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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed, I use it a lot for personal projects and it's quite straightforward to use while still pretty powerful. I'd just like to export the data somehow though
I like magicplan[0]. It's not perfect, but I like that I can just point my phone around the room and tap on points to create a rough layout. You can add in precise measurements later if you choose to.
I think "floor plan app" is the keyword you want to use, there are a bunch of these. You draw a floor plan and then most of them can give you a 3d render based on that. I used floorplanner.com, but there are several options.
I'm quite familiar with CAD for the purpose of designing things from scratch. What I want to do is, essentially, create blueprints for an old, poorly designed and built house. The tools I have tried for this are not really well-suited to this task.
> I figured there must be some professional software for this, but if so, I don't know what it is.
As an architect I can confirm that there's indeed a lot of professional software for this. The ones I usually work in are Revit and ArchiCAD, which are tailored for architects. Our interior architects also use Sketchup a lot. There's also more general-purpose CAD software like AutoCAD and Vectorworks available.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Unless you want to move all the furniture out of place (even in-built one), all the heavy stuff blocking edges and corners from view etc. Good luck with that bathroom sink or kitchen counter-top.
And angles and inequalities (eg. top edge vs bottom edge), that gets funny fast.
isn't that all of the more reason to use a high-resolution 3d LIDAR point cloud - to get the exactly geometry? I hear your point about moving furniture, but you kind of need to do that anyway to get a measuring tape into corners.
But then you need to measure "free standing" wall (when measuring the opening is not an option), and without someone to hold something flat at the other end for the laser to bounce off, measuring tape still wins.
Which is not to say that laser is not extremely useful: I generally use both.
There are companies today like Matterport: https://matterport.com/ which leverage LiDAR to do high detail measurements and mapping for various applications.
My company uses them to measure prior to use creating build plans for remodels and I used them at my previous company to do high detail measurements in the context of real estate to make 3D tours of homes.
If the iPhone can eventually get to the point where Matterport is today with their tech then that's good enough for a huge number of use cases.
Pretty much everyone in the construction and remodeling industry right now is prepping for that as the future. We all know it's 3 to 5 years away and want to be the first one to get it right.
Everyone is prepping for those self driving cars for the last 10 years, yet we are still swinging those steering wheels ourselves :)
There are certainly cases where LiDAR approach can work wonders. But as long as you need to do a couple of corrections manually, you'll need to have both set of tools at your disposal.
It will definitely augment current measuring approach (or rather, existing tools will be used to augment results coming from 3D scanning), but as soon as you have to pull out a laser or tape for one edge, your workflow is significantly more complex.
Not to mention that for cases where one might use SH3D, it'd be hard to tell an automated tool to ignore that 2"x2" "tooth" in one corner for just wanting to look at different furniture arrangement.
TBF that would be a good application of AI to infer what is clutter and what is not from the visual light image of the same space, the wall behind an object can simply be inferred from the sections of that wall that aren't occluded by the clutter. It might not catch some obscure cases where clutter obscures some anomalous part of the wall, but it'll be good enough in the other 99% of cases. Multiple viewpoints would probably deal with a large number of oddities too - much how photometry can get more accurate with more viewpoints already.
I found this youtube channel[0] has some pretty good walkthroughs (quite literally) of using various iOS apps to scan architectural spaces. The short answer is that the LIDAR and iOS APIs are remarkably powerful, but not 100% accurate. There are techniques to improve accuracy (e.g. using a gimbal), but ultimately you'll need to do tape or laser measurements and modify the models that these tools can build, or just model it yourself with the scan as a reference.
MagicPlan[1] and PolyCam[2] seem to be the most focused on building a schematic level building model which could be imported into other tools if needed. They both now take advantage of the Roomplan API[3] which Apple introduced in iOS and iPadOS 16[4]. MagicPlan has been out for ages[4] and originally just worked off the camera and the accelerometer to help build a floor plan. Polycam also supports photogrammetry[5] where you just take a bunch of photos and it builds a 3D model by interpreting what shape the object could be (I don't know if this is also used in architecture scale things, but it could be interesting for ID projects). Both MagicPlan and PolyCam allow you to tweak dimensions of rooms, doors, windows, furniture, etc. in a somewhat parametric way. This is where you likely want a laser measuring device to quickly update the dimensions. These can be used through Bluetooth to enter the measurements directly into the floorplans in MagicPlan[6]. I didn't try this, but if I was doing this all the time, it seems like it would be essential.
