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.
v6.5 [Mar 3, 2021]
- Added information about Java and Java 3D providers in About dialog box.
- Added com.eteks.sweethome3d.singleInstance system property which makes each launch of Sweet Home 3D run in a separated process when set to false.
- Fixed toggling magnetism when Alt key is released under Windows.
- Fixed a drawing bug of solid polyline joints.
- Adjusted the image scale of items of the plan copied to the clipboard to prevent out of memory errors.
- Accepted DAE files with empty mesh sources.
- Fixed a bug which removed the color or texture of a wall adjacent to a modified room.
- Fixed the top view in the plan of the mirrored furniture rotated around its Y axis.
- Used lower case for texture names exported to OBJ format to avoid possible conflicts on case insensitive systems.
- Fixed the deletion of folders in work directory when they contain subfolders.
- Ensured the message about version updates is displayed in front of preferences dialog under macOS.
- Added preferences to manage IDs and item names in SH3F and SH3T files in the Furniture Library Editor and Textures Library Editor.
- Added the ability to read default catalogs contained in Furniture.jar and Textures.jar files with the Furniture and Textures Library Editors.
- Added native support for Apple Silicon computers running with ARM processors.
- Notarized Sweet Home 3D installer under macOS.
- Replaced Oracle JRE 8u202 bundled in Sweet Home 3D installer by Azul OpenJDK 11.0.10 under Windows 64 bit and Azul OpenJDK 15.0.2 under Mac OS X ≥ 10.9.
- Upgraded JOGL library running with Java 3D 1.6.1 to version 2.4 RC 20210111 to ensure compatibility of Sweet Home 3D and Furniture Library Editor with Java 9 and above, but forcing these applications to use Java version ≥ 8 under Mac OS X ≥ 10.9 as well as with Java Web Start.
- Replaced Java 3D version 1.6.1 by version 1.5.2 for the distributions running with Apple Java 6 under Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.9.
- Updated the Ant scripts of Sweet Home 3D and Library Editors to allow project compilation with JDK 9 and above.
- 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
