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Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

639 points by punnerud 4y ago

locofocos 4y ago
I used this when modeling a shed-to-house I built. Like most open source software, it's not SUPER polished but it's useful. Making basic walls, doors, windows, and placing furniture is fairly easy. It gets very complicated using their workaround for things like ceilings, roofs, and such but it's doable. One great feature is being able to export a 1:12 scale reference for my shed builder. It took some very careful toying with background layers, but I was eventually able to get a large-scale Kinko's printout from a PDF where 1 inch on the printout = 1 foot in the real world.
kyaghmour 4y ago
I've successfully used SH3D to create plans for a 14'x24' workshop that a contractor then used to build it. A year later I used it to remodel 2 bedrooms with some funky closet arrangement and again gave the plans to a contractor to do the work. It's got its quirks, but it's good enough to get a good idea of what things would look like. Most irritating is when its 3D viewer fails because of some random error as a separate window and has to be closed and reopened. Then again this was an older version. Maybe things got better since.
alanbernstein 4y ago
I had a need for this kind of tool a while ago, and this was the ONLY decent option I found. I'm just wondering what alternatives are even available. I figured there must be some professional software for this, but if so, I don't know what it is. I was pretty happy with this for whatever project I was doing at the time. I recently started using inkscape, for a general purpose drawing of my house. I can also include layers with other kinds of information like a circuit map. I can also include exterior information, like landscape design, buried utility lines, or assorted raster maps. It just seems like a "whole-house visual diagram" software tool should exist.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  > this was the ONLY decent option I found Can SketchUp do any of this?
  - dddddaviddddd 4y ago
    It can, but when I last looked, you needed the paid version to have similar features.
    - xupybd 4y ago
      Fusion 360 is free for personal use. It could probably do this
      - xupybd 4y ago
        Wow didn't expect down votes on that response.
    - jasonjamerson 4y ago
      I recommend modeling in Blender and importing to Unreal, which has a library of furnishings and real time rendering.
      - djhn 4y ago
        But only if you budget the time for learning those. Blender might take several hours of tutorials just to be able to create an empty room in the shape of a regular, rectangular box. Also Blender lacks support for exact measurements AFAIK. I tried this approach but gave up after barely achieving a rough floor plan after a day's of work.
        jasonjamerson 4y ago
        It definitely takes some doing, and you're right about the measurements. I often draft the floorplan in AutoCAD first, bring that into Blender... But the results are amazing. I wonder if a powerful but easy interface could be built as a bridge /plugin for these tools.
senkora 4y ago
I used this when planning out my apartment. I grabbed a floorplan from the listing ad, recreated it to scale in Sweet Home 3D, resized and recolored the bundled furniture models to match the dimensions and colors of furniture I was considering ordering online, found a layout I was happy with, and had everything ordered before I even moved in. Sweet Home 3D was honestly really useful for giving me confidence that everything I was buying would work well together, and I’m very happy with the result.
- km3r 4y ago
  I did this with various different apartments trying to figure out which layout worked best with the furniture I already had (and the use cases I wanted to meet).
guidoism 4y ago
I tried hard to make Sweet Home work for me. It solves the quick and dirty use case but I really wanted something where I could measure out every dimension in the house with a laser measurer, describe the shape and the relationships between the objects and let the computer do the rest. In a program like Sweet Home, and every other floor plan program out there if you make one change (like updating the measurement of the wall thickness you have to manually and carefully move everything else around. I ended up throwing together something quick and dirty with Org Mode tables and Metapost: https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/blob/main/house.org https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/blob/main/house.org It works pretty well and the output is pretty.
- unwind 4y ago
  That sounds fantastic, and it mirrors my (brief & shallow) experience with such tools. It quickly becomes too much of a drawing project, and too little of a data-capture/tabulating one. But please please please show the resulting picture somewhere, it was incredibly frustrating to read through your page's wonderful build-up towards the goal, and then not get to see the rendered result? Poor me.
  - guidoism 4y ago
    https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/releases/download/20230217/house.pdf https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/releases/download/20230...
