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.
v5.0 [Feb 16, 2012]
- Added a tool to draw polylines in the plan with various styles.
- Added the ability to display baseboards with wall and room modification panes.
- Made levels possibly not viewable with the new Viewable check box of their modification pane or with the new Make level unviewable menu item.
- Managed levels at the same elevation as layers with an order index that can be set in levels modification pane (may provoke some small changes in existing SH3D files).
- Added Edit > Paste style menu item to modify the style of the selected objects from the object of the same type copied in the clipboard.
- Added Add point to room and Delete point from room menu items in the contextual menu of the plan.
- Added the ability to select objects in furniture groups, edit them and delete them, without the need to ungroup grouped objects.
- Added Furniture > Add to group and Edit > Paste to group menu items to add objects to the selected group.
- Saved expanded groups in the furniture list.
- Added an option in preferences pane to change the default font.
- Added the ability to change the font and the color of free texts in their modification pane, as well as to display them in the 3D view at a given elevation.
- Added $level variable in print setup dialog box to print the name of the printed level in page header or footer.
- Checked the size of the image chosen in the background image and texture import wizards to propose to reduce it if it's very large.
- Proposed directly to save the current home after selecting Sweet Home 3D > Quit menu item under Mac OS X, when only one modified home is opened.
- Displayed an information message once a furniture or textures library import is completed.
- Allowed the pitch angle of the point of view to be between -90° and 90°.
- Accepted 1/8 1/4 3/8 1/2 5/8 3/4 7/8 fraction text to be entered when Foot/Inch/Fraction unit is in use.
- Fixed the management of negative values in Foot/Inch/Fraction unit.
- Improved DAE/Collada format support to accept files with missing data.
- Fixed a bug that prevented to render photos at the two highest quality levels when Turkish localization is in use.
- Included Dutch localization written by Gerwin Harmsen and Rob van den Berg.
- Included Traditional Chinese localization written by Lee Shin-Chun.
- Updated French, English and Chinese help pages.
- Upgraded Java 3D to version 1.6.0-pre12 / JOGL 2.3.1 for the Mac OS X version run with Java 7 / 8.
- Replaced JRE 6u45 by JRE 8u51 in Sweet Home 3D installers bundled with Java under Windows.
- Other minor bugs fixes and enhancements.
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
