Ashampoo Home Design 6 reviews

Ashampoo Home Design has been around for years, helping people create and furnish their 3D homes. We looked at the latest iteration: version 6, which is available for Windows 7 and later, with a minimum of 4GB of RAM (although, as is the case with all of these types of apps, the more you l ‘feed into memory, the more responsive it will be).

Currently, this interior design software comes at a very low price: $ 19.99 (£ 17.99) instead of $ 49.99 (£ 44.99) for the download-only version. If you want to give it a try, you can also take advantage of a 10-day free trial.

To start

Launch the software and you will immediately feel that the design is past its peak. There may have been a time when the layout was modern, but that was many moons ago. The “Start Wizard” window gives you an overview of some renderings that are nowhere near as good as the current competition can achieve. You get access to training videos that are eleven (!!) years old and don’t even come with narration – not a good first impression, but it explains the archaic feel. You also have a construction assistant – that’s more encouraging.

You are a wizard, house designer

The steps that are guided to you are very simple and help you get started quickly and easily. You choose the general shape of your house, its dimensions, even the type of roof you are looking for. Once you are ready, place your new home on your land. Everything was going well until we decided to insert windows and doors. For some inexplicable reason, which we could not resolve, these doors and windows insisted on being placed on the first floor and not on the ground floor. Since there was no first floor, they appeared in the roof.

We tried to create another building and the door appeared in the right place… until we noticed that the building was actually floating above the ground next to each other! Maybe we shouldn’t have let a wizard design our house in the first place! There must be some way to fix this, but if this issue appears the first time you try the app, and there is no obvious and clear way to fix it, how many potential customers will be left with? the application and how many others to venture into the arms of the competition?

Interface

The interface is very heavy. You have rows of tools and icons at the top and a project sidebar on the right. What remains is where you will design your home. Except, not really. You can work on a 2D top-to-bottom plan, or a virtual 3D render of your creation. These two windows are in the form of floating windows which can only reside inside the space not occupied by the other tools. It’s very frustrating because these tools take up a lot of space, and if you like working with those two windows open, they end up fighting for limited space.

Sure, they can overlap with one partially behind the other, but the fact that they can’t even be displayed in different tabs to maximize the limited amount of screen space you have makes the design very poor or very archaic. Either way, he doesn’t feel up to the task.

Yes, you can hide the toolbars, but you still end up with windows competing for the same space, and you have to keep moving and resizing them as you work. Not ideal.

Build your house

We have not encountered any “floating house syndrome” when building a house from scratch. The tools work well, but it looks like you need way too many clicks to get the job done. It’s also not clear if your cursor is configured to use a particular tool or just there to help you move around your design. Many times we found ourselves inadvertently adding walls when all we wanted was to select another part of the construction.

Now, as you would expect, you have a myriad of options available to you. The type of wall for example (exterior, interior, load-bearing, etc.), the way your roof is constructed (options which were presented thanks to our wizard above), and of course, utilities and furniture galore. .

Take a door for example. Click on it to access its properties, and from there you can scroll through a list of different styles … except the thumbnails are quite small and more often than not it’s not clear what your selection will look like – until that you select it and check the result in the 3D window. Lots and lots of clicks to get what you want.

The Item Catalog is better because you can double-click on an item to see a large preview, so that’s fine. Most items have multiple options, such as various sinks, toilets, and showers. Adding an element consists of dragging it from this catalog onto your plan … unless you want to work on the 2D plan, even if this window is the most in the foreground, the 3D window will appear as and when you slide, competing for attention like a neglected pet. If you can still see your 2D window, you can drop the element there instead, and then drag it to its appropriate location. But then there is another problem: Somehow the software now insists that you want to add as much of that chosen item as you can click. Sure, hitting the Esc key stops that, but would that be asking too much for that to be an option, instead of ending up with four toilets stacked on top of each other in the same bathroom?

As you would expect, every element you add can be resized, although it takes a lot of clicks to do so. Rather than dragging their outer edges like it would be the natural and expected method, nothing is that easy here. No, you need to open its properties and then manually enter new values. If the size is not exactly what you need, you need to open the properties again and repeat the process until it is.

Final verdict

Home Design might have been cutting edge software at one time, but it looks old and frustrating now. You can design a house to your exact specifications, absolutely, and customize it however you like, no doubt, with as much furniture as you can fit in … but you really have to click way too many times to get results that could be done. faster and much more efficiently. Its competitors can do it, why can’t this software?

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