3D Viewer Reviews

This is just miserable to use. No pinch to zoom. Touch two fingers to the display and the model vanishes. The walk through mode flashes and blinks and strobes. The navigation options are not intuitive.

Worst of all, you can't review designs while on an airplane because it insists on connecting to the Internet just to authorize viewing (as if it could be used to view other company models.)

Everything is sloppily designed...even entering your email address and password is bizarre with a normal looking user name and password box but when you click to a field it expands to the full width of your iPad.

Need customer support? They honestly ask you to pay $125. Yes, $125 and not $1.25!

This is just one of the most underwhelming apps I have seen.

We are paying a designer well to design our home, and we have not been able to see their work in the Chief Architect 3-D viewer. We have tried to upload files using links, OneDrive, and Dropbox, and we have been completely unsuccessful at getting a file into an iPad. There is no useful help function, and the software is incompetent. We started the design of the house in other 3-D design software, which was infinitely more useful and user-friendly. I strongly recommend against any Chief Architect products.

I was hoping to use this to see in real life how it would look in the location. It only finds one spot to begin the simulation. It is small and does not have north and south markers so you have to play with it a lot to get it even close to the correct aspect ratio or location.

I’m genuinely surprised by how poor the user interface is on 3DViewer. It is not up to the standards of Chief Architect products. I suppose with enough practice a person could manage to get some idea of what the design looks like. I found it to be intolerable and not worth investing time in.

3DViewer is very frustrating! It is slow to load and cumbersome to use and navigate. While you wait you tie up your device waiting or start all over again. The absolute worst part of dealing with our design team is 3DViewer!
Ps. The review won’t let you out w/o a “nickname”…. really? 5 attempts and they’re all taken or disallowed!

Let me start off by saying that I love chief architect. I was super excited to learn about 3DViewer. It does a very good job of allowing you to view your design in 3D mode. It's very impressive in front of clients.......but it's way behind on going between a 3D view and a 2 dimensional floor plan. When sitting in front of a client you don't always need a 3D model. 2 dimensional plans are equally important when discussing layout and flow of an area.
An app that does this flawlessly is BIMX. It allows you to view your design in 3D or 2D plans. I'm not saying it needs to be exactly like BIMx but even the option of loading your 3D model along with a separate tab that also allows you to load your 2D construction documents would go a long way when talking to clients in a real world situation.
Keep up the great work. I can't wait to see where 3DViewer goes from this moment.

When we approached our architect one of their selling points was an interactive 3d model of our home we could reference at any time during the building process. The first couple of times it worked great but then I had memory issues. I can no longer open it on a computer and it only loads half the time on my phone. I have cleared any unnecessary space from my devices and still get the memory error. It’s extremely frustrating now that we are in the building process and can’t reference what we paid for.

US as usually behind from the rest of the world when it comes using more efficient apps and drives. A lot more people use google drive than Dropbox. I don’t even use Dropbox anymore and unfortunately can’t upload my 3D file from google drive because there is no option for that. So, till they add a button for google drive 3DViewer is useless for me. Hope you will improve it and add another google drive option.

Nothing I can do launches the drawing my architect created. Just a dead end do loop of nothingness. Very annoying that it worked fine for months and then suddenly can’t launch my plans.

Most importantly, I frequently get out of memory errors when loading models even after I’ve attempted to optimize. There’s only so much you can take out after all.

The rendering engine seems to need work. There are games I play that seem to use much more complex polygons, textures and lighting that run faster than the models in 3DViewer.

Next, there should be a floor plan view that mimics the view in Chief Architect instead of only having the textured floor plan. It would be great if we could also control the layers to hide or show them. I’d like to be able to see notes I made on my desktop as text boxes. Along these lines, the floor navigation in the floor plan is really just a cross section height adjustment and is difficult to control.

I’m glad controller support was added. It really takes away some awkwardness when showing models to others and having them gather around your iPad if you’re not in a position to mirror your screen.

Support for saved walkthroughs would be nice.

Overall, I’m glad 3DViewer exists as it was key to choosing Chief Architect that I be able to show and share models. I just wish some things could be enhanced.

Great idea. Got it to use with my field subs and clients.

Sent a link to share a model with them.
They could not load without creating an account with Chief it was hard for them from the shared model link and I had to help with that.

Difficult to share content. ID numbers way too long and links not as seamless as you would imagine.

3D texturing not very good. Would like to send models and be able to walk thru a plan in 2D and seeing in 3D.

Would be more useful called Chief Architect Viewer without the 3D and one could send 2D layers of 2D as well.

Thinking of it as a collaboration tool with end user recipients of shared content who are holding phones in the field would provide a better framework of how to
Redesign interface to make it truly useful.

I look forward to future versions.

I created my basement design using Home Designer Suite 2021 and uploaded my design to my Chief Architect account to be able to view on 3DViewer in VR. All the features work great except for the VR feature where you put your phone in a VR headset. Everything just spins around like crazy without stopping.

Fast and easy to use. Very difficult if not impossible to isolate a single floor and allow easy overview of that floor. Have to align the slices perfectly and even then it leaves things all jittery. Great for overall viewing, horrible for fine detail viewing. And get that top bar off the screen its huge and gets in the way.

Great program. Love the agility and response. To make it easier to look around without hitting walls it would be nice if rotation was from the point of vision instead of somewhat behind.

Will this work with Sketchup?

THIS is the 3D viewer tool I’ve been waiting for! Or, a very reasonable facsimile. Is it perfect? No. Does it do what I need it to do? In most cases, yes. Does it have limitations? Absolutely, but most limitations are on the client side because they can’t or won’t spend a few minutes working on their navigation game.

Just thought I’d give it a try and am amazed. My clients love it and after getting used to the controls, it’s worked seamlessly for us. Haven’t had any probs loading models from 11 and it takes the place of laying out the walkthroughs. Thanks Chief!

I’d like to see more capabilities. I.e. Views, keyboard and or controller tools. Most importantly an iOS version of chief pro to design away from the office.

My iMac is old (2013) and doesn’t have a good enough graphics card to support HDP23. 3DViewer has been crucial for me to be able to find tune my models.

Great bonus item for clients to move through once we have done a review of their project on the big screen. It does take some learning to understand how 3DViewer works, like turning on the shadows and the surfaces. The main purpose of Chief Architect is producing the final product which is the layout plan set. This is simply an additional way for clients to see their project as it was last rendered. We use it often. I spend a little time with my clients to acclimate to using this ‘bonus’ app. Generally good feedback.

Just what I would expect from Chief Architect.... it just works like you would want it to. I was not expecting the ability to use Google Glasses.... excellent.