This is official description applies to version 3.4
Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application that helps you place your furniture on a house 2D plan, with a 3D preview. This program is aimed at people who want to design their interior quickly, whether they are moving or they just want to redesign their existing home. Numerous visual guides help you draw the plan of your home and layout furniture.
The following review written by one of the Software Informer contributors applies to version 1.8
Sweet Home 3D is a home and interior design program that can help you to place all your furniture, walls, doors and appliances in minutes and gives you a real time 3D preview of all your plans. You can create walls of desired dimensions and directions, use textures for your walls, hang paintings on them and much more.
Sweet Home 3D is designed with novice users' abilities in mind. You don’t need any prior knowledge to use this program. In fact, you will think that everyone can become an interior designer after using this wonderful program. You can use the available furniture that is given with the program or download more from the official website for free.
The best feature of this program is its support for 3D .obj files. It means you can import any 3D object file or furniture to use with your home plans. You can design any object or furniture using other 3D design tools and use it in your plans. Additionally you can export the plan to a 2D PDF file for future realization.
The program is not very flexible, so it may not be preferable for professionals, but the easy user interface is surely attractive. It makes interior designing as simple as dragging and dropping.
Very good application for beginners in interior designing.
You can use your own 3D furniture and objects in your design.
Easy to use, but with professional features.
None.
Reviewed by: Jasminder Singh
Reviewer rating:
Reviewed: 2 years ago
What's new in version 3.4
Sweet Home 3D is now able to manage multiple levels, either above the ground, or underground. To create a new level, choose the Plan > Add level menu item. As soon as the home contains more than one level, tabs with their name are displayed at the top of the home plan to let you select the level where items will be drawn. To help you draw the rooms of the upper floor, the walls and ceilings of the lower floor are drawn with a light color and magnetism was greatly improved.
If you want to change the default name or dimensions of a level, you can double click on its tab to edit its attributes with the new level dialog box. This pane presents also the list of existing levels to help you compare home levels to each other.
Levels can be used to manage levels on top of each other, but also intermediate levels, false ceilings, false floors or even layers, the list of level tabs being always maintained in the elevation order.
Similarly to the ability of windows and doors to automatically compute a hole at their intersection with a wall, staircases are able to make a hole in the ceilings and floors of the upper floors they intersect. For example, the following plan shows a staircase going from the ground floor to the first floor, and as the cut out shape of this staircase is round, you'll get automatically a round cut out in the 1st floor.
You can now fine tune the orientation of a model in the second step of the Furniture import wizard, if you keep pressed the shift key when you click on the orientation buttons. The I button in the middle resets the orientation.
t's now easier to select an object displayed under other objects in the plan: just right click in the plan at the location of this object and choose it in the Select object contextual menu that appears.
To change quickly the visibility of a piece of furniture, you can also directly click on its check box in the furniture list, and auto completion support was added to Name text fields to help you type faster repetitive names, suggested words coming from previously entered texts.
Different bugs happening in multiple screens environment were corrected, and dragging catalog furniture onto the plan was fixed in the online version when run under Mac OS X or Linux.
What's new in version 1.8
You can now lock base plan to select and arrange furniture more easily.
You can now hide background image without deleting it.
You can now export the home plan to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).
Save and compress menu items added to save the current home in a smaller SH3D file for easy file transfer.
A 3D viewer applet added.
Other minor bugs fixes and enhancements.
