CADsoft’s new Envisioneer 14 is billed as a CAD product for non-CAD people: a product so easy and intuitive to pick up that even complete CAD neophytes can use it. To see whether Envisioneer 14 lived up to its hype, I test-drove the software to build the house of my dreams. My verdict? The platform is an easy, enjoyable building tool for beginners, with some very minor annoyances.
The Concept
Currently, the home-design process is fractured across stakeholders and platforms. The fragmentation means that even after the owner creates the plans, different subcontractors must keep redrawing them in their platform of choice.
Envisioneer is meant to be a unified creative platform that stores all of the project information, simple enough for a CAD-illiterate homeowner but detailed enough for a subcontractor to get useful information out of. If professionals need to use the information on their own platforms, there’s the capability to import the plans directly to the software rather than redraw the entire model.
The other big selling point is that Envisioneer’s software makes it easy to see what a building is going to look like, both on the inside and in the context of its environment. CAD-inexperienced users can create their own virtual reality walkthroughs, either to test out what their own house might look like or to advertise it to others.
One of the strongest selling points of Envisioneer 14 is its various automated Building Tools. When starting a new project,…