- voisin 4y ago
  I wonder if there is a good answer for quick mapping using an iPhone’s LiDAR Scanner?
  - guidoism 4y ago
    This is definitely the eventual answer. I can't imagine in ten years we will be hand measuring walls.
    - 4y ago
Yuioup 4y ago
Does it do gardens?
- rubidium 4y ago
  Yes but not super well.
dang 4y ago
Related: Sweet Home 3D - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325485 - Aug 2022 (2 comments) Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21652888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21652888 - Nov 2019 (115 comments)
tokyoseb 4y ago
I must say it looks pretty good, wish I had tried it when I renovated my apartment. But all the other similar software I tried ultimately were a big disappointment. In my experience, once the design is complicated enough they tend to fail: some objects start to glitch if you move them by a certain amount, I could never get the right angle between walls, etc. It seems to be difficult to implement a way to put robust set of constraints on geometry yet keep the software easy to use by everyone. Perhaps it works well with more rectangular designs where the walls all have the same thickness though, my place has some weird shapes. Ultimately I gave up on specialized software and ended up re-drawing everything at scale in Affinity Designer. Of course, it's only 2D and it's basically free-form vector drawing but at least you control everything and it's not too complicated to create your own library of object like windows, doors etc et re-use that. I was very happy with the result.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> It seems to be difficult to implement a way to put robust set of constraints on geometry yet keep the software easy to use by everyone Maybe they could integrate the Solvespace constraint solver. It seems to be gaining popularity outside its original CAD program.
  - wyager 4y ago
    I tried to use Solvespace for a number of projects, but it seemed like it had essentially ~zero support for parametric repetition (e.g. putting one hole every 15mm), which made it basically useless for any semi-complex project. A home might be easier, as long as you don't have any design features like "put a light socket every 3 feet".
urbandw311er 4y ago
I’ve modelled my entire home with this in the past when planning major renovations etc. As others have said it’s not slick but it has a good set of features and does the job well. Interesting aside: it’s able to export to a fully interactive 3D model that you can embed in a browser! We used this feature to build an interactive trade stand during Covid at my company.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sabujp 4y ago
I did a full design of an addition for my home with it, now i Just need to find a contractor in the bay area who doesn't charge an arm and a leg to bring it to fruition
- duderific 4y ago
  Good, fast and reasonably priced, pick the two that are most important to you. You won't get all three.
hdjsksjd 4y ago
[dead]
rubidium 4y ago
Used it for a full house renovation of a 125 year old house (merging a duplex to a single family and moving stairwalls). Was super valuable and used the drawings to get my plan approved by the city. The 3d view really helped in visualizing what the new spaces would feel like. A bit of a learning curve but the flexible ability to import 3d models really helped. Now that i have every room in my house I can quickly test new furniture layouts. Highly recommend it.
michaelmior 4y ago
Sweet Home 3D is pretty popular among users of the ha-floorplan add-on[0] for the Home Assistant home automation platform. It takes some work, but you can do some really cool things like show which lights are on, who is in what room of the house, etc. [0] https://github.com/ExperienceLovelace/ha-floorplan https://github.com/ExperienceLovelace/ha-floorplan
goleary 4y ago
I use https://floorplanner.com https://floorplanner.com for similar purposes (I pay $5/month). It is great at getting the floorplan nailed, but leaves a bit to be desired when trying to fill the space with accurate furniture, patterns etc. You can have multiple variations floor plans per level. My gf uses https://foyr.com https://foyr.com once we have the floor plan nailed to get an idea about what colors, textures & furniture to use in a space. It supports higher def renderings. It's kind of expensive though iirc.
- rubidium 4y ago
  Sweet home 3-D is free. Does everything that you’re paying for and will still be around in 10 years.
- mrits 4y ago
  I used floorplanner for my last remodel. It was great. The contracting company was really impressed by what I gave them. I'd say it will take a few hours to get used to it and after that you can probably do most of what you want to do.
mrguyorama 4y ago
I was looking for something like this, but for flexibility, stubbornness, and quick-and-dirty-ness reasons, I ended up just building the floor plan in blender. It's adequate I guess
voakbasda 4y ago
I used Sweet Home 3D to design my current house. I passed the desgin off to my contractor, who had it turned into blueprints. That was over 10 years ago, so I'm sure it has impoved. It's free and open source, yet it's relatively user friendly. When I need to design another building, I definitely will use it again.
