Recently I’ve come across house floor plan software Sweet Home 3D.
Sweet Home 3D is an impressive floor plan software, easy to use, intuitive and fast. The 3D views are amazing
You need not be an Civil Engineer or Architect to plan your dream home. You have two options . The program can work directly in a browser connected to the web. It also exists as a desktop version you can download and run locally on your computer.
Downloading and installation is simple.
You can add walls to create spaces, or create rooms directly. Walls and rooms can be resized, moved. You can also place and arrange all sorts of furnitures in the room and spaces to see circulation paths, usability of your floor plan.
The most interesting feature is the 3D view in the second bottom half of the screen. Whenever you change something in the 2D view the change reflects immediately on the 3D view. Tailor made furniture, Doors, Windows, Kitchen Accessories, Toilet Accessories are available which makes your house more realistic.
Not only that the software also allows you to move around the 3D image with the mouse to examine your plan from different perspectives. To me the speed of 3D rendering in Sweet Home 3D constitutes a great quality as it is a time saver comparing to other softwares. Although Floorplanner is capable of rendering your floor plans in 3D it takes much more time to do.
Other features I like about Sweet Home 3D include:
- Use metric system (definitely easier to work in metric in Australia than having to mentally convert inches and feet)
- 3D virtual visit of your dream house (what a great feature). It looks so real
- Large collection of furniture, cabinetry, kitchen appliances can be arranged on the plan
- Light fixtures
- Window elevation can be adjusted
- Dimensions of things can be precisely typed in via keyboard
- Walls can be “painted” with different colours (different colour each side)
- Colours and patterns for floor
- Import a floor plan as background image. If you want to modify or adapt an existing floor plan this option will speed up the process a lot
- Print to PDF. When you print to PDF the listing contains not only your 2D plan but also a 3D view of it.
Overall Sweet Home 3D boasts impressive functionalities. It is so powerful and versatile, yet easy to manipulate, that you could use it to draw floor plans for a new house, to concoct a furniture rearrangement/upgrade or to design a kitchen renovation. What you can do with it just blows me away. I encourage you to check it out.
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