TurboFloorPlan 3D Pro v16

TurboFloorPlan does exactly what you would think it does: lets you quickly create floor plans. Aimed at average PC users with an interest in home design, rather than professional architects, TurboFloorPlan is the kind of package you’d use to design your new home or renovations, then pass your design along to a professional architect or draftsperson to work out the structural details, ensure compliance with building codes and give you back something ready-to-build.

This means the package has to be fairly easy to use out-of-the-box which, for the most part, I found it was. However, I have many years of hobbyist CAD experience, so laying out simple house plans doesn’t really present a challenge. I can’t help but wonder if things would have been more difficult without that background knowledge.

The interface looks dated, particularly against Windows 7. However, creating walls, adding doors and windows, and even setting up multi-storey designs with stairs all seemed simple enough.

There’s a large range of furniture to work with, making it easy to plan renovations around your existing stuff, or just add a sense of scale to your plans.

When I first tested FloorPlan more than ten years ago, it came with a two-dimensional (top-down) garden design package that let you create landscapes using local plants, water features and other decorative elements. Nowadays you’ll find that functionality built into TurboFloorPlan 3D, with an extensive ‘plant encyclopaedia’ containing over 7,500 plants, trees and other leafy things. The Australia/New Zealand version contains 360 Australian plants, but I found common New Zealand ferns and other native flora lacking. Nonetheless, the tools for shaping terrain are fairly simple, and it’s quite easy to reproduce a real-world section from existing maps, plans or photographs with a little eyeballing and a lot of clicking.

The real selling point here, however, is the ‘3D’ component. TurboFloorPlan lets you walk through your designs in full 3D, and render ‘photorealistic’ still-shots from any angle, interior or exterior. How well does it work? That really depends on your expectations.

The walkthrough hasn’t changed much in the last ten years – the graphics are better, but only marginally so. You move around by clicking on the ‘walk’ tool (or another of the camera tools, such as pan or rotate), and dragging in the desired direction. It’s not terribly complicated, but nor is it what I’d call ‘easy-to-use’.

‘Walkthrough’ is really the wrong term here: you can move your camera through a 3D representation of your plan, but it’s like playing a videogame with no-clipping on – you travel straight through walls, can’t open doors or windows – it’s a totally non-interactive experience.

In such a consumer-focused package, I’d really have loved to see a true ‘walkthrough’, where you move around as you do in a first-person game: using the keyboard and mouse, opening and closing doors, and climbing stairs. Maybe even sitting on couches or beds to see what the view would be like. That, to me, would provide the most intuitive way to test out your virtual creation.

Still-image render quality is good, and ambient lighting is cleverly handled: you set the location of the home (as a city, or latitude/longitude), the date and time of day, and the correct lighting is calculated. Want to see what your lounge will be like at 4:00pm in mid-July? Sure, just position your camera there, dial the details in and build an image. Its slow, particularly on the higher quality settings, but it’ll give you a good indication of the effects of indoor and outdoor lighting.

Altogether, TurboFloorPlan 3D is a powerful package, though its interface and titular 3D functionality are starting to look worn around the edges. Still, a solid investment if you want to plan your own renovation, build or landscaping project.