I have been planning my basement construction in my new house, currently under construction, for about the past month now. To help me conceptualize everything I modeled my basement in 3D using AutoCad, including my proposed HT setup. For those of you who enjoy planning ahead, here's the link to the EP500, M60, VP150, and QS8 (they are in PDF for those who don't have the ability to view Cad files).

Wireframe-1
Wireframe-2
Rendered

Makes me think of an old Styx song, "Too much time on my hands"

Maybe it is just that I have been on overload for so long, I don't have time to do everything that I would want to, let alone a cad rendering.

It is nice to be able to play with positions and such, so kudos to you ctk...

Well done ctk. Actually when you know what you are doing it it pretty easy to knock these things off. I used Autocad at work for municipal road/sewer/watermain designs.

I'll show my age by saying I purchased the first copy of Autocad for my employer, it came on 3 floppies .

For the obsessive planner, it's time well spent and I think we have quite a few of that type on this board. All a matter of perspective.

I found myself wanting to do the same thing, but without the tools or knowledge to get it done. What did I do? Printed out a couple QS8's to scale and taped those suckers to the wall. (My wife is still making fun of me for this...)

What I found out that I wouldn't have otherwise is:

• The proposed window hangings will interfere with my original placement plans. Moved them all up 2".
  
• I don't have the 6" above the surrounds that I wanted.
  
• Exact location where the wiring will emerge so that it can be completely invisible.
  
• Damn, they look good in there.
  

Cool.

I've done similar things using Google's free SketchUp program. Nowhere near the power of AutoCAD, of course, but it's free and pretty easy to learn.

I recently did a full 3-d model of my HT room in trying to decide whether I wanted to buy a projector. My wife thinks I'm nuts, but I had a lot of fun virtually walking through the room and moving furniture, TV, and speakers around with the flick of a mouse.

I actually found it really great for figuring out what size screen I can use and where the ideal speaker location is in the front soundstage. At first my wife thought I was nuts until she realized that my efforts can also be used to locate the freezer, plan out the bedroom, and keep me busy designing instead of buying things for the not-yet-built house

nice work Chris,

regarding the planning, it DOES help alot, I had my surround positions picked out before I bought the speakers, my room looks almost identical to my sketchup model.