Most people would feel extremely bored after having to stay inside their own homes for weeks. No matter how great your home is, looking at the same thing for a long time would start to feel a bit dull. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Little changes that you make around the house would totally change the look and feel of the whole house. That's why in this time when you have lots of free time, you should try doing some remodeling projects. Or if you have the time and resources, you could even begin a big construction project while at it.
But before you set out to do anything, you should create a proper plan first. One of the best tools to do that is a home designing software called Sweet Home 3D. And this brief article will tell you about its features, the pros and cons of using it, and all other things that you need to know about Sweet Home 3D.
Sweet Home 3D is a home designing software that was developed for Windows Operating System. You could do everything related to home design with this tool. From creating a blueprint, drawing walls, adding furniture, and even changing the color and texture, you could do it all with Sweet Home 3D.
Sweet Home 3D was developed by a man named Emmanuel Puybaret. He is a programmer who's been creating various software such as Jeks for swing spreadsheet, PJA Toolkit for a graphical library, and finally Sweet Home 3D for home design. He is also active on the website eteks.com where he freely shares his creation and programming knowledge.
- Free draw walls. Sweet Home 3D allows you to freely draw walls wherever you want within your design. You could draw straight walls, curved walls, and any other kind of walls that you need and want. Sweet Home 3D has precise dimensions to make it easier for you to draw the walls as accurately as possible.
- Insert doors and windows. You could also easily insert doors and windows wherever you want within your design. You could simply use their drag and drop method to put doors and windows anywhere you want and Sweet Home 3D would compute the size of the hole in the wall for you.
- Add furniture. Sweet Home 3D has a library with loads of furniture that you could freely choose from. It will be available in different categories, such as kitchen, living room, bedroom, and even bathroom. Adding it to your design is simply a matter of drag and drop.
- Change color and texture. You could customize almost everything in your design. You could change the color of any surface, the texture, the size, the thickness, the location and orientation of furniture, the height of the wall, the ceiling, and lots of other customizable things.
- View in 3D. To make everything faster and smoother, you usually design everything in a 2D plane. That being said, there is an option that you could toggle to change the view to the 3D plane. This way, you could see how your design would look in real life.
- Create photorealistic images and videos. When you're finally done with your design, you could create a photorealistic image and video of your design. Not only that, but you could also customize the lighting source, angle, and any other thing that could affect the overall look of your design.
- Print and export. After you're done you could export your design into various formats to make it easy to transfer. You could export it to PDFs and print it out, you could save it as vector files, you could even export it as videos and 3D files.
- Plugins. For those of you fellow programmers out there, you can extend the features and functionality of Sweet Home 3D by creating plugins. There is extensive documentation on its official website to guide you through the whole process.
- Free to use. Despite all of its features, you could use Sweet Home 3D free of charge for however long you want. There is no restriction on the features that you could use because Sweet Home 3D is truly a free tool. You could, however, choose to donate some money to the developer.
- Steep learning curve. Using Sweet Home 3D is quite straightforward. You could see all the main features through the main window. But once you want to use its advanced features, then there will be quite a steep learning curve that you need to overcome.
- Infrequent update. Since Sweet home 3D was developed and maintained by only one person, updates will come few and far between. If software from a major developer would receive monthly updates, then Sweet Home 3D would only receive new updates once or twice a year.
Just like cutting your hair would change your overall atmosphere, remodeling your house would give a refreshing feeling to it as well. But before you decide to hire an expensive professional architect or interior designer, you should try creating something by yourself.
Sweet Home 3D allows you to easily create your dream remodeling project free of charge. It is filled with tons of features that could rival other premium home designing software in the market.
It does require quite a steep learning curve if you want to fully use its advanced features, but for something that you could use for free, there's nothing better than Sweet Home 3D out there.