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.
v6.0 [Mar 10, 2012]
- Added the ability to rotate and slide openings and light spots.
- Added a mannequin which can be articulated.
- Replaced the 24 3D models contributed under LAL license in the default catalog by new models under GNU GPL / CC-BY license.
- Updated rotating and sliding parts in the 3D model of doors, windows and furniture to support new rotation and translation capabilities.
- Added price management with currency choice and optional sales tax in preferences pane, new Price and Sales tax % fields in furniture modification pane, total prices displayed below the home furniture list and new columns to display price information in this list.
- Added the ability to calculate math expressions in numeric fields.
- Added Plan > Flip horizontally and Plan > Flip vertically menu items.
- Added support for multi line and text alignment in text modification pane.
- Added X offset and Y offset spinner in texture modification pane to shift textures.
- Enabled multi selection of materials in materials modification pane to change them by group.
- Added Dash offset spinner in polyline modification pane to shift the pattern of dashed polylines.
- Allowed polylines to be displayed in the 3D view.
- Added an option in 3D view modification pane to view background image in 3D view at ground level.
- Added Plan > Make level the only viewable one and Plan > Make all levels viewable menu items.
- Displayed level menu items in a separate contextual menu bound to level tabs.
- Managed Ctrl modifier (alt or option under macOS) to resize the selected piece of furniture only along its width or its depth.
- Added a new indicator in the middle of the selected wall to easily change its curve.
- Displayed wall arc length in the tool tip associated to Arc extent field in wall modification pane.
- Allowed sloping walls to have a minimum height equal to 0 on one end.
- Added 2.40:1 image ratio and updated video formats.
- Saved column widths of the furniture list to restore them at home opening.
- Made underground objects of a group individually dig the ground in the 3D view.
- Increased Z-buffer depth to 24 bit when supported, to simplify the management of the front and back limits of the frustrum in the 3D view.
- Ensured equirectangular images are correctly mapped in the 3D view when used as sky texture.
- Forced CSV export encoding to UTF-8 on all systems and added com.eteks.sweethome3d.CSVEncoding system property to set the encoding to another value for backward compatibility.
- Checked SH3D files start by ZIP magic number after a file is saved to warn users for rare fail cases.
- Fixed angle of grouped furniture according to the angle of leading selected piece.
- Fixed furniture and texture libraries loading under Java 10.
- Improved HiDPI screens detection with Java 8/10 under Windows / Linux / macOS to automatically scale the user interface.
- Updated Java 3D version to 1.6.1 to support HiDPI screens under Java 10.
- Optimized 3D walls update after the move of a door or a window.
- Added sunjce_provider.jar library to installation programs to allow access to web sites with https.
- Added architecture 32/64 bit radio buttons in Windows installer and selected 32 bit by default under Windows 10 64 bit.
- Added support for ARM64 architecture in Windows installer.
- Upgraded Inno Setup to its Unicode version to support more easily non Latin languages in Windows installer.
- Bundled macOS installer with Oracle Java 8 and added an other installer based on Apple Java 6 for Mac OS X 10.6/10.7 users.
- Replaced JRE 8u162 by JRE 8u181 in Sweet Home 3D installers bundled with Java.
- 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
