By: Mitch | Last updated July 22, 2021 
When designing a house, it is very important to have a 3D equivalent of what you are currently designing. After all, blueprints and sketches can only give you the bare design of your vision. With a 3D design, you can use real life lighting, accurate colors, and even fill the interior with different objects to complete the vision. Because of this, many architects, engineers, and interior designers use home design applications which can easily create 3D designs of simple sketches through the use of intuitive and easy controls.
Virtual Architect Ultimate Home Design is one of the premier choices for home design applications. With a satisfactory rating of 3.8 in Amazon, the application is favored by many because of its intuitive design that makes it easy to be used by both amateur and professional users. It was created by Nova Development US which also creates similar applications such as photo editing, printing, utility applications, and more.
The application is continuously developed to fix previous bugs and add more features, with the application now in its 10th version. The application offers designing for both interior and outdoors.
One of the best parts about the application is the interface. It is built with a lot of guides and wizards which can teach you about how to use the different features of the app. Almost every tool has a description on its own with additional guides on how to use each of them. The icons used by the application, though dated in appearance, are very useful for instantly grasping its usage. Upon opening the app, you will be guided through the main categories of building, interior, landscape, terrain, and help.
You can also insert your blueprint into the application to act as a guide in building the bare foundations of the home. Putting the exact measurements of each part was a breeze because of responsive controls that needed only a couple of clicks to work. To design this, users simply need to click and drag the different parts which makes it easier to work. The measurements are also very smart and do not easily become cluttered when users accidentally create incorrect data. The application works a lot like the popular application Autocad which is why many users will immediately become familiar with using it.
It has tools such as wall snapping which makes it a breeze to design the different rooms of the house. You can also trace the blueprint into the actual design in order to suit your exact vision. With the application, you will be making most of the work in the 2D interface which will automatically be reflected into the 3D design so that you can easily see the impact of any change to the whole house. The current iteration of the application has fixed some very important issues of its previous application such as the difficulty to manually insert measurements and some issues with doors and windows designs.
The developers ensure that the application is a good purchase for the long run with the additional features they added. First, to make floorplans much easier to make, they have added intuitive angular dimensions. They also make it easier to combine two windows through their sash, glass, or frame. Finding materials for the different parts of the house is also easier with the material search tool. The door handling for double doors were also improved to make it very convenient. To make better rendering of the final house design, they have also added more lighting options and backdrops.
The application can run even for low-powered computers as long as they have a dedicated video card and adequate RAM. The bare minimum that we can advise is at least 2 GB of video memory and 4GB for the latter. When it comes to designing, we did not encounter much difficulty aside from the occasional stutters. However, those with older computers may experience errors when it comes to finally rendering the design with adequate lighting, objects, and backdrops.
After designing the bare foundation of the house, the application guides you through the interior designing process. They offer an objects library containing hundreds of objects which have different design inspirations to fit any theme that the user wants to follow. To help them with this, users can even integrate digital photos to serve as the pattern or design for a specific object. You can also upload photos to the application to serve as inspiration as you design the application.
With them, users can only click and drag objects from the library that is displayed in the side of the application to make it easier to reach. This makes it very easy to use even without prior design experience.
Virtual Home Architect also has dedicated building tools for the kitchen and the bathroom.
For the kitchen, they offer additional materials that are especially useful for the tabletops and the walls. They also have dedicated appliances, floorings, and paints. This includes options such as granite, slate, ceramics, and more.
The same goes for the bathroom that has specific materials. This includes cabinets, countertops, wall materials, sinks, floorings, and bathtubs. For the last one, they offer deck-mounted, free-standing, and integrated options. These come with various design inspirations such as contemporary, retro, and more.
Designing the house is not only limited to the indoors. With the application, you can design the decks, patios, gates, fences, and more outside of the house. This completes the whole design. Same with the indoor objects, the available outdoor objects that you can also put outside has a lot of variety in its design inspirations as to follow any specific design inspiration you have in mind. You can also change the topography to fit any real-life needs of the client you are designing the house for.
One of the best features about them is the abundance of plants included which can make designing the garden very easy. They contain thousands of entries in their plant encyclopedia which can tell you the best positions for where to store your plants to give them the right amount of sunlight and to protect it from external factors.
After designing the house, you can then get a 3D house tour where you can adjust the lighting, time of day, and more factors to make everything more realistic. Users should take note, though, that this feature may be slower for those with lower-end computers which may not be able to handle the load.
Virtual Architect Ultimate Home Design has all of the basics of a home design application along with more. They offer one of the most intuitive and easy to use interfaces that does not take compromises in terms of functionality. With them, users can have a wide selection of objects, designing tools, and 3D display options.
