.1 and got busy. Neither package really creates beautiful 3D graphics, but IMSI's simple renderings were adequate for previewing the design work. Everything was hard to do. So I bought it, in spite of paying approximately 3X what I would pay for the latest IMSI version of FloorPlan 3D. I have a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering, and have taught interactive computer graphics, so I guess I am more than usually familiar with computers and design.
So, I took the time to find the "best package out there". I found Punch to be even more restrictive. Interestingly, I downloaded Google's free Sketchup software, imported my IMSI design (in dxf file format), and was able to place it on the terrain using a Sketchup to Google Earth tool, and then interactively view it in 3D on my 10 acre lot using Google Earth. Now I am thinking of purchasing IMSI's Version 11 as I am finalizing our house plan and like some of the new features and abilities of the new software.
Too bad it always lost my saved designs. I tried everything, and eventually thought that it was my fault, so I went back to my old IMSI package because I had a house to design. So, I had a decision- Waste more time trying to debug a program I had paid 3X more for than the IMSI FloorPlan 3D, or spend my time getting work done on my house plan. I found that the package was easy to use (although a bit weird), and that it generally worked great. While I was able to export the IMSI design as a vrml file and e-MAIL it to my son to review, Punch had the greatest number of export file options.
So, when we moved to another state to retire, we decided to repeat the process. Unless you knew the design beforehand, it was very difficult to lay out a floor plan interactively. Punch's 3D viewer was totally useless, and I was never able to control the views, no matter what I did. The manual seemed reasonable and there are TONS of features (read complexity), but when I actually tried to use the program, I couldn't get anything done. IMSI was also the easiest in viewing your design in 3D. Even with a fully designed floorplan, I had trouble with the Punch program.
When we moved in, the home was absolutely spectacular. I found out that I have some serious grading and fill work to do on the build site. When I went back to work on it some more, it was unreadable. And, "Hey.", I taught computer graphics.
Nowhere did they tell you whether you could design the 2nd floor first, whether you had to layout the foundation beforehand (Punch), etc. This was what IMSI was good at. I have no vested interest in either manufacturer. Then, and this was the killer for me, whenever I saved data, I could never read the file back in. I was never able to use Punch's layout editor efficiently. I own both the IMSI (FloorPlan 3D Version 5) and Punch (Architect 4000) software titles, and the following are my own conclusions. Even just creating a simple layout was a huge struggle.
Ever. I quickly got up to speed because IMSI wins out hands down for its simple user interface. To be candid, neither software package was bug-free.
Finally, I should mention that I wanted to input site information for my lot, but that was too costly in terms of time. I struggled with both initially, but soon found that IMSI's wall layout tool, while weird, was useable. But, neither program made it clear how to proceed in starting a design from scratch.
It's ease of use (tailorable wall heights, pushing even non-rectilinear wall segments around, changing wall thicknesses, immediate demonstration of dimensions and room square footage, changing wall and floor materials, colors, and texture, etc) allowed one to work pretty quickly. The reviews I read said that the Punch (Architect 4000) package was rated best, had the most features, blah, blah, blah. IMSI occasionally doesn't allow you to move a wall, but that is almost always because there is some constraint that is disallowing the modification.
I designed my previous home using the IMSI package, and after using it to capture the design, I passed it along to a draftsman to create drawings for the permitting process. The file was there, but there was some formatting error that made it unreadable.
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