Product Reviews

Almost everyone wants to improve their home in some way. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average British adult spends over 10 minutes a day on DIY-related activities. To help you with this, Your 3D Home Designer aims to take the guesswork out of DIY. It allows you to make a model of your home and view alterations in 3D before you've even driven to Homebase.

The first step towards creating a model of your home is to draw the foundations on screen. A grid is available to help you gauge distances, and you can alter the scale to suit the size of your property. This is where things get difficult. Instead of an arrow or a crosshair, the cursor for drawing foundations is a caret: the shape used when positioning text in a word processor. This makes it impossible to judge where you're clicking, so your foundations and walls tend not to fit exactly on the gridlines.

This problem resurfaces elsewhere. Other important elements

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such as walls must be positioned with an imprecise mouse cursor. This problem is compounded by the fact that you can't use the undo function to remove a badly positioned wall. We had to delete walls time and again. This isn't easy, as the walls are marked as dark blue lines. Foundations are also marked as dark blue lines, and with walls often positioned over foundations it can be hard to see which is which.

Once the walls are in place, you can add basic features such as windows and doors, and extras such as furniture, heating equipment and floors. You can view your plans in 3D at any point. The 3D view is basic, but it gives you a better impression of your building than the plans. You can click and drag textures on to the plain shapes to give the model more realism, but certain objects such as trees still seem like 2D images.

You can view your 3D model in two ways: above and from the ground. Unfortunately, both these views are extremely difficult to control. To move around, you have to click and drag with the mouse. We found ourselves charging about aimlessly on the ground or entering a nauseating spiral when looking from above. Controlling the elevation of your viewpoint using the mouse is similarly hit and miss and we often found it hard to get the view we wanted.

Focus Multimedia's Your 3D Home Designer Deluxe Edition is disappointing. Its scope is impressive, with enough 3D objects to create a detailed model of any home, but it's just too fiddly to use. Even at this price, it's difficult to recommend.