Drafting Application for Home Addition

[sengsational]

I'm toying with the idea adding a screened porch and wondered what tool would be good to plan that addition.

Back in the Windows 3.1 days I had an inexpensive but useful 3D drawing tool that allowed one to "fly through" the resulting model. I used this tool to design my crawl space to basement conversion. It worked ok, but it was kind of quirky. I doubt I could find it or get it to run on a modern OS. The way it worked, though, I could define a "box" some feet wide and tall, 4 inches thick to be a wall. It also had a library of pre-drawn 3D objects, but I didn't use those much. It had a 2D library to 'paint' things like windows on a 3D object (wall) if you didn't want to "frame" in that level of detail. It was flexible such that it did not lock me into any a set of predefined things that may not match reality of the situation. I've tried some programs that try to be "easy", but at the expense of not being able to actually model something that wasn't in their play book already. I've tinkered with a CAD program a very long time ago, and never got the kind of reasonably quick satisfaction I got from my old 3D drawing tool.

Anyone have any tools they could recommend to do this modeling?

[braumeister]

Google Sketchup

[Dash man]

Paper and a pencil

[bingybear]

pink pearl and #2

[hakuna matata]

I agree Google Sketchup would be the easiest.
I believe you can download it free (limited use and function)
or you can buy a Pro version for like $500 if I recall--it is what I use.

Good luck!

[Rustic23]

I used Punch software to design our house. Then had a 'plans drawer' create a set for the builder to actually build from. $39 buck fro program and $100 for the set. Worked well for us.

Home Design | Punch Software | Official Site

[sengsational]

Thanks for the ideas. Paper and pencil won't give me a 3D model, so that's out.

I downloaded SketchUp Make by Trimble Navigation Ltd. Google sold it in 2012, I guess. Really nice proggy, especially for free. Very flexible. The free version won't allow construction drawing to be generated (SketchUp Make vs Pro | SketchUp Knowledge Base), but you get the pro features for 30 days, and I have more than one computer. $700 for the pro version is unreasonable for a single use. They do have a student version for $49, and I have a student that might let me borrow her computer. But $139 for Punch Software might be less hassle. The problem is you get so much with SketchUp for free, it's hard to not use that.

I've been following along youtube videos for many, many hours now. I feel almost like I could hack through the home addition model now, but I'm going to keep watching and following along for a while. I've only watched two different youtube sources, and their ideas and techniques were completely different, so I'm going to try a few more sources before I launch into my project.

[Brat]

My favorite doesn't offer 3D cheap so I went to CNET and found ThreeDify Designer. Highly rated by CNET and users.

[Ronstar]

I would use either Sketchup or DraftSight, a cad program that creates Autocad compatible .dwg files. Both are free.


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