jimmcslim 4y ago
I’ll see how well it handles my 1930s timber cottage that is well out of square!
jeremy_wiebe 4y ago
We completely renovated our apartment about 3 years ago. We used Sweet Home 3D to help visualize our kitchen as we took out a wall and rearranged things. Being able to model it and then “explore” it in 3D was really helpful to settle on our final layout. And especially since the designer we hired gave us one option that stunk.
ale42 4y ago
So slow right now... looks like the server is getting a HN hug...
BizarroLand 4y ago
I live in a geodesic dome and sweet home isn't really suited to buildings that aren't comprised of 90 degree angles. Other than that it;s a great little program.
pabe 4y ago
I didn't find a better solution for planning the layout of a house. It's basically like playing Sims; way easier to handle than e.g. SketchUp. It can also export layers (or the whole building) as OBJ which is awesome for 3D printing or working with Twinmotion. I decorated my rooms in Twinmotion and did awesome high fidelity renders. You can even experience your building in VR! Maybe one day there's an AI that helps you with planning a home.
- mnsc 4y ago
  How is the workflow for going to vr? Do you need som fancy headset or would a quest 2 with a link cable work?
trentnix 4y ago
I used Sweet Home 3D to plan a major home renovation in our new (to us) house and it worked great. I used Magic Plan on my iPhone to map the floor plan with LiDAR, converted the result to a 2D PDF, and imported that into SH3D. I then drew walls and doors and windows on top of that, effectively recreating the existing home. Then we started experimenting. SH3D proved to be invaluable at understanding how to utilize existing walls and unproductive space to minimize renovation costs. Being able to “walk through” the various plans we considered was invaluable. And I couldn’t be happier with how my plans worked out. SH3D has some rough edges and took some time to master. But the learning curve was worth it.
tssva 4y ago
I find all of these packages cause a level of frustration which endangers my laptop. Fortunately my daughter is enrolled in the technical drawing curriculum at her high school. Last summer I had her create plans for our house in Autocad.
eurasiantiger 4y ago
Why not ask ChatGPT to design your interior for you? ;)
- mavsman 4y ago
  I actually just had this thought as I was playing with it and manually adjusting lots of different dimensions. Seems like a great fit.
nathan_f77 4y ago
I'm moving to a new house in the next few weeks, so I'll be firing this up again soon. It was fun to model our current house, and it was very useful for figuring out interior design. I also used it to set up some floorplans in Home Assistant using https://github.com/adizanni/floor3d-card https://github.com/adizanni/floor3d-card And a 2D version with https://github.com/ExperienceLovelace/ha-floorplan https://github.com/ExperienceLovelace/ha-floorplan The home automation floorplan stuff was a fun project, but I don't really use it. I found that it's not as useful as a simple dashboard page with plain buttons and cards. But it was fun to work on just as a hobby, like painting models or setting up a model train set.
zekenie 4y ago
this thing is low key awesome. planned my renovations with it and my contractor was blown away. he offered (jokingly) to hire me to make models for other clients
jraph 4y ago
A bit hidden (in the FAQ and in the SourceForge repository) but not only free: open source under the GPL :-)
- echelon 4y ago
  I'm shocked SourceForge is still around. How are they making any money, and how can they employ half a dozen people? I'm also surprised that Slashdot still owns SourceForge. Haven't both of these companies split ways and been through several different hands? ThinkGeek, etc.
pasquinelli 4y ago
sweet home is also an famicom game.
- bennysonething 4y ago
  I came here to say the same thing. It's sort of survival horror by capcom, so same lineage as resident evil in a way. Only seven years before it, the jump in technology is mind boggling to me.
radiojasper 4y ago
2004 called. They wanted their web2.0 design back.
Element_ 4y ago
I used this for a recent home renovation project, highly recommended. It has everything I needed to layout a house and get a basic 3d rendering, it worked great. You can make a donation to help out the author on the homepage.
huevosabio 4y ago
Cool stuff! Will give it a try next time I need something like this. I found https://floorplanner.com/ https://floorplanner.com/ to be quite useful as well. The renders are good enough for me to feel like I am looking at the space rather than a sketch.
js2 4y ago
A few years ago I recall trying to use Sweet Home 3D and being dissatisfied, but I don't honestly recall why. Maybe it was taking me too long to figure it out. I found Live Home 3D which is cross platform and purchased a license for it. I think it's free on Windows. https://www.livehome3d.com/ https://www.livehome3d.com/
bluedino 4y ago
I would love to get a copy of whatever the software was they used at the home improvement store when my parents bought cabinets back in 1990? I remember it running on an IBM PS/2 style machine (the all in one) and it had very slow wireframe graphics.
dtgriscom 4y ago
