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.
v4.5 [Oct 23, 2014]
Version 4.5, October 22, 2014
Replaced the Loader3DS library by a new one that better interprets colors, transparency and subparts placing of 3D models at 3DS format (caution: the customization of materials set on furniture at 3DS format in previous versions of Sweet Home 3D will be lost).
Increased to 50 the maximum count of stored points of view.
Added a margin of error to determine whether a piece of furniture overlaps an other one, when a user wants to place it on the top of the second one.
In the furniture list, appended an icon to the name of each piece with a defined information property, and displayed this information in a popup after a click on the icon.
Restored the previous size of the textures choice dialog box when resized.
Cleared search filter in the textures choice dialog box after a texture is imported.
Forced format for sizes exported to CSV format to display decimals instead of inch fractions.
Added an additional spacing to columns of furniture list at print time under Windows for better rendering.
Fixed a bug that could interpret SH3D files with correct imported zipped 3D models as damaged files.
Fixed a bug that prevented side by side alignment of superimposed pieces of furniture to work.
Fixed wrong computation of wall corner on some horizontal walls.
Ensured that the order in which pieces of furniture were added is kept after grouping them.
Fixed the management of mouse cursor during drag and drop operations in the catalog.
Delayed the disposal of the default home to avoid Java 3D fatal error in Mac OS X full screen mode.
Updated Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese Brazilian, Russian and Polish localizations of the help.
Other minor bugs fixes and enhancements.
Review 2D and 3D designs without using the application they were created in
Create a floor plan for your home and start adding walls and textures