Matterport is starting to get into mobile[7] (phone, tablet) capture, but they've built their business up on their branded hardware and cloud platform. They provide floorplans as a service[8] and everything adds up, but from what I see in the real estate market, they are ubiquitous.
And if you want to spend a bunch more for very pro level app for documenting things like crime scenes, shipbuilding, infrastructure, etc. there's Dot3D.[9]
There are several products out there that can create 2d, 3d renderings of a living space using the iphone lidar scanner. Not sure it they keep dimensions.
I have been playing with RTAB-Map and a Kinect, and exporting to various formats and it works reasonably well, but is still far from user-friendly. They also have a iOS version if you want to play around with it.
Download RTABMap and the OpenNI drivers and export as ply and use CloudCompare and MeshLab to play with the pointclouds. I am not a fan of the mesh function in RTAB-Map and there are some buggy options which insta-crash it on export. Meshlab is also super-buggy and has a terrible GUI. Have fun!
Love Polycam! My wife just got the newest iPhone this fall before our remodel started and I was stoked to capture our house before the remodel and cannot wait to get the after all scanned in for comparison. https://poly.cam/capture/11B48FCD-E6A5-4ED7-9C9D-BF5DFE60579...
I love the app! The interior designer and property agent who saw me using it were pretty blown away.
One thing I struggle with though is making sure that the capture is robust enough before I move on. I usually only really know that something is off when the capture is done already. Can I “touch up” an existing capture by doing another local scan of a problematic area?
What I ended up doing when I was in a similar situation is manually edit the XML(sh3d files are XML) with proper measurements and coordinates after first doing a rough sketch on the GUI.
I haven't used that tool for a while, but I think that it includes a table with all the items (walls, etc.) where you can enter the measurements.
Ultimately I think of sweethome3d as a sweet spot between paint and a full-blown CAD program. Nowhere as powerful as the latter but so much better than the former. Also my daughter had a moment when she preferred sweethome3d over Minecraft et al. as a building game.
+1 on the sweetspot.
I never mastered a proper CAD tool. Sweet home 3D was amazing at helping plan the furniture build and layout of an empty 40m2 living space.
I have been living in that space and benefiting from the simplicity SH3D for ten years now with no need for a change.
There was a startup in SF that tried to do that using iPhone video feeds as one walked around the room, but they went belly up recently and whatever tech they created was siphoned to another platform startup.
This has been a source of frustration for me too, as I've occasionally tried out these kinds of packages. Particularly having used model-oriented dimensionless CAD tools like Solidworks, it feels like stepping back in time four decades to suddenly have to manually dimension and align everything upfront.
Parametric modelling - OpenSCAD (which you mention) is commonly used for that style of handwritten arithmetic and has a few python-based alternatives like CadQuery. In GUIs, FreeCAD has an architecture module that aims to be fully featured (never used it), but for just parametric drawings, SolveSpace is lightweight and probably more pleasant to use.
OpenSCAD is completely the wrong tool for the job. You want a graphical parametric modeller. The only vaguely decent FOSS one is SolveSpace. It's a bit lacking for actual CAD (no fillets!) but it works fine for 2D layout.
I have actually used it for that (actually I did full 3D modelling of part of my house) and it worked ok, however I would say that measuring things with a laser and copying them into CAD is not a very accurate way to do things.
You will end up with large accumulated errors, and most houses are not as square as you think they are.
I haven't ever used one but I suspect those phone based AR measurement apps have a good chance of being more accurate.
I shared the same frustration, but I finally gave up, and guess what, I was able to fulfill my projects and have a good insight about what my layout will be even with ~5cm difference. I learned to relax about absolute measures and think more about feeling and subjective dimensions.
