Sweet Home 3D

Importing a floor plan blueprint.

Note: This is optional, but it does make drawing your house easier.

You can create your own blueprint using a paper, pen/pencil and ruler and then take a photo of it and import it into Sweet Home 3d, or you can search the internet for a floor plan similar to the house you want to design, and even if your house was for sale once, you may be able to access a floor plan of it already that you can take a photo of and import, or download from the internet.

There are many options for a blue print, and It only needs to be good enough to allow you to roughly gauge the positioning of your walls and layout.

Once you have an image you want to use for your blueprint, open Sweet Home 3d, and go to the menu option, Plan->Import Background Image and then select your file.

You then have an option to set the scale of your image.  You need to drag the ruler start and end points to a place on your image where you know the real measurements of it. In my video, I know the wall length that I moved the ruler to is 1300 cm.

You then need to set an origin point on your diagram where you want 0,0 to be. I usually use the top left point of my blueprint image.

I have also added the floor plan blueprint from my video if you would like to use this in place of your own.

Exploring the Wall Tool

The Wall Tool can be found in one of the top menu bars as an icon that looks like a wall.

To start drawing a wall, ensure the icon is selected, then go into the 2d plan view, click the mouse button and then move your mouse to the desired end point of the wall, and then click again.

A new wall, which is joined to the first, will begin to draw and the process continues until you press ESC.

If you want to change a wall, you can select the Selection tool, which is left of the Create Wall tool and resembles an arrow. This will allow you move the wall, either of its start or end points, or to give you the option of splitting the wall, or even deleting.

If you have two walls that aren't joined, you can select both while holding down the shift key, and then press Plan->Join Walls.

You also have the option to create rounded walls. The video explains best how this is done.

You can double click a wall to get it's modifiable properties, such as colour, texture, thickness, start and end heights, and many more.

You can also, right click the wall, and then select Modify Wall to get to the same options.

Note: That there is no need to create hole for doors or windows, since when dragging doors and windows into the plan, Sweet Home 3D will automatically calculate them for you

Drag a door from the Catalogue view into the Plan View.

When dragging a door over an existing wall, the door thickness will auto match the thickness of the wall, and the angle of the door will auto match the angle of the wall.

After you drop the door, you can also modify it's dimensions using the icons around the door object, or double clicking to open the Modify Furniture dialog.

You can change which direction a door swings open by adjusting the mouse cursor when placing the door. You can also change whether a door swings open left or right by ticking the mirror option on the Modify Furniture dialogue. This is demonstrated ion the video.

You can also modify the doors colour, texture, whether the door panel is open or closed and more.

Adding windows is very similar to adding doors. You get all of the same options such as editing dimensions, editing the opening, changing the colour or texture and more.

Double click the window to open it's modifiable properties, or right click and select Modify Furniture.

After creating your wall and positioning doors, you can draw the room boundaries.

This will allow you to see its dimensions in square meters, or other units dependent on your preference settings.

You can also change the floor colour, texture and more.

You also have the option of adding skirting/base boards around the room perimeter. Just be sure to draw your doors first so that the boards stop and start on the edges of your doors.

There are 2 ways of drawing rooms.

1. By clicking each corner, where the room perimeter should be, until the full floor is drawn,

2. Double clicking inside the room. This will only work of all the walls surrounding the room are joined together

Both of these methods are demonstrated in the video.

Adding Furniture is very similar to adding Doors and Windows, except, it doesn't create a hole in the wall, but rather tries to align the object to the edge of the wall instead of inside.

You have many options to modify the furniture dimensions, colours, textures, position, angle and more.

Adding and positioning furniture is one of the things the Sweet Home 3D is most useful for, spend as much time as you like trying to perfect your layout.

The design I am creating in the course has so far been a single story building. I now show you how to add and manage levels so you can turn it into a multi story building.

When creating new levels, the walls from the level underneath are shown faded so that they can be used as a template for the new level.

After creating the new level and drawing the walls, you now have enough skills to create the doors, windows and position any furniture.

Your house is nearly finished.

Now that you have a double storey building, you need stairs.

Placing stairs is the same as placing furniture, except, the stairs are normally higher than the walls on the floor that they are placed, so they protrude through the floor to the level above.

Sweet Home 3D automatically cuts a hole into the floor above, in the same what that doors and windows placed within the walls have there holes automatically created.

In this video I show you several ways you might like to improve the 3D presentation of your model, from setting the wall transparency, setting the ground and sky textures colours and even displaying the blueprint as an image on the ground.

You can also undock the 3D view from the application and show it on a different monitor if you have a multi monitor setup.

The collection of furniture libraries that I download can be found on this page,

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sweethome3d/files/SweetHome3D-models/3DModels-1.6.4/

Also, see the official Sweet Home 3D downloads page for more info.

http://www.sweethome3d.com/download.jsp

Note: If you import libraries and they have an adverse effect on the performance of your Sweet Home 3D installation, you can manually delete the libraries by going to the folder,

c:/Users/[Your Username]/eTeks/Sweet Home 3D/furniture/[library].sh3f

Also included is a Library of few of the models I have created for Sweet Home 3D.

In this video, I rely on the Red Slate Roof object that was imported from the lecture before this one.

The particular library that contains this roof object is from the

3DModels-Contributions-1.6.4.zip file that can be downloaded from this page.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sweethome3d/files/SweetHome3D-models/3DModels-1.6.4/