Does anybody have any recommendations? Haver tried googling and come up with a number of possibilities, but would like to hear if anyone has any particularly favourable experience.
I'm looking for something like estate agents might use, or those Beeny-esque TV programmes. Strong preference for something free, or at least shareware.
Urgh - keep us posted. I went through this a while ago and the 'solutions' all seemed to be either too complicated, too much work (no libraries of 'useful' bits available), too crap, or saved in some utterly random format rather than anything remotely standard. I gave up and just drew everything on good ol' dead trees.
Seems like there's an opening for simple software to do this, because it's not exactly rocket science. If only Inkscape had a usable tape measure feature it'd probably be the best bet - but I think that's been a work in progress for several years now.
I use a package called - would you believe - FloorPlan 3D, from IMSI. I got mine free on the Coverdisc of PCPlus Magazine a few years ago, but you can buy the current version from the likes of Amazon for about £20. It enables you to create a 2-D plan view, and then place 3-D walls, doors windows, roofs, etc. on it - and then render the image to look (more or less!) like a photo of the finished building. You can hide layers so as, for example, to see inside with the roof removed and you can do walk-throughs etc. You can furnish the rooms with tables, chairs, fire-places, bathroom suites, etc. - except that the standard fixtures are somewhat Americanised (although they can be customised).
As with any CAD-type package, you have to invest some time in learning how to get the best out of it - but you can produce some fairly impressive results without *too* much effort. There's a reasonable amount of on-line help available (contributed by third parties IIRC) with tips on how to do end gables, etc.
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