In this short video, Dan Baumann explains the difference between Chief Architect Premier and Home Designer Pro.

Transcript:

Hey, Dan here with Chief Experts Academy. Now I get this question quite often about what's the difference between Home Designer Pro and Chief Architect Premiere, because on the surface they look kind of similar, but I'll tell you right now, they're below the surface.

There's a ton of differences. So, uh, the home designer pro is a subset of the chief architect premiere. So they just pull up functions that can be used in the consumer market or, you know, the light usage market and they work fabulous.

It's a wonderful program for the money. Um, as you, you know, you may have already seen that the, uh, chief architect premiere is quite a bit more, uh, spending than the home designer pro.

So now what are some of the major differences? Let me point out a few of them. There's a ton, there's a lot of differences between the two programs as a professional user chief architect.

I would not be able to do my job effectively using the home designer pro I could do okay. I could get by with it, but it would cost me a ton of time to get a set of plans done.

So, so what are some of the main things? Um, these three things here are some of the big ones, um, the ability to have different layer sets, so I can display different kinds of views, the ability to add the text and dimensions and things like that.

For the kinds of views that I'm working on my floor plan, my electrical plan, my, uh, kitchen plan, that sort of stuff.

And the ability to create what are called plan views, the different types of plan that I'm going to use within my project.

So when I click this down arrow here, you'll see I've got a list of different kinds of views that I can have for a specific plan.

Okay. So I can have my architectural or the different size text because of the different scales I'm going to be using my as-built sets, my electrical foundation framing.

So if we start clicking through these and taking a look at some of those different, uh, uh, sets, see, this would be the as-built versus new.

And we get into my, the electrical plan. Then we get into our foundation plan. So if I go down here, here's my foundation versus my architectural plan.

And if I get into my, um, let's go to the framing. So there's the framing and the project I go to my HVC.

Okay. So you see, I'm just clicking these different views. There's different ideas to get to the different kinds of views that I want to create for the plan that I need to build.

All right. That's the idea is that we want to do this now. Uh, so in chief, it's all built in, I can create as many different kinds of views as I want to.

That list could be, you know, unlimited, if I'd wanted to, I try to keep it simple and only do the types of things that I'm working on.

It was my plot plan. So you can see I'm just doing it all within the same plan, file. Now with the home designer pro you get, you are limited to one set of layers, period.

You can't create this thing here called layer sets, which is what we use to display our different views. You're stuck with one set of layers, and only way you can turn things on and off is to run down the list here every time and check and uncheck different things.

All right. So what you end up doing sometimes, well, most of the time with home designer pro, if you're going to create any kind of view, besides just the floor plan is you have to save the plan as a copy and then go in and turn some different layers on and off.

Okay. So now I can display my electrical on my plan, separate from my floor plan, or if you want to show some framing in your plan, which you can put in and it works just fine.

Now you have to save that, create it, and you'll have a whole separate plan with that in it. Now that works fine until you have to come and start making some changes to your plan.

And in that case, what you're going to end up doing is you have to go and change all of the different plans that you've created to create those different kinds of views.

So that is just some, one of the biggest features within that. So now when it comes to assembling the working drawings that you're going to use to create the, the, your working documents, okay, so here, I've got my elevation.

So again, I'm, uh, in the home pro version, you get one page, you get page a page like this, that you can put some things on it.

When you want to create a second page, you have to create a brand new file, and you have to put all your stuff on that file as well.

So you might create the first page, do a save as delete the view. That's on the page, put your new view on it.

You'd be good to go make a copy of that, delete it, put your stuff on it, make a copy of that, deleted, put your stuff on it, go adjust all your layers, turn them on and off.

Um, and, and it can work just fine. It just takes a lot of extra time and a lot of extra energy and a lot of extra coordination because you have to make sure you're keeping track of everything correctly.

So those, again, that's some of the main differences if you creating full working documentation for the program, um, if you're just doing floor plans and some elevation, and maybe some 3d views, you're measuring some existing houses, the home designer pro was a great fit.

It'll do that just fine. So those, some of the main things, you know, I've got this little thing here where I can go look at all the different pages that I'm creating.

I can add as unlimited pages, you're up to a thousand pages within my, within one working document. So it works really well.

So if you want to learn a little bit more about this, go to my, uh, go to chief experts, academy.com.

Okay. Chief experts, academy.com go to blog right here and type in, um, um, home designer pro. And I did a complete, I did a whole show on this, the differences between the home designer pro it's show number 26, if you're looking for that.

So there it is. So if you click on that, um, you can go down here and here's the different things that I'm talking about in this show.

It's a 53 minutes long. I get really deep into a lot of what the differences are and why you might consider the premiere version versus the long designer pro.

So there you go. That's a little bit about that. And if you have any questions, just let me know. This is Dan with chief experts.

Thanks.