Quote Originally Posted by Grafixman
I can understand your viewpoint on software overkill... .
Not trying to be cute or anything...
But how about a pencil and a paper? Work out most things before even sitting down in front of the computer. Then the drawing would be a lot easier.
Well yes, that's exactly where I'm starting from right now - there's no alternative to a paper sketch. It's conceptually pretty easy to do a single room for example that way. However, it gets messy because of the need to adjust lines, and that's a good reason to use a graphics programme. Another is that in digital form it is much more portable, scalable etc.

The difficulty comes in transferring the paper sketch into any existing software, other than by scanning it. I haven't found the Xara bitmap to vector tracer process really works well for that purpose. It's also conceptually absurd to have to get a vector image by collecting vector data, making an image by creating hand drawn vectors, convert it to a bitmap and magnify all the "noise" defects in the hand drawing (pencil line thickness and so on), read that (now noisy) bitmap into a programme, try and clean out the noise, and then convert it back to pure vector information !!!

But that doesn't solve my problem of for example variable walls, inconsistent levels and the like, which is why I want to use the computer in the first place.... The paper and pencil process takes too long as it is with these complex structures, with the appropriate simple software I could do the whole thing far faster, which is where I came in!!!
Steve L