Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Design Backyard Chicken Coops with DreamPlan

Design Backyard Chicken Coops with DreamPlan

Create a Chicken Coop Design Plan with DreamPlan

Raising backyard chickens brings joy and bountiful egg harvests to urban farmers across the world. When first adopting chickens, one of the first orders of business will be to build a chicken coop to home your chickens so that they will be safe and sheltered. DreamPlan offers an easy way to design a 3D chicken coop plan.


Planning a Chicken Coop Design

Chicken coops provide chickens with protection from both inclement weather and local predators. A chicken coop will generally contain both areas with open-wire as well as covered roosting areas for the chickens to sleep and lay eggs. When planning a chicken coop design, you will want to keep in mind the number of chickens that you plan on raising, the space in which you can build the coop, and the utility that you would like the coop to provide. You will want to supply both a covered roosting space and a safe, fenced-in outdoor space for your chickens.


Create a 3D Chicken Coop Plan

3D modeling software can make chicken coop design simple, and chicken coops can be designed to scale. You can also use DreamPlan to build a 3D model of your backyard in order to see how your chicken coop will fit in your current space.

Design the Roost

To create a chicken coop with DreamPlan, you will want to begin by sketching up the roost for your chickens. You can use multiple stories to build an elevated roost or a roost with a pitched roof.  You can change the wall height for each story in your project in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.



To draw the walls for the roost, simply select the wall tool and draw walls to match your size specifications. To build a chicken coop design plan that is elevated off the ground on risers, use stories and footings. When you are finished designing the walls for your chicken roost, finish your design with a roof and add a ramp to your design for chickens to access the roost.


Design a Fenced Area

To fence in the area around your chicken coop roost, use the railing tool to draw your chicken yard. You can edit the railing properties in the left-hand program menu to create fencing. You can increase the railing height to create a tall fence and then change the "Infill Type" to mesh to simulate chicken wire. You can also change the color, spacing, style, size, and design of your fence posts in the railing options.


Finish your Chicken Coop Design

To finalize your chicken coop design, you can import 3D models of chickens into DreamPlan. You can download the chickens and rooster that we used in our projects from archive3d.net here:
We used the chicken model above to create three different chicken species by changing the size and color of the chicken models as we added them to our project. 






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