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Design your dream interior the easy way. $46.99 WITH IAP | BELIGHTSOF­T.COM

- JR Bookwalter

If you’ve ever fancied remodeling a room in your home, but haven’t a clue how to go about it, then you need to try Live Home 3D. This makes the process of designing a new house or interior so deceptivel­y simple and fast.

If you have existing blueprints for your dream home, it’s easy to import scans and create a detailed 3D model, with furniture and all the trimmings, or start from scratch using the software’s intuitive tools to throw up virtual walls, windows and more. Live Home 3D displays measuremen­ts for each room, which can be assigned custom names. The Room tool makes it super easy to draw a complete space, then attach it to any part of the house. There’s even a slick drawing tool for adding rounded walls in a few clicks.

The user interface is laid out in a comfortabl­e and logical tabbed style, which turns what could be a rather daunting task into a whole lot of drag-and-drop fun. One area where there’s still room for improvemen­t is how Live Home 3D handles layers, it becomes a challenge as houses grow in size, and there’s no way to easily search through elements.

Although it handles basic landscape design, it’s not adept at it, especially if your planned home is on anything other than flat ground. It’s much better at sprucing up digital homes with a library of over 1,500 objects, which can be decorated with more than 2,100 different built-in materials; if that’s not enough, an optional Extras Pack adds another 600-plus materials.

When the house is complete, you can take a virtual 3D walkthroug­h, export projects to social networks or even share 360° panoramas directly to Facebook. The developer provides detailed video tutorials to help get started, and there’s a free trial version to get a flavor of the software before you decide. There’s also a Pro version ($109.99, or $62.99 upgrade from non-Pro version) available for those who want to tinker with structures taller than two stories or require more complicate­d roof, balcony, or porch designs.

In all, Live Home 3D makes designing your dream house easy and fun.

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