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.
v5.7.1 [Jan 25, 2018]
Added a preview component to file choosers used to select an image under Windows and Linux.
Managed user defined furniture properties added to catalogs read by Sweet Home 3D and read/saved by Furniture Library Editor.
Fixed the visibility of horizontally rotated objects at upper levels.
Fixed the size in the plan of a copied-pasted object which is horizontally rotated.
Fixed a bug that prevented to group unresizable furniture or read a SH3D file saved with a previous version which contained such objects.
Fixed the display of furniture catalog and furniture list when scrolling under Mac OS X 10.13 with Java 6.
Fixed Window menu management under Mac OS X with Java 8.
Replaced JRE 8u152 by JRE 8u162 in Sweet Home 3D installers bundled with Java.
Converted CVS repository on SourceForge.net to SVN (sorry for the dead links to sweethome3d.cvs.sf.net server that this change implies).
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
