Create a floor-by-floor house plan, decorate it with a furniture from a wide variety of catalogs then view the results both in two and in three-dimensional images.
Sweet Home 3D can help you draw a sketch of your home, arrange its interiors and visualize the results in 3D views. The program has a simple interface, which is divided into four main panels. One of them is the floor plan, the second holds the 3D preview, the third contains an object library, and the last one shows a list of the active objects and their properties. The tool is quite easy to use, provided you have some knowledge of technical drawing and a good spatial perception.
It is a good idea to start by drawing the walls on the floor plan. This way, you will have the limits you need for each of the house’s spaces. After that, you can drag and drop objects from the library, including pieces of furniture, equipment, lights and others, such as staircases, workbenches and curtain rods. These objects can be modified to match the exact measures. Similarly, their properties can be changed, including color, texture and shininess. Moreover, they can be positioned with accuracy even on the Z axis.
All the changes you make on the floor plan are automatically reflected on the 3D preview. However, the tool does not allow making changes directly on the 3D model. Good news is that two types of views are allowed: aerial and virtual visit. And, if you want to make a presentation of your work, you can even create a video.
The program´s features can luckily be expanded with plugins. It is great that you are allowed to import texture collections. Likewise, as it supports 3D models created with other tools, it is possible to download and import complete libraries using the furniture import wizard.
All in all, Sweet Home 3D is a free design application that may come in handy when you are remodeling your home or planning where to put the furniture. It has the limitation of not allowing to design exteriors or gardens. You should also know that it requires a large quota of system resources and may not work unless your system is using the latest 3D rendering software. Fortunately, there is also an online version of this program that you can use from your browser.
v3.4 [Dec 21, 2011]
Sweet Home 3D is now able to manage multiple levels, either above the ground, or underground. To create a new level, choose the Plan > Add level menu item. As soon as the home contains more than one level, tabs with their name are displayed at the top of the home plan to let you select the level where items will be drawn. To help you draw the rooms of the upper floor, the walls and ceilings of the lower floor are drawn with a light color and magnetism was greatly improved.
If you want to change the default name or dimensions of a level, you can double click on its tab to edit its attributes with the new level dialog box. This pane presents also the list of existing levels to help you compare home levels to each other.
Levels can be used to manage levels on top of each other, but also intermediate levels, false ceilings, false floors or even layers, the list of level tabs being always maintained in the elevation order.
Similarly to the ability of windows and doors to automatically compute a hole at their intersection with a wall, staircases are able to make a hole in the ceilings and floors of the upper floors they intersect. For example, the following plan shows a staircase going from the ground floor to the first floor, and as the cut out shape of this staircase is round, you'll get automatically a round cut out in the 1st floor.
You can now fine tune the orientation of a model in the second step of the Furniture import wizard, if you keep pressed the shift key when you click on the orientation buttons. The I button in the middle resets the orientation.
t's now easier to select an object displayed under other objects in the plan: just right click in the plan at the location of this object and choose it in the Select object contextual menu that appears.
To change quickly the visibility of a piece of furniture, you can also directly click on its check box in the furniture list, and auto completion support was added to Name text fields to help you type faster repetitive names, suggested words coming from previously entered texts.
Different bugs happening in multiple screens environment were corrected, and dragging catalog furniture onto the plan was fixed in the online version when run under Mac OS X or Linux.
Create a floor plan for your home and start adding walls and textures
Review 2D and 3D designs without using the application they were created in
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