WFE – cover entire side of cabinet or only the exposed side of cabinet?

[Scottanddogs]

I am learning to use the trial version of Chief Architect to design kitchens, bathrooms for my home.

I am planning for an open exposed wall cabinet at higher elevation than the adjoining side cabinets for above the kitchen sink.

My question is should the WFE I order cover entire side of cabinet (A to C) or only the exposed side of cabinet (B to C)?

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[ChadBarker]

You can do it either way, but typically we would run the finished end panel full height from A to C. This creates a separation between the exposed and standard cabinet styles.

[Kevin]

I’d strongly recommend just biting the bullet and starting a monthly subscription for Chief Architect, despite the high cost. One little glitch or power outage and you’ll lose all your work, which is what happened to me.

Chad, I’d love to see you all add your cabinets to the Trimble 3D Warehouse, which is used not just for SketchUp, but also by other consumer-grade design apps. Live Home 3D Pro is my personal favorite. I know it’d be a heavy lift, but homeowners subscribing to Chief Architect at $250/mo. is a pretty big lift just to be able to save designs, especially when projects usually span multiple months. Thanks for considering!

[ChadBarker]

f the cost of Chief Architect is too high, I’ve heard of people using Home Designer (program is made by Chief Architect) instead. It has fewer features overall, but since Chief Architect is such a large program, you’re paying for a lot of functionality you’ll never use if you’re only doing cabinet layout. I haven’t compiled a list of which functions are missing, but I’ve seen plenty of people design full layouts in Home Designer without any issues. It allows you to save files and, last I checked, costs under $100 per month. I don’t believe it can open our template directly, but you should still be able to create a workable plan using our catalog.

I will look into Trimble as well—this sounds promising. My main issue with SketchUp has been that the door profiles and stile/rail widths don’t scale properly (I am sure there is a way to do this), which results in inaccurate or bad-looking 3D cabinet visuals. Chief, on the other hand, has always been consistent with catalog data from version to version. The interface may change, but the catalog remains stable and usable. Cabinet doors maintain correct proportions without scaling errors, and I can lock our stile and rail widths at 2 5/8″, so the 3D views look accurate.

https://www.homedesignersoftware.com/products/home-designer/

[Kevin]

That makes total sense, cabinet accuracy is the most important factor with designs. I created my designs in both Chief Architect (for the precision with the Barker catalog) and in Live Home 3D Pro (for the ease of use, third party models, and rendering quality). In Live Home, I had to improvise by using random third party 3D cabinet models from Trimble Warehouse, but they worked out fine in terms of a general representation. I found it an order of magnitude easier to build ceilings, soffits, custom shapes, apply lighting elements, and do walkthoughs in Live Home. Plus, thousands of customizable items are available for free through the Trimble Warehouse integration, like the counter stools I already have and my exact gas range. I could’ve spent a lot more time learning Chief Architect, but I intend to cancel the subscription soon, so it wouldn’t have been a great use of time.

Btw, for rendering, Live Home 3D Pro uses Cycles, the open source version of Blender. It’s incredibly fast and very high quality. Check out the results here: https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B1g59UlCq7Lr4l. I also added a render from Chief Architect for comparison. You can see that I never mastered the ceiling and skylight situation. 🙂

[ChadBarker]

Yeah, that looks really good. Nice work. I’ll look into this.

[Author]

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