Abracadata is bringing its Premier Home Architect to the Mac. It will utilize a brand-new proprietary Open GL 3D engine.
With Premier Home Architect, users will be able to place lights in 2D/3D space and set their properties (type of light, brightness/color, direction/angle, location/elevation, etc.) with an adjustable slider. The application will support a variety of American and metric measurement units, including inches, feet, yards, millimeters, centimeters, and meters. What’s more, Japanese units (e.g. Shaku, Ken and other applicable units), will also be supported.
Premier Home Architect will offer precision to thousandth of an inch with the ability to zoom in on any part of your drawing. And you can specify precise object sizes through a properties dialog or by other means.
It offers the ability to generate and print material reports (cost estimates). Premier Home Architect has tools for drawing smart walls and rooms, including curved and polygonal walls. Users will be able to cut walls and to make walls associative and “self aware” of one another. The walls will automatically cut out openings for the windows and doors that are placed on them. Walls can be viewed in 3D as solids or as studs only. Users can set stud spacing and stud size in the wall properties dialog.
There’s a one-step room tool for drawing an entire room, along with the ability to create a room by specifying its size. You can draw your exact lot size or have the program do it for you. And you can specify ground angle to create homes on sloped lots.
Premier Home Architect lets you create editable terrain objects to simulate hills and mountains, and support for specifying slope angles. It sports resizable 3D objects and the ability to export files in DXF format.
You can specify base elevations for layers to make planning multi-story floor plan easier. Objects placed on a second story, for example, would automatically have the second floor elevation added to their own elevation.
There’s 3D gravity support. Objects that have an elevation in the 3D view fall until they rest upon another object, or until they reach the floor/base elevation. With Premier Home Architect’s enhanced dimension and measuring tools you’re able to measure and determine the square footage of an area (polygonal-type and rectangular).
The app has automatic associative dimensioning capabilities. Dimension lines are linked to their object counterpart. When objects are resized, the dimension line is updated automatically. Then there’s the ability to place and position multiple cameras.
An indicator on the 2D view represents the current camera location in the 3D view. When moving within the 3D view, the indicator on the 2D view also moves. If the 2D position indicator is moved, the 3D camera view adjusts accordingly.
An Auto Roof Tool gives you the ability to create any type of roof, including domed or cathedral ceilings. Stair Tools will allow the user to create any type of steps and stairways.
You can capture, playback, and export your 3D walkthrough movement as a QuickTime movie file. Premier Home Architect offers support for aligning, distributing and scaling selected objects. Plus, there’s support for all of the typical “edit” and “arrange” editing features, such as flip, rotate, copy, and paste.
Premier Home Architect gives you the ability to create custom 3D objects by extruding 2D object primitives such as circles, rectangles, polygons, etc., then grouping them. These objects appear in the 3D view and can be arranged into different configurations and then can be grouped together as one object. The properties of the object information can be changes and saved with the new object to a new or existing object library for future use. Textures may also be applied to individual pieces.
There’s support for generating 2D elevation views. Premier Home Architect also offers the ability to print at custom scales. The program will print to any system compatible printer, including plotters.
The US$39.95 app requires System 6.7 or later, 4MB of RAM and a CD-ROM drive.