Described in programming terms: You try to type the weird dynamic object you have to deal with in Typescript but after spending too much time, you learn to relax about types and just write it in JS and it feels like it's working most of the time.
Don't forget the power of `as const` and type guards for tricky dynamic types! Especially for function params that accept multiple complex object types.
I modelled my whole house including very piece of furniture. It is very “finicky” as you describe. It’s good enough for my amateur use with manual clicking. (There’s probably a programmatic option that I don’t know). However if I was a pro contractor it would probably not be the best.
I did plan custom designs that my contractor used. It’s also great when I want to get a new desk or sofa or whatever so that I can visualise everything first. Possible to make pretty realistic 3d walk-through videos that would be fine on any design tv show.
I never figured out how to relate primitives to each other in OpenSCAD so my models were an endless soup of absolute position math. I used SolveSpace for a while and it was brilliant because what took hours in OpenSCAD took just a fraction of the time. And then I picked up the Maker license for Solidworks ($100/yr) and haven't looked back.
I rendered my whole house in Solidworks to plan for a remodel and it was extremely well suited for the job.
I'm going to try SolveSpace, but I'll look into that Maker license. Didn't know of that, and I can absolutely afford a grande-latte/month for a tool like that.
The nice thing about FOSS though is that it's worry free. I can keep OpenSCAD and Cura, and my projects will build years later without me having to think about it.
The stuff I built with 3DS Max educational license, though, is not accessible. So I am hesitant to jump ship for Solidworks (even though it's the industry standard).
The vacuum navigates and route plans based on the geometry, though, so chances are the actual map is on the device. Robot vacuums are competitive and plentiful enough to where there has to be one with a way to download the map from some endpoint on the device, or at least a way to pop it open and pull out some SD card. Of course, it’d probably be in a proprietary format, so transforming it into a usable mesh might be tougher than getting the data.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
I use 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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadOne 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.
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.
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.
Can SketchUp do any of this?
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.
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.
[0] https://www.magicplan.app/
There's a whole category of such software, it's called CAD. The professional products are notoriously expensive.
As an architect I can confirm that there's indeed a lot of professional software for this. The ones I usually work in are Revit and ArchiCAD, which are tailored for architects. Our interior architects also use Sketchup a lot. There's also more general-purpose CAD software like AutoCAD and Vectorworks available.
Found https://pcon-planner.com/en/?privat=530&page=126 instead which is windows only and bon-open source but effectively free.
Pretty impressive stuff. Been very happy so far.
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.
I ended up throwing together something quick and dirty with Org Mode tables and Metapost: https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/blob/main/house.org
It works pretty well and the output is pretty.
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.
Unless you want to move all the furniture out of place (even in-built one), all the heavy stuff blocking edges and corners from view etc. Good luck with that bathroom sink or kitchen counter-top.
And angles and inequalities (eg. top edge vs bottom edge), that gets funny fast.
But then you need to measure "free standing" wall (when measuring the opening is not an option), and without someone to hold something flat at the other end for the laser to bounce off, measuring tape still wins.
Which is not to say that laser is not extremely useful: I generally use both.
Basically, my point is that we'll need all three, and workflow won't be trivial to combine them.
My company uses them to measure prior to use creating build plans for remodels and I used them at my previous company to do high detail measurements in the context of real estate to make 3D tours of homes.
If the iPhone can eventually get to the point where Matterport is today with their tech then that's good enough for a huge number of use cases.
Pretty much everyone in the construction and remodeling industry right now is prepping for that as the future. We all know it's 3 to 5 years away and want to be the first one to get it right.
There are certainly cases where LiDAR approach can work wonders. But as long as you need to do a couple of corrections manually, you'll need to have both set of tools at your disposal.
It will definitely augment current measuring approach (or rather, existing tools will be used to augment results coming from 3D scanning), but as soon as you have to pull out a laser or tape for one edge, your workflow is significantly more complex.