I used SH3D eight years ago to model my soon-to-be-remodelled kitchen. It worked great, as long as I was only going for appearance and sightlines; I wouldn't use it for planning anything precise.
myself248 4y ago
The term "interior design" should, but does not, encompass what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do an ergonomic study of some workbench and shelf layouts, with instruments and displays and tools located on a shelf above the bench. I'm tall, and when I lay out the shelves so they fit me, shorter people can't reach the knobs on the instruments. But if I just move everything down, I feel like I'm wasting space. And I don't want to just chain a short person to the chair for several hours while I build and rebuild shelves. I feel like there should be ergonomic models for reach and view, for like the 5% and 95%ile of human sizes, but I can't figure out what this is even called.
drumttocs8 4y ago
Archicad is amazing, but unfortunately, technically not free.
amatecha 4y ago
Is there a place to find good 3d models to use in this software? I want to plan out a "computer lab" room in my home, so of course I wanted to map out where computers would go, which desks, at which heights, etc.. ... but I found that the models available on the software's site are relatively few...
- epilys 4y ago
  Go to online markets of furniture models which have online preview (necessary) If you then look at the request that loads up the preview, the dae/obj file is usually there.
- 0x53 4y ago
  It does allow you to import 3ds/OBJ files. So that might be able to help some.
0x53 4y ago
I've been using Sweet Home 3d for a bit now and it has grown on me. When I first started it wasn't very intuitive at all, but after a bit it got better. Currently, I just use it to do floor planning and get a rough idea, and then I use Fusion 360 to actually layout the technical parts of the project.
newshacker000 4y ago
This website has been around for quite some time.
CSDude 4y ago
Not same, a bit harder but this is also free: https://pcon-planner.com/ https://pcon-planner.com/ and also has catalogs for actual furniture firms with actual items (where you need to register but most approve) I've learnt this because the furniture firm designed a wardrobe for us with wrong dimensions and the designer lady was surprised that I showed them why they made wrong - they put the dimensions for outside of the wall, without taking in the account for wall thickness.
- edwcross 4y ago
  Unfortunately pCon.planner is Windows-only. I wonder if the file format is standard and compatible with other software?
  - ixs 4y ago
    I think they store data in DXF. Should be pretty standard thus.
userbinator 4y ago
As someone with a moderate amount of CAD experience, and working with graphics applications in general such as Photoshop, I'm surprised by the mandatory modifier keys for all the keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+Shift+anything is a horrible combination to hit with one hand while the other hand is on the mouse, which is the usual way one of these applications is operated. That said, the compatibility is impressive --- which is not too surprising, given that it's Java: Sweet Home 3D may be run under Windows 98 to Windows 11, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) to macOS 13 (Ventura), various Linux systems and Solaris.
vbezhenar 4y ago
Is it possible to set parametric constraints? After using CAD, paint-like tools seems like stone age.
briHass 4y ago
Love SH3D. As others said, it takes some time to learn, but becomes pretty intuitive. The ability to import and scale a background image is my favorite feature. I recently used it with a satellite image from my County's property line tool and planned a shed location. It was easy to measure setbacks and other obstacles. I even had fun translating the surveyor jargon on the deed to retrace the property lines.
squarefoot 4y ago
Hah, I wish I knew about it before drawing part of my soon to be new house using Room Arranger (https://www.roomarranger.com/ https://www.roomarranger.com/). Although from a quick run it seems that RA is easier to use but less powerful, which for someone who knows absolutely nothing about either graphics or house design like me isn't much of a problem. It would be nice if RA data could be imported into Sweet Home 3D; does anyone know of some external tool to do that?
y2hhcmxlcw 4y ago
I used this software to design my tiny house that I built with great success. It really helped me visualize the space. I didn't create an engineering ready floor plan with this so to speak. In other words, I intentionally left the measurements slightly relative which wouldn't work for most construction projects. In other words, if my bedroom ended up being 14ft by 10ft and 2 and 1/2 inches instead of 14x10' I was fine with that, it just meant other rooms slightly smaller. But give or take the width of dry wall and other factors it was worked fine. I found getting super precise measurements with this app difficult and so I didn't even try. I just let the guy building walls have a tad bit of freedom. Like I said, for most projects that would not work. Having said that, this app was a huge life savor and allowed me to really visualize the space and make key design decisions.

