Home decorating software has improved greatly, especially over the last five or six years. Software which once produced box-type images with basic shading can now render more advances scenes.
But how good are they, and will they help you with your home decorating projects? Will you just spend hours, if not days, learning a new program only to find it has severe limitations?
Here you'll find an explanation of the different sorts of home decorating software available, and our opinion on their usefulness for home decor.
What types of home decorating software are there?
Computer Aided Design (CAD)
These are more for architectural features and initial floor plans that for home decor. Many of these are professional programs which have price tags to match. They are able to produce technical drawings of the buildings, together with all the necessary building specifications and regulations.
They are very good at what they do, and some have simplified versions for home use. If you just want to plan your furniture arrangements, you can probably do as well with a simple graphics program such as find on your PC or Mac.
3D Software
You may have seen pictures with titles which include the phrase '3D rendered'. This indicates they have been generated by computer software. It takes a very long time to prepare these pictures, as all the items shown have been modeled in the software.
Some of the programs which produce these pictures are very expensive, but there are others which are quite reasonably priced. One of them, called Blender, is free. But they have a very steep learning curve, and if you just want to play around with forms and colors, there are other alternatives which are better suited to your needs.
3D software is mostly used for product image generation, often used for advertisements. Many of the TV advertisements which feature impossible actions, such as cars skating around a frozen lake, are created with this sort of software.
Home architect - exterior and interior
This type of home decorating software is more suitable for the average user. You can plan your home and rooms to scale, apply textures and color, and place furniture items in position. Then you can render the scene with various lighting options. Many programs also allow a 'walk-through', where you can record a small movie of moving through your room or home.
There are all sorts of variations on this. For one example, take a look at the arranging living room furniture page on this website. You can go to different positions in the room and then pan around to get an idea of how the room would look from that position.
The advantage of this type of product is that you apply different colors and see how they look in different lighting conditions. But read the last section of this page for our opinion on these features.
Website based schemes
Some furniture manufacturers have sections where you can plan your rooms using their products. This is an easy and free way to check that the furniture will be suitable.
You can drag and drop the items into the room space, rearrange them, and make sure they will fit comfortably in the space.
Other websites deal with color. For example, many paint manufacturers now provide ways for you to apply one of their paint colors to the walls of various room settings, to see what the effect would be. Others allow you to select textures, color and different furniture items, and move them around.
One product which many readers of this website have found useful is www.Plan3D.com. This is subscription based, which is often more useful. If you buy home decorating software, the chances are you'll use it for a week or two, and then forget about it. Using a subscription you only subscribe for as long as you need to, and this can work out less expensive. The other advantage is that the product is always up to date.
Is Home Decorating Software worth it?
Here is our opinion, based on over 30 years' experience of advising clients on interior design and home decorating. You may or may not agree with our views, but for what they're worth, here goes.
Home decorating software can be useful in planning the layout of your rooms. If you're not good at visualizing how things will look, they can give you a good indication of what the result will be. (See the link above to arranging living room furniture and judge for yourself.)
As regards color, software is ok for trying out basic combinations. Some software will allow you to apply textures and pattern, with limited success.
Three conclusions
1. The usefulness of these packages is limited. They are certainly not necessary for successful home decorating. They can't do anything you can't do with a ruler, a pencil and a piece of paper.
They can, however, confirm if your initial basic ideas are feasible. If you've got your measurements wrong, or you haven't left enough room between items of furniture, they can flag up these errors.
2. Never, ever, rely on software for your final color choice. This is one area where we won't give in!
As in the first conclusion, software can help with the initial ideas. But before you make your final selection, always get samples of your proposed paint, wallpaper, fabric, etc, and look at the samples in the room, and in different lighting conditions. Real materials cannot be replicated accurately on a computer screen
3. They are great fun to use! You can spend many happy hours building your new home, decorating your rooms, generating walk-throughs and fly-throughs, and generally impressing everyone else with your new found skills.
Home decorating should be fun, and some of these software packages are certainly that!
Note: we started out intending to give links to the various products. But there are just so many of them we decided it wasn't feasible. So the easist way is to do a search on the internet and take it from there.
