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1. TexasShopper | July 13th, 2010 at 3:16 pm

   This is a horrid program, difficult to learn, difficult to use. Let me say that I have worked with various vector-based drawing and CAD type programs for years.

   Chief Architect Landscaping and Deck Designer 9. 0 is just a module of their full Architect program. Before the landscape can be designed, the house must be built, then the lot must be defined. Fair enough, but the home design function is simply their architect program with limited capabilities. It requires extensive technical knowledge of home construction, far more than the average user might have. Certainly more than I have. Really, can’t I pick a wall exterior and height and draw the darned thing? Every facet of each floor must be individually defined and built, one wall section at a time. It’s as if you were designing a home to actually be built and not simply an exterior as a backdrop for landscaping. I cannot even describe how awkward and horrible that is to try to do if you do not have extensive knowledge of building.

   Once the floors are built, the foundation must be built, but I’ve never been able to get it to build correctly with the auto build function. Some walls get a raised foundation, others drop to the ground lowering the roof line, doors and windows accordingly. This causes doors to open through exterior steps. Other walls, inexplicably, float in space. I’ve not been able to find any differences in how these various walls are defined.

   One can manually draw the foundation, but on a blank screen. Not with an image of the excruciatingly built house to go by. That foundation will appear wherever it was placed on the screen, relative to the invisible elements. If the foundation is drawn where the driveway would be on the lot, that’s where it will appear. Of course, the lot cannot be seen, either. It is very difficult to properly define and nearly impossible to properly align the foundation in this manner.

   Of course, one must have a roof, and the horrors of that are simply beyond imagining unless one has a simple, box shaped house.

   I don’t want to be an architect, just to design some landscaping, print plans to take to the Architectural Committee, get my permit and get started.

   Defining the lot was difficult, as well. One cannot simply draw an oddly shaped lot and add the features. The advertised GPS import doesn’t accept GPS coordinates to search for data, but will accept some GPS file format I’m not familiar with. Certainly not the GPS data from my cell phone.

   After spending several weeks of pure frustration, I called in my son, the engineer, who is quite skilled with any number of CAD programs. He cannot make it right, either, so it’s the program, not me.

   Seriously, parts of the roof shoot off to infinity, the steps go through the carport slab, with the entire structure floating two feet above the ground because the foundation will not build correctly. There are too many oddities to detail here, or to deal with. I have begun from scratch 4 different times, always with bizarre results.

   Gave up on the house with only the outlines of it and other structures placed on the lot and tried to lay out the landscape elements. Simply cannot find a way to draw curves. There are presets for a circle garden bed, kidney shaped or retangular, but one cannot just put a garden bed up against a straight surface (wall or fence) and curve the opposite side. You can reshape a circle or kidney shape, but with only 4 points to drag, cannot get the shape you want. No curved garden paths. There are not even the most rudimentary drawing tools.

   It has a library of predefined plants, but is lacking quite a few of the ones needed for the xeriscape of our dreams. One can define general plant shapes, but that’s a bit tedious and doesn’t give the same results, were one actually able to use the 3-D features.

   Gave up on using the landscaping tools, too, and tried to print out the lot/structure plan to draw elements in by hand. In order to get anything larger than about 4 or 5 inches, I ended up taking a screen shot of the plan, importing it to another program and scaling and printing from it.

   The tutorials are obviously the ones from the full architect program. Features and controls are not well described, difficult to find and, sometimes, not named the same in the program as they are in the instructions.

   I am not a stupid person, but this program makes me feel otherwise. Although it is advertised as an easy way to design landscaping, it isn’t. My son agrees that this is a difficult program to use. As I said before, he has extensive background with quite a few professional and lower level CAD programs. The program will neither import nor export CAD format files. That means one cannot make the structures in a good CAD program and plant them on the lot. Nor can one export the disastrous structures and fix them in a good CAD program. Pitiful.

   This may be a great program if you have a strong background in building, but I imagine even if you’re that good, there are still better tools available to you.

   On the good side, the landscape program doesn’t use a dongle, which their full architect version does. If you ever happen to get your landscape designed, the program will “age” your various plants, so you can get an idea of how that pretty tree will look 20 years from now. If you are able to get features defined, it will calculate areas, perimeters and volumes, which is quite handy.

   If ever I get brave enough to subject myself to the rigors of this stupid software again, and somehow manage to make anything work, I shall post an update to this review. Barring that, all I can say is to avoid this program like the plague. If you are foolish enough to buy it, as I did, you will feel as if you’ve gotten the plague before you’re finished.

   Rating: 1 / 5

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