639 points by punnerud 4y ago

I used this when modeling a shed-to-house I built. Like most open source software, it's not SUPER polished but it's useful. Making basic walls, doors, windows, and placing furniture is fairly easy. It gets very complicated using their workaround for things like ceilings, roofs, and such but it's doable. One great feature is being able to export a 1:12 scale reference for my shed builder. It took some very careful toying with background layers, but I was eventually able to get a large-scale Kinko's printout from a PDF where 1 inch on the printout = 1 foot in the real world.

kyaghmour 4y ago

I've successfully used SH3D to create plans for a 14'x24' workshop that a contractor then used to build it. A year later I used it to remodel 2 bedrooms with some funky closet arrangement and again gave the plans to a contractor to do the work. It's got its quirks, but it's good enough to get a good idea of what things would look like. Most irritating is when its 3D viewer fails because of some random error as a separate window and has to be closed and reopened. Then again this was an older version. Maybe things got better since.

alanbernstein 4y ago

I had a need for this kind of tool a while ago, and this was the ONLY decent option I found. I'm just wondering what alternatives are even available. I figured there must be some professional software for this, but if so, I don't know what it is. I was pretty happy with this for whatever project I was doing at the time. I recently started using inkscape, for a general purpose drawing of my house. I can also include layers with other kinds of information like a circuit map. I can also include exterior information, like landscape design, buried utility lines, or assorted raster maps. It just seems like a "whole-house visual diagram" software tool should exist.

wyldfire 4y ago
> this was the ONLY decent option I found Can SketchUp do any of this?
- dddddaviddddd 4y ago
  It can, but when I last looked, you needed the paid version to have similar features.
  - xupybd 4y ago
    Fusion 360 is free for personal use. It could probably do this
    - xupybd 4y ago
      Wow didn't expect down votes on that response.
  - jasonjamerson 4y ago
    I recommend modeling in Blender and importing to Unreal, which has a library of furnishings and real time rendering.
    - djhn 4y ago
      But only if you budget the time for learning those. Blender might take several hours of tutorials just to be able to create an empty room in the shape of a regular, rectangular box. Also Blender lacks support for exact measurements AFAIK. I tried this approach but gave up after barely achieving a rough floor plan after a day's of work.
      - jasonjamerson 4y ago
        It definitely takes some doing, and you're right about the measurements. I often draft the floorplan in AutoCAD first, bring that into Blender... But the results are amazing. I wonder if a powerful but easy interface could be built as a bridge /plugin for these tools.

senkora 4y ago

I used this when planning out my apartment. I grabbed a floorplan from the listing ad, recreated it to scale in Sweet Home 3D, resized and recolored the bundled furniture models to match the dimensions and colors of furniture I was considering ordering online, found a layout I was happy with, and had everything ordered before I even moved in. Sweet Home 3D was honestly really useful for giving me confidence that everything I was buying would work well together, and I’m very happy with the result.

km3r 4y ago
I did this with various different apartments trying to figure out which layout worked best with the furniture I already had (and the use cases I wanted to meet).

guidoism 4y ago

I tried hard to make Sweet Home work for me. It solves the quick and dirty use case but I really wanted something where I could measure out every dimension in the house with a laser measurer, describe the shape and the relationships between the objects and let the computer do the rest. In a program like Sweet Home, and every other floor plan program out there if you make one change (like updating the measurement of the wall thickness you have to manually and carefully move everything else around. I ended up throwing together something quick and dirty with Org Mode tables and Metapost: https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/blob/main/house.org https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/blob/main/house.org It works pretty well and the output is pretty.

unwind 4y ago
That sounds fantastic, and it mirrors my (brief & shallow) experience with such tools. It quickly becomes too much of a drawing project, and too little of a data-capture/tabulating one. But please please please show the resulting picture somewhere, it was incredibly frustrating to read through your page's wonderful build-up towards the goal, and then not get to see the rendered result? Poor me.
- guidoism 4y ago
  https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/releases/download/20230217/house.pdf https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/releases/download/20230...
voisin 4y ago
I wonder if there is a good answer for quick mapping using an iPhone’s LiDAR Scanner?
- guidoism 4y ago
  This is definitely the eventual answer. I can't imagine in ten years we will be hand measuring walls.
  - 4y ago

Yuioup 4y ago

Does it do gardens?

