Looking for a photorealistic 3D house planner program

If you mention 3ds Max, once again: you can also use Blender instead, it is free and, just like 3ds Max, is used for top blockbuster movies, for example. Achieving results with it requires a huge amount of experience. (Start your first week by creating two cubes with a light source using video tutorials...) Better use a highly limited program, just for houses. Feel free to try an old, free one and experiment with it. When you reach the point where your (design) skills exceed the capabilities of the software, think further. But first start with something calmer to get closer to the subject matter.

Exactly, just start by pushing a few floor plans .. by the time you need photorealistic furnishing and design representations, a little water will have flowed down the mountain.

And, such a discussion .. it makes sense to include the maximum budget.

Ok, I am convinced and retract my statements. What the OP is looking for simply does not exist [emoji4]

To the OP: especially or precisely when building a house, it’s quite good to compare wishes and reality – or in other words, see how much of your wish remains at the end of reality [emoji6]

Seriously: You write that there are countless possibilities for facade designs and would be disappointed if your construction company didn’t offer you one of these many designs?!? That sounds quite unrealistic to me. You should roughly think about what you like and what you don’t. Getting or giving inspiration is ok. But basically wishing that someone reads your wishes… well how exactly??? … that is wishful thinking, far from reality. You should have some idea before building a little house. Even if it’s just picking out pictures of appealing objects on Pinterest and showing them to your planner. That is your obligation to contribute. If I misunderstood you, please correct me.

Unfortunately, I can’t make anything of your questions to me, I don’t understand them...

Then I’ll take these two pictures of a staircase from Massa Haus. Here, a virtual stair railing was covered with completely different textures... sometimes light and sometimes dark, and it already creates a completely different feeling. I could simulate something like this, for example, with the egg-laying-wool-milk-sow program.

Here you get a red glaze from me. Sorry for the botch, but image editing is done on high-resolution photos and not on these small pics. You also spend several hours on it, not just 5 minutes.

You are currently involved in product advertising

No, you misunderstand me. I don’t mean that you are doing advertising, but that the photos come from the category of advertising. There is no house planner at work here anymore; rather, products like stairs, glaze, or house are advertised – these are two different products. One is the creative design of a product, the other marketing.

Photoshop is also such a common name for me. There is again a seemingly confusing number of products and modules, filters, etc... What would you need from it to create 3D images?

No, Photoshop is an image editing program. Technical photographers or reprographers sit there who alter (stairs) or beautify (house) one or several photos according to the wishes of a major client, purely for advertising purposes. This has nothing to do with photorealism, nor with 3D or house building.

something like Vi2000 or Villa2000

No idea what that is. But I can imagine that it goes in the professional direction, although the deficits can still be seen in 3D here as well. Wait, I just checked YouTube... the 3D photos are of the same quality as Arcon:
.. and by the way, I briefly gathered that the application is not even learnable quickly in a few hours.

The fact, and to sum up, is this: You confuse two different terms and things. What you imagine under a planner is not offered by a planner and is not called photorealistic 3D.

A photorealistic 3D would be the last picture if, when rendered, it achieves the subtleties of a real image.

Edit: I also share the opinion of when it comes to what is (not) offered to you and what you should know if you want to build.

: True, you’re right! Both 3ds Max and Blender belong to the family of sketchup programs. However, I absolutely do not feel like manipulating a lump of clay until I’ve carved the Golden Gate Bridge out of it. I’m more of an enthusiastic kit-type. So just give me as many colorful building blocks in all shapes as possible, and I’ll put together something nice with them.

: You didn’t read me correctly, I have indeed already put together some little houses with Arcon. It’s just been many years ago. By the way, I didn’t want to start a destructive discussion like the one about the high prices. My question was rather how construction companies manage to make their glossy brochures look so stylish and realistic even though they are purely artificially created.

@rupson: YPG said in post #08 "More 3D simply doesn’t work unless you buy a professional tool for a five-figure sum." and you responded with "NOPE". I wanted to ask you which more affordable solution you would then suggest. And by the way, I would also be interested in YPG’s expensive solution.

@ALL
As far as I’m concerned, I would gladly use Arcon again. Only the program had quite a few annoying bugs regarding the size and placement of interior elements, and roof surfaces flowing into each other also often didn’t work properly, and if I remember correctly, there were frequent problems with the stairs too.

Apart from that, interior design isn’t helped by furniture modules from the 90s when kitchens were mostly designed in rustic oak with surrounding cornices and ornate cutouts. Also stairs, windows, simply so much has changed since then. There are solar panels on the roof, smooth aluminum roof shingles instead of red Braas tiles, the houses have extra-wide blinds in front of the windows instead of mounted roller shutter boxes, and so on and so forth…

Just as little as you unfortunately seem to understand me, the architect doesn’t understand me either. Yes, I already have many different style elements in mind that I like. But these can’t necessarily be combined with each other. Specifically, I like a city villa, but the simple cube is personally too boring for me. I really like it when another smaller cube is added to the main cube as seen in my post on page 4 / #22. But this can be stretched in length or depth, which drastically changes the overall external impression. Another cube on the other side of the house is also welcome, but what does that really look like in reality?

Sure, one can ask the architect to “draw” this addition onto the plan. If I then ask him to add a cornice of roof shingles all around, he’ll do that too. But if I suddenly want to try a terrace on that addition instead of roof shingles, he might already be rolling his eyes. Then I’d like to try a stainless steel pipe railing all around, and for comparison a wire steel version and then also a glass panel solution. At the latest then I’d be fed to the dogs. And even if that doesn’t happen… I haven’t yet met a designer who can prepare the whole thing as a virtual image so that I can "SEE" it before realization how it might feel later.

I once found a really great house on the internet and contacted the creator. He also offered that I could visit his house and rebuild it for a fee. However, the price was quite high and especially the living area with 280 m² was much too large. I asked him how one could design it smaller. The answer: impossible because the house would no longer have the same effect, and the man was definitely right about that. If I squash a super stylish American cruiser in length, I also get a hideous car.

Due to all these considerations and problems, I can only take on the sweaty and time-consuming planning work all by myself. Of course, if one wants a "normal house" with a red hipped roof, you just have to look around and point, but that’s just not what we want.

You’ll get a red glaze from me.

I think you misunderstand me. My goal would be to change the textures at the push of a button on the finished design when everything else fits. The tiny stair pictures were just an example. That’s probably possible nowadays… or really not!?!?

Wait, I watched YouTube… the 3D photos are qualitatively the same as Arcon:

And again, which Arcon version do you mean? The current 3.5 or the outdated ones from over 10 years ago?

to still plan a wreath of roof shingles all around

Hehe, finally someone calls Toast Hawaii (uh, Tuscany) by its name

I think you misunderstand me. My goal would be to change the textures at the push of a button in the finished design where everything else fits.

Oh yes, if THAT’s what you mean, you were actually unclear. I had so far thought you were looking for a planning program to create house designs. But if you are actually looking for a program that digitizes existing designs in order to simulate them with different hair colors, that is quite something completely different.