Sweet Home 3D Review

Home design applications can be used to render a realistic version of your blueprints. It is a tool that both home designing hobbyists and architects can use to visualize their designs. Through this, you can follow precise measurements to design the walls, windows, and doors of the house. After this, users can fill it with furniture and objects. Finally, they can have a virtual home tour where they can see every room of the house with realistic lighting and ambiance. Sweet Home 3D is one of these applications that is unique from other apps because of its simplicity and its free price.

Sweet Home 3D is an open-source project that was created by SourceForge.net and is distributed with a GNU General Public License. This means that it has been developed by a lot of developers who then made the application available for everyone to use. This is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac which is why many users can use the app. It is complete with 25 languages and comes with intuitive features and tools to make the whole process easier. As their way of continuing the project, users can donate to the developers through their website. Its last update was in April, 2021 which shows that the app is always updated.

The application uses a very simple interface. Upon opening the application, you can see a full view of a room, your blueprints, and the different features of the app. Included in their features are furniture, file, edit, 3D view, and more. To use features, users simply need to drag and drop these in the PC. The application has abundant guides within the app that can help you get familiar with its features.

The first part in the designing process is setting the measurements of the wall. For this, the application allows precise measurements even with slopes, round sides, and straight walls. This can be edited with the mouse and the keyboard. We found its tools to be very responsive and easy to edit. We did not have any awkward measurements as the application is smart enough to ensure that its calculations match each other. Included in the information users can edit is the length, angle, and thickness. After this, users can compute holes in the walls where the doors and windows will then be installed.

Users can easily annotate the different rooms that they design so that they can be reminded about its specific size. They also have a North compass available to make knowing the directions easier. They have helpful texts, arrows, and lines for this.

Users can also incorporate already-made blueprints into their design which makes the whole process shorter especially if the measurements are correct and ready to go.

Next the users can start adding furniture to their house. For this, they simply need to click and drag from the extensive library of the application. Being a free application, users should not expect too much variation in terms of design. This can only be a good way for visualizing the space to be taken by the objects themselves in case interior designing is a big part of your process. They have specific objects for each room of the house including the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and more. This whole process is fast and easy.

To make the design more personalized, you can also edit the specific design of the different objects. You can change its pattern, size, and the orientation of how it will be placed. Included in the objects that you can modify is the furniture, ceilings, walls, and more. For this, users can change the shades of the color and the patterns that they have.

To make any changes that you make instantly visible, users can simultaneously have a 2D and a 3D view of the house. Through this, any changes will instantly be seen by the user which can make them remove errors quickly.

Finishing the design

After you complete the home design, users can then export the file into a PDF, a PNG, MOV, and more to share it to other computers.

Sweet Home 3D is a straightforward application that does not have many features but gets the job done. Being created open-source, it is free for many users which makes it very friendly for students, those on a tight budget, and home designing hobbyists.

Sweet Home 3D contains the essentials of a home design application which makes it an easy choice for beginners and students. It has a very simple interface that users can easily modify with their responsive feature. It is open-source and free for anyone to download.

Pros

·        Has a very simple interface

·        Is free for everyone and continuously updated

·        Allows drag and dropping for designing the house

Cons

·        Lacks diversity in objects library