Sweet Home 3D comes as a cheaper alternative to using expensive CAD tools for creating a 3D house or room interior designs. The program is open source and you can use it as long as you like without paying a single buck.
You can choose between various project view modes (2D and 3D displays), include as many elements as you like by using drag-and-drop actions, and check the integrated help manual whenever you require assistance. The program provides you with various project components that are nicely organized into groups and can easily be edited when needed. For example, you can change the size of a furniture piece, rotate a bookcase, etc.
Once you finish editing your project, you can create a video presentation showing the design and export it to your local directories. What's more, you can take a snapshot of your design and save it for later. Sadly, the utility supports a limited amount of output formats for completing both of the aforementioned tasks.
Furthermore, even though it comes with a price, the Mac App Store version of the tool provides you with more project elements (more than 1200 elements).
Another thing you need to consider is that the program provides you with a limited amount of exterior design elements, such as front porch furniture and other types of objects. Still, on the homepage of the developer, it says the utility is created for "interior design" projects.
In conclusion, it's up to you to decide which is the best Sweet Home 3D edition for you. Either way, both versions (open source and Mac App Store) provide you with many useful advantages and are very intuitive.
v5.2 [Feb 19, 2016]
- Added Invisible option to the Furniture materials pane to hide some parts of a piece of furniture.
- Made resizing of a piece of furniture with its resize indicator proportional when shift key is pressed.
- Moved the viewport of the plan only when selected objects become invisible at screen when they are moved with the keyboard.
- Changed the width of the rectangle of doors and windows in the plan to take into account the width of their doorOrWindowCutOutShape property when it's smaller.
- Added com.eteks.sweethome3d.resolutionScale system property to apply a scale factor to the user interface of Sweet Home 3D.
- Added a Java Web Start version able to display the user interface of Sweet Home 3D at a twice larger size for users with HiDPI screens under Windows and Linux.
- Added samplerAlgorithm and filter properties to the renderer properties that can be set for Sunflow.
- Fixed a bug that could enlarge uselessly the size of a SH3D file when the texture of a material was set to its default value or reused on an other object.
- Ensured walls created by Plan > Split wall menu item are at the same level as the split wall.
- Replaced visual properties set on a Home instance with simple String properties (developers are encouraged to replace calls to the deprecated getVisualProperty and setVisualProperty on a Home instance, by calls to getProperty and setProperty, because future file format might not save visual properties anymore).
- New icon and logo designed by madudesign.
- Modified installer program to delete old JREs at the end of installation process under Windows.
- Updated the digital signature used to signed the application with a SHA-2 signature.
- Replaced JRE 8u60 by JRE 8u74 in Sweet Home 3D installers bundled with Java under Windows.
- Other minor bugs fixes and enhancements.
