Beginning the Design

• 1). You will need to establish the criteria or wants for your house before you even put pencil to paper. You will need to decide what you want in the house in terms of the spaces.
  
  
• 2). You will need to decide what the style of the house is going to be once you have decided on the spaces that you want.
  
  
• 3). The design should solve the criteria you have established and follow the design style you are trying to follow.
  
  
• 4). You can establish relationships between the spaces once you know the spaces you need. Drawing a bubble diagram will help you determine which rooms should be next to one another. A bubble diagram just lists the spaces with lines connecting them to one another.
  
  
• 5). Develop an adjacency matrix that will help you determine the hierarchy of each space and how they will relate to one another. An adjacency matrix lists all the spaces and puts what you established in the bubble diagram into a concise hierarchy of the spaces and their relationships with one another.
  
  

3D Modeling Software Program

• 1). Choose a software program that will work with your computer's operating system.
  
  
• 2). Pay attention to the difficulty level of each software program, as some require basic knowledge of construction and how drawings are put together.
  
  
• 3). Choose one that will have the features you need, as some of them are geared toward drawing houses while others are geared toward drawing landscapes.
  
  

Begin Drawings

• 1). You can start establishing room sizes once you know what the relationships are among the spaces you want.
  
  
• 2). Draw out approximate room sizes to scale using your architectural scale and your triangles.
  
  
• 3). The room sizes should reflect the amount of square footage you require for each space. For example, if the bedroom is supposed to be 400 square feet then you will draw out a 20-by-20 square.
  
  
• 4). Draw the spaces in the 3D modeling software program.
  
  
• 5). You can begin to design the floor plan once you get the spaces into the 3D modeling software program.
  
  
• 6). You may want to print out the floor plan or views of the 3D model so that you can refine the design before you start modeling it on the computer.
  
  
• 7). The 3D modeling software program will give you different views of the house from outside to inside, which will help you understand what the final house will look like.
  
  
• 8). Once you have a 3D model of your house, you can start creating floor plans, sections and elevations of the models by creating different views of it within the modeling software program.