Chief Architect

[Michael Dye]

I realize this subject has probably been beat to death, but I hope to get some advice, anyway. I've been looking at buying the Chief Architect software, but have not had a chance to talk with anybody that has used it. Although tailored more for building design, it looks like you can also use it for furniture and cabinet design. Anybody on the forum have experience with this program, or a similar program that could be used for most building and furniture CAD projects? Thanks in advance.

[Justin Ludwig]

I don't know about the newer versions, but CA X allows you to input cabinet and furniture in renderings but you do not get any cutlists or builds. Save the money and buy a program dedicated to CAD in furniture/cabinetry.

[Bob Falk]

+1
I bought the home version to design my house addition. If you want to design a house, it is a good program. If you want to design furniture/cabinetry its probably not the program to buy.

[Gerry Grzadzinski]

Take a look at Autodesk's Fusion 360.
It's free for hobbyists.

[Andy Giddings]

Am a current user of Chief Architect X8. For me, it works really well for designing interiors and figuring out what works in terms of cabinet sizes, shapes etc. You can modify the standard cabinets relatively easily to suit preferences and it has a sizeable range of different material libraries from most of the top name suppliers. It really depends on what you want to use it for.

I tend to design the cabinets on Chief Architect and then move to Cut List for materials. There are better programs out there for pure cabinet design (kitchens, baths) although I don't know if they will produce an automatic cut list with minimal waste.

If you are after a program that will help you design interiors/exteriors relatively easily and give you the tools to develop photo realistic renderings of your designs to customers, then Chief Architect will do that. Turning that rendering into a cut list automatically is not something I've been able to do, though. Most of the advanced design programs will let you try before you buy, so maybe the best way forward is to experiment and see what fits your needs

[Michael Dye]

Thanks for the input, guys. My goal is to save some money on software. I find myself having to deal with a lot of built-ins and, due to that, clients who need a rendering of what the end result will look like. Although Chief Architect appears to allow a 3D image of the final product, it looks like I'm going to have to work within a different program to do the final design prior to sending it to Chief Architect. Although a cut list would be nice, it is not a deal breaker. Thanks, again, for the advice.

[Greg R Bradley]

CA is primarily designed to design houses, giving construction documents and the ability to see how things will look. It works well to give you an overview of the finished product including the ability to walk thru the house and see what it will look like.

It will include many manufacturers standard cabinets. You can go to many manufacturers and download their entire standard catalog into CA. You can change the dimensions of those directly in CA. So if you place a 24" double door cabinet on the wall, you can then change the width to 23" and it will change the cabinet. However, if you want to design your own cabinets, you will need to do that in another product and then import that into your CA Library, where it will be available for further use. I use Sketchup and Solidworks for that but you can use others.

Here is an example of CA figuring out if way, way too much stuff will fit into two small offices with doorways cut. I can see how it will look and even how people can walk past each other. I drew the modular furniture and Vidmar Cabinets in Sketchup, downloaded the File Cabinets from Hon.
335716

You can move around and look at the design and use overview cameras like shown, use floor cameras that show what it looks like to a person standing on that floor, even save walk-throughs that are a movie of a person walking thru, including down stairways, etc.

Send me a PM for my phone number if you want to call me.

[Joe Samorodin]

I use Home designer pro a subset of CA and for clients its often the difference in getting the job as the 3d renders let them visualize what they want. I use Design Cad 3d for details in drawings but it doesn't develop cut lists.

[Chris Padilla]

Why not learn Sketch-Up? It is free. I use it for all my cabinet designs.

[Al Launier]

Although I've retired from designing homes, I have used CA from versions 5-10 to design over 100 homes and found it very easy to learn & use as it is intuitive & object oriented (select & drop) as compared to CAD which I thought was way too textually oriented, at least for me. If you intend to design & construct your own kitchen/cabinets and those available within the program are not what you want, you can do this, but you'll have to initially select a "close" cabinet model & then change individual components you want to use for your cabinets. Once this is done & "saved" you can use this model to size & place within your kitchen. Dimensional changes are easy for sizing to fir within the allowed space. It will provide you with a great visual & you can explode the components, but the detail dimensioning of these components are not as straight forward as with other software as is with Sketch-Up. CA would be a great tool for the wife to visualize as well as yourself.
There are very relevent comments above, i.e. like Greg Bradley's that indicate the flexibility one has to portray different design scenarios.
If you are competent with SketchUp, that would be a good alternative for designing individual "pieces", but not for a global perscpective on spatial relationships within the house.

Best of luck & whichever way you decide you'l have a useful tool for life.