home design + construction + landscape design software?

[David Rysdam]

On Sat, 7 Jan 2012 10:39:57 -0500, David Miller <david3d at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sketchup may be worth a look.  While not open source the free version
> is pretty capable and works with Wine.  I use it quite a bit for
> designing wood working projects.

If we are going to talk actual CAD, rather than home
planning/landscaping, you might take a look at these two Free projects:

    http://www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html
    http://www.openscad.org/

QCAD is a more-or-less traditional 2D CAD package that anyone familiar
with CAD will be right at home with. OpenSCAD is really interesting to
me for 2 reasons:

1) It's procedural rather than declarative. That is, you don't draw
things, you program them. This makes it easy to parameterize parts,
iterate them (i.e. fractals), etc.

2) You use constructive solid geometry (CSG) to do the programming. So
for instance, to make a hole in a rod, you might specify a cylinder for
the rod, then intersect another cylinder with that and take a
difference.

OpenSCAD does 3D and renders really nicely in real-time. The only
problem with it IMO is that it isn't easy to produce traditional
projected 3-view plans. I think they are more geared towards things like
3D printers and whatnot. But it's an evolving project, so maybe they'll
add that in the future, especially if enough people ask for it.