Home Sweet Home 3D

It seems that open source has become more mainstream these days, and while the open source operating systems are still struggling, the applications are thriving. One of my recent favorites is Sweet Home 3D. It's a great interior design application that allows you to model the inside and, to some degree, the outside of a home or building. It favors the home user or interior designer, but for a free app, it's very powerful.

Few 3D modeling applications are easy to use, are free, and can perform architectural renderings to scale. Sweet Home 3D can do all of those things and more. You can use the existing library of 3D furniture, windows, doors, and more. You can even export your creations in a few popular formats, for use in other 3D apps. You can export your floorplan and/or your 3D rendering of it as an image. I rely on this app to help me create rooms to scale for use in Cheetah3D, my 3D app of choice.

Another huge benefit to this wonderful gem, is the fact that it can run on Windows, the Mac OS, and/or Linux. I have successfully added 3D models of furnishings from Cheetah3D to Sweet Home 3D and back again. You can add textures to the floors, walls, and other items in Sweet Home 3D to give them a more realistic feel. The rendering isn't quite as sophisticated as most 3D applications, but it doesn't need to be. I have included a picture of a quick 10 second mockup of a bedroom, to show you what this thing looks like. Draw the walls in the floorplan view using an intuitive snap-to-and-measure user interface, drop in furniture, which automatically turns appropriately towards the inside of the room, and simply save the file either in native format, as an obj, or as an image.

There's much more to this application, but I suggest you try it out for yourself. This one goes down as one of my highly recommended apps of all time. Find it at http://www.sweethome3d.eu