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Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

sweethome3d.com

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Re: Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Laser measuring tools avoid the need for a physical tape these days.

Mostly!

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.

Re: Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

#112
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yes we will. 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.

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 Matte…

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.

Re: Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

#113
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

#114
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yes we will. 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.

Measuring tape is pretty thin and can get behind or just under a bunch of things: or a laser can when tape can't.

Basically, my point is that we'll need all three, and workflow won't be trivial to combine them.

Re: Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

#116
Love SH3D. As others said, it takes some time to learn, but becomes pretