A room planning product knows of rooms, doors, and walls. Diagraming tools know of objects and groups. That said, this is where Live Home 3D starts to differ from a traditional diagramming tool. A few cuts and a few pastes solved it, but it was a bit annoying. In the case of Live Home 3D, there were some areas where I added a room and it decided to change the angle of some walls. I'm very glad I did.įor the top-down floor plan view, Visio, OmniGraffle, or Live Home 3D all would have done about the same job. I ran into some licensing snafus that the support folks helped me with, but by that time, I'd started researching other tools and found Live Home 3D. That's $99 (or $199 for the pro version) for a year. Instead, I went with OmniGraffle, a decent-enough diagramming program for the Mac. Plus, no native MacOS Visio app? Really?Īlso: Augmented and virtual reality mean business I already pay for an Office 365 subscription, so I just couldn't bring myself to shell out another $60 to $180 to use an application I'd already paid for numerous times over the years and that is considered part of Office. Yes, there's a browser version of Visio, but that's either $5 per month or $15 per month, depending on whether you want the basic or pro version. It's just 3D is in the product's title for a reason, and we'll come to that reason later in this article.įor reasons I don't understand, Microsoft hasn't ported Visio to the Mac. That isn't to say Live Home 3D isn't worth it. To be honest, there's nothing super-special about Live Home 3D's ability to create a top-down floor plan. If you have a complex project, the Pro version is well worth the extra forty bucks. Live Home 3D sells for $29.99, while the Pro version sells for $69.99. I used the Pro version, which added extra views, more advanced material editing, camera and lighting customization, and the ability to custom create and edit furniture models in SketchUp. To create the floor plan and the 3D model, I used software provided to me by Belight Software, makers of Live Home 3D and Live Home 3D Pro. By the time I was done with that phase, I had pictures with dimensions of just about every element of the house. I wrote recently about the first phase, the measurement process, so go check out that article to come up to speed. The workplace and home design we settled on was created in three phases: Taking app-enabled measurements, creating a basic top-down floor plan, and 3D modeling and pre-visualization of object placement. Visualize alternatives and even make color choices.Work out how subsystems will work before climbing in the attic for a week during a 90-degree summer.Understand where one room (and wall) is in relationship to another.Save money (because you're saving time).The benefit of this was that I was also able to share with you heating and cooling zones for my Extreme Nest article and video, and was able to share fabrication lab designs with partner vendors, who are helping me bring 3D printing and fabrication stories to you.īecause everything's more fun with a chart, list, or table, here's one on the benefits of floor planning: In my case, because my home not only needs to house my family, but also the video studio, workshop, offices, desktop fabrication and robotics lab, and workshop needed for work, we had to carefully plan out how and where everything went. When you're paying construction professionals by the hour, reducing contractor confusion can save a lot of money. The prevailing feeling was that only anal, nerdy people need to plan in advance, and tough folks just do it. I'm beginning this article with the above description because six years ago, when I first wrote about planning my furniture placement, I got a lot of pushback in the comments. But if you also have to spend hours in each room dragging heavy things, it could take days of back-breaking work just to position your belongings so that they work for your environment. Usually, you can get a move in or move out done in a day (assuming everything's packed up). The time it takes to move into a new home or office is one thing. This is not just about saving your back from pain. That's why I like to use laser measuring tools and plug the measurements into floor planning software. It's tons easier to move little pictures of furniture around on a screen than it is to drag actual heavy things around. When you're moving into a new house or a new office, it's a good idea to know where stuff's supposed to go before you do all the lugging. If at all possible, it's best to avoid moving the same furniture repeatedly around to see where it fits. The point is that moving furniture is a lot of work.
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