IMSI TurboCAD Deluxe 14 review

You'd think that a program with the word 'Deluxe' in the title would be the most advanced version of the program that was available.

TurboCAD Deluxe 14, however, is the most basic version that IMSI offers, costing just £80, compared to £400-£500 for the more specialised Architectural and Professional editions. Instead, Deluxe 14 is aimed at home and small business users who need to produce blueprints, floorplans and technical drawings.

TurboCAD's latest update gets off to a poor start with an annoying activation process that requires you to fill out a form on the developer's website and wait for the activation code to be emailed to you. It's worth it, though, as TurboCAD has a comprehensive and versatile set of drawing tools.

Much of the emphasis in this version is on 3D work. Deluxe 14 uses a 3D graphics engine called LightWorks, which provides photo-realistic lighting effects and texture effects for the materials you use in your designs.

A key feature is the Materials Editor. This allows you to select a wide range of standard materials, such as marble, wood or even clouds, which can be used as part of the background within a 3D scene. You can then modify properties, such as the roughness of wood or the refractive properties of glass, by using simple slider controls in the Editor's dialog box. This provides an enormous amount of control over the final appearance of your 3D designs.

You can also create a variety of realistic lighting effects, ranging from tightly focused spotlights to diffused sunlight that illuminates an entire scene. It's easy to create these effects, too, as they can be selected from a quick menu list.

However, while these individual tools are all relatively straightforward, the problem with TurboCAD lies in the sheer number of tools, menus and dialog boxes that it throws at you. Although we appreciate the huge range of features for less than £100, it can be quite intimidating for the non-professional users that will be using Deluxe 14.

The program's documentation is part of the problem here. There's no printed manual at all; you have to buy one for £10 or view the 500-page PDF user guide. The latter falls into the common trap of simply listing features without really explaining how they work together to create even a simple floorplan or 3D model. The broken links to tutorials that were supposed to be found on the TurboCAD website didn't help, either.

Overall, newcomers to technical drawing and 3D work should look at some of IMSI's other products, such as FloorPlan or TurboSketch, which are both cheaper, a lot easier to use and come with printed manuals. However, if you already have some experience of CAD software, you'll find that TurboCAD Deluxe 14 provides an impressive range of tools at an extremely competitive price.