rubidium 4y ago
Yes but not super well.

dang 4y ago

Related: Sweet Home 3D - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325485 - Aug 2022 (2 comments) Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21652888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21652888 - Nov 2019 (115 comments)

tokyoseb 4y ago

I must say it looks pretty good, wish I had tried it when I renovated my apartment. But all the other similar software I tried ultimately were a big disappointment. In my experience, once the design is complicated enough they tend to fail: some objects start to glitch if you move them by a certain amount, I could never get the right angle between walls, etc. It seems to be difficult to implement a way to put robust set of constraints on geometry yet keep the software easy to use by everyone. Perhaps it works well with more rectangular designs where the walls all have the same thickness though, my place has some weird shapes. Ultimately I gave up on specialized software and ended up re-drawing everything at scale in Affinity Designer. Of course, it's only 2D and it's basically free-form vector drawing but at least you control everything and it's not too complicated to create your own library of object like windows, doors etc et re-use that. I was very happy with the result.

phkahler 4y ago
>> It seems to be difficult to implement a way to put robust set of constraints on geometry yet keep the software easy to use by everyone Maybe they could integrate the Solvespace constraint solver. It seems to be gaining popularity outside its original CAD program.
- wyager 4y ago
  I tried to use Solvespace for a number of projects, but it seemed like it had essentially ~zero support for parametric repetition (e.g. putting one hole every 15mm), which made it basically useless for any semi-complex project. A home might be easier, as long as you don't have any design features like "put a light socket every 3 feet".

urbandw311er 4y ago

I’ve modelled my entire home with this in the past when planning major renovations etc. As others have said it’s not slick but it has a good set of features and does the job well. Interesting aside: it’s able to export to a fully interactive 3D model that you can embed in a browser! We used this feature to build an interactive trade stand during Covid at my company.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sabujp 4y ago

I did a full design of an addition for my home with it, now i Just need to find a contractor in the bay area who doesn't charge an arm and a leg to bring it to fruition

duderific 4y ago
Good, fast and reasonably priced, pick the two that are most important to you. You won't get all three.

hdjsksjd 4y ago

[dead]

rubidium 4y ago

Used it for a full house renovation of a 125 year old house (merging a duplex to a single family and moving stairwalls). Was super valuable and used the drawings to get my plan approved by the city. The 3d view really helped in visualizing what the new spaces would feel like. A bit of a learning curve but the flexible ability to import 3d models really helped. Now that i have every room in my house I can quickly test new furniture layouts. Highly recommend it.

michaelmior 4y ago

Sweet Home 3D is pretty popular among users of the ha-floorplan add-on[0] for the Home Assistant home automation platform. It takes some work, but you can do some really cool things like show which lights are on, who is in what room of the house, etc. [0] https://github.com/ExperienceLovelace/ha-floorplan https://github.com/ExperienceLovelace/ha-floorplan

goleary 4y ago

I use https://floorplanner.com https://floorplanner.com for similar purposes (I pay $5/month). It is great at getting the floorplan nailed, but leaves a bit to be desired when trying to fill the space with accurate furniture, patterns etc. You can have multiple variations floor plans per level. My gf uses https://foyr.com https://foyr.com once we have the floor plan nailed to get an idea about what colors, textures & furniture to use in a space. It supports higher def renderings. It's kind of expensive though iirc.

rubidium 4y ago
Sweet home 3-D is free. Does everything that you’re paying for and will still be around in 10 years.
mrits 4y ago
I used floorplanner for my last remodel. It was great. The contracting company was really impressed by what I gave them. I'd say it will take a few hours to get used to it and after that you can probably do most of what you want to do.

mrguyorama 4y ago

I was looking for something like this, but for flexibility, stubbornness, and quick-and-dirty-ness reasons, I ended up just building the floor plan in blender. It's adequate I guess

voakbasda 4y ago

I used Sweet Home 3D to design my current house. I passed the desgin off to my contractor, who had it turned into blueprints. That was over 10 years ago, so I'm sure it has impoved. It's free and open source, yet it's relatively user friendly. When I need to design another building, I definitely will use it again.

jimmcslim 4y ago

I’ll see how well it handles my 1930s timber cottage that is well out of square!

jeremy_wiebe 4y ago

We completely renovated our apartment about 3 years ago. We used Sweet Home 3D to help visualize our kitchen as we took out a wall and rearranged things. Being able to model it and then “explore” it in 3D was really helpful to settle on our final layout. And especially since the designer we hired gave us one option that stunk.

ale42 4y ago

So slow right now... looks like the server is getting a HN hug...