Not to mention that for cases where one might use SH3D, it'd be hard to tell an automated tool to ignore that 2"x2" "tooth" in one corner for just wanting to look at different furniture arrangement.
MagicPlan[1] and PolyCam[2] seem to be the most focused on building a schematic level building model which could be imported into other tools if needed. They both now take advantage of the Roomplan API[3] which Apple introduced in iOS and iPadOS 16[4]. MagicPlan has been out for ages[4] and originally just worked off the camera and the accelerometer to help build a floor plan. Polycam also supports photogrammetry[5] where you just take a bunch of photos and it builds a 3D model by interpreting what shape the object could be (I don't know if this is also used in architecture scale things, but it could be interesting for ID projects). Both MagicPlan and PolyCam allow you to tweak dimensions of rooms, doors, windows, furniture, etc. in a somewhat parametric way. This is where you likely want a laser measuring device to quickly update the dimensions. These can be used through Bluetooth to enter the measurements directly into the floorplans in MagicPlan[6]. I didn't try this, but if I was doing this all the time, it seems like it would be essential.
Matterport is starting to get into mobile[7] (phone, tablet) capture, but they've built their business up on their branded hardware and cloud platform. They provide floorplans as a service[8] and everything adds up, but from what I see in the real estate market, they are ubiquitous.
And if you want to spend a bunch more for very pro level app for documenting things like crime scenes, shipbuilding, infrastructure, etc. there's Dot3D.[9]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@LiDAR3D
[1] https://www.magicplan.app
[2] https://poly.cam
[3] https://developer.apple.com/augmented-reality/roomplan/
[4] https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/15/ios-16-roomplan-api-3d-floor-...
[5] https://www.magicplan.app/about
[6] https://help.magicplan.app/laser-distance-meters#laser-tutor...
[7] https://matterport.com/3d-camera-app
[8] https://buy.matterport.com/
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouZxCDKTizs
EDIT - PLY not PCL
https://twitter.com/Polycam3D/status/1623730477637959680
One thing I struggle with though is making sure that the capture is robust enough before I move on. I usually only really know that something is off when the capture is done already. Can I “touch up” an existing capture by doing another local scan of a problematic area?
I haven't used that tool for a while, but I think that it includes a table with all the items (walls, etc.) where you can enter the measurements.
Ultimately I think of sweethome3d as a sweet spot between paint and a full-blown CAD program. Nowhere as powerful as the latter but so much better than the former. Also my daughter had a moment when she preferred sweethome3d over Minecraft et al. as a building game.
I have actually used it for that (actually I did full 3D modelling of part of my house) and it worked ok, however I would say that measuring things with a laser and copying them into CAD is not a very accurate way to do things.
You will end up with large accumulated errors, and most houses are not as square as you think they are.
I haven't ever used one but I suspect those phone based AR measurement apps have a good chance of being more accurate.
I'd say most houses don't even have straight walls, so you should be very happy if what you got is vaguely a trapezoid.
I did plan custom designs that my contractor used. It’s also great when I want to get a new desk or sofa or whatever so that I can visualise everything first. Possible to make pretty realistic 3d walk-through videos that would be fine on any design tv show.
Of course you did....
Gods above I love org-mode.
OpenSCAD is my go-to since you just write code.
I rendered my whole house in Solidworks to plan for a remodel and it was extremely well suited for the job.
The nice thing about FOSS though is that it's worry free. I can keep OpenSCAD and Cura, and my projects will build years later without me having to think about it.
The stuff I built with 3DS Max educational license, though, is not accessible. So I am hesitant to jump ship for Solidworks (even though it's the industry standard).
Obviously you just get an image, but for what I needed (map in home assistant with sensors overlaid) it was enough.
Sweet Home 3D - 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 - Nov 2019 (115 comments)
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.
Maybe they could integrate the Solvespace constraint solver. It seems to be gaining popularity outside its original CAD program.
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.
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.
[0] https://github.com/ExperienceLovelace/ha-floorplan
My gf uses 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.
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.
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.
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.
Other than that it;s a great little program.
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.
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.