BizarroLand 4y ago

I live in a geodesic dome and sweet home isn't really suited to buildings that aren't comprised of 90 degree angles. Other than that it;s a great little program.

pabe 4y ago

I didn't find a better solution for planning the layout of a house. It's basically like playing Sims; way easier to handle than e.g. SketchUp. It can also export layers (or the whole building) as OBJ which is awesome for 3D printing or working with Twinmotion. I decorated my rooms in Twinmotion and did awesome high fidelity renders. You can even experience your building in VR! Maybe one day there's an AI that helps you with planning a home.

mnsc 4y ago
How is the workflow for going to vr? Do you need som fancy headset or would a quest 2 with a link cable work?

trentnix 4y ago

I used Sweet Home 3D to plan a major home renovation in our new (to us) house and it worked great. I used Magic Plan on my iPhone to map the floor plan with LiDAR, converted the result to a 2D PDF, and imported that into SH3D. I then drew walls and doors and windows on top of that, effectively recreating the existing home. Then we started experimenting. SH3D proved to be invaluable at understanding how to utilize existing walls and unproductive space to minimize renovation costs. Being able to “walk through” the various plans we considered was invaluable. And I couldn’t be happier with how my plans worked out. SH3D has some rough edges and took some time to master. But the learning curve was worth it.

tssva 4y ago

I find all of these packages cause a level of frustration which endangers my laptop. Fortunately my daughter is enrolled in the technical drawing curriculum at her high school. Last summer I had her create plans for our house in Autocad.

eurasiantiger 4y ago

Why not ask ChatGPT to design your interior for you? ;)

mavsman 4y ago
I actually just had this thought as I was playing with it and manually adjusting lots of different dimensions. Seems like a great fit.

nathan_f77 4y ago

I'm moving to a new house in the next few weeks, so I'll be firing this up again soon. It was fun to model our current house, and it was very useful for figuring out interior design. I also used it to set up some floorplans in Home Assistant using https://github.com/adizanni/floor3d-card https://github.com/adizanni/floor3d-card And a 2D version with https://github.com/ExperienceLovelace/ha-floorplan https://github.com/ExperienceLovelace/ha-floorplan The home automation floorplan stuff was a fun project, but I don't really use it. I found that it's not as useful as a simple dashboard page with plain buttons and cards. But it was fun to work on just as a hobby, like painting models or setting up a model train set.

zekenie 4y ago

this thing is low key awesome. planned my renovations with it and my contractor was blown away. he offered (jokingly) to hire me to make models for other clients

jraph 4y ago

A bit hidden (in the FAQ and in the SourceForge repository) but not only free: open source under the GPL :-)

echelon 4y ago
I'm shocked SourceForge is still around. How are they making any money, and how can they employ half a dozen people? I'm also surprised that Slashdot still owns SourceForge. Haven't both of these companies split ways and been through several different hands? ThinkGeek, etc.

pasquinelli 4y ago

sweet home is also an famicom game.

bennysonething 4y ago
I came here to say the same thing. It's sort of survival horror by capcom, so same lineage as resident evil in a way. Only seven years before it, the jump in technology is mind boggling to me.

radiojasper 4y ago

2004 called. They wanted their web2.0 design back.

Element_ 4y ago

I used this for a recent home renovation project, highly recommended. It has everything I needed to layout a house and get a basic 3d rendering, it worked great. You can make a donation to help out the author on the homepage.

huevosabio 4y ago

Cool stuff! Will give it a try next time I need something like this. I found https://floorplanner.com/ https://floorplanner.com/ to be quite useful as well. The renders are good enough for me to feel like I am looking at the space rather than a sketch.

js2 4y ago

A few years ago I recall trying to use Sweet Home 3D and being dissatisfied, but I don't honestly recall why. Maybe it was taking me too long to figure it out. I found Live Home 3D which is cross platform and purchased a license for it. I think it's free on Windows. https://www.livehome3d.com/ https://www.livehome3d.com/

bluedino 4y ago

I would love to get a copy of whatever the software was they used at the home improvement store when my parents bought cabinets back in 1990? I remember it running on an IBM PS/2 style machine (the all in one) and it had very slow wireframe graphics.

dtgriscom 4y ago

I used SH3D eight years ago to model my soon-to-be-remodelled kitchen. It worked great, as long as I was only going for appearance and sightlines; I wouldn't use it for planning anything precise.

myself248 4y ago

The term "interior design" should, but does not, encompass what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do an ergonomic study of some workbench and shelf layouts, with instruments and displays and tools located on a shelf above the bench. I'm tall, and when I lay out the shelves so they fit me, shorter people can't reach the knobs on the instruments. But if I just move everything down, I feel like I'm wasting space. And I don't want to just chain a short person to the chair for several hours while I build and rebuild shelves. I feel like there should be ergonomic models for reach and view, for like the 5% and 95%ile of human sizes, but I can't figure out what this is even called.

drumttocs8 4y ago

Archicad is amazing, but unfortunately, technically not free.

amatecha 4y ago

Is there a place to find good 3d models to use in this software? I want to plan out a "computer lab" room in my home, so of course I wanted to map out where computers would go, which desks, at which heights, etc.. ... but I found that the models available on the software's site are relatively few...

epilys 4y ago
Go to online markets of furniture models which have online preview (necessary) If you then look at the request that loads up the preview, the dae/obj file is usually there.
0x53 4y ago
It does allow you to import 3ds/OBJ files. So that might be able to help some.

0x53 4y ago

I've been using Sweet Home 3d for a bit now and it has grown on me. When I first started it wasn't very intuitive at all, but after a bit it got better. Currently, I just use it to do floor planning and get a rough idea, and then I use Fusion 360 to actually layout the technical parts of the project.

newshacker000 4y ago

This website has been around for quite some time.

CSDude 4y ago

Not same, a bit harder but this is also free: https://pcon-planner.com/ https://pcon-planner.com/ and also has catalogs for actual furniture firms with actual items (where you need to register but most approve) I've learnt this because the furniture firm designed a wardrobe for us with wrong dimensions and the designer lady was surprised that I showed them why they made wrong - they put the dimensions for outside of the wall, without taking in the account for wall thickness.

edwcross 4y ago
Unfortunately pCon.planner is Windows-only. I wonder if the file format is standard and compatible with other software?
- ixs 4y ago
  I think they store data in DXF. Should be pretty standard thus.

userbinator 4y ago

As someone with a moderate amount of CAD experience, and working with graphics applications in general such as Photoshop, I'm surprised by the mandatory modifier keys for all the keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+Shift+anything is a horrible combination to hit with one hand while the other hand is on the mouse, which is the usual way one of these applications is operated. That said, the compatibility is impressive --- which is not too surprising, given that it's Java: Sweet Home 3D may be run under Windows 98 to Windows 11, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) to macOS 13 (Ventura), various Linux systems and Solaris.

vbezhenar 4y ago

Is it possible to set parametric constraints? After using CAD, paint-like tools seems like stone age.

briHass 4y ago

Love SH3D. As others said, it takes some time to learn, but becomes pretty intuitive. The ability to import and scale a background image is my favorite feature. I recently used it with a satellite image from my County's property line tool and planned a shed location. It was easy to measure setbacks and other obstacles. I even had fun translating the surveyor jargon on the deed to retrace the property lines.

squarefoot 4y ago

Hah, I wish I knew about it before drawing part of my soon to be new house using Room Arranger (https://www.roomarranger.com/ https://www.roomarranger.com/). Although from a quick run it seems that RA is easier to use but less powerful, which for someone who knows absolutely nothing about either graphics or house design like me isn't much of a problem. It would be nice if RA data could be imported into Sweet Home 3D; does anyone know of some external tool to do that?

y2hhcmxlcw 4y ago

I used this software to design my tiny house that I built with great success. It really helped me visualize the space. I didn't create an engineering ready floor plan with this so to speak. In other words, I intentionally left the measurements slightly relative which wouldn't work for most construction projects. In other words, if my bedroom ended up being 14ft by 10ft and 2 and 1/2 inches instead of 14x10' I was fine with that, it just meant other rooms slightly smaller. But give or take the width of dry wall and other factors it was worked fine. I found getting super precise measurements with this app difficult and so I didn't even try. I just let the guy building walls have a tad bit of freedom. Like I said, for most projects that would not work. Having said that, this app was a huge life savor and allowed me to really visualize the space and make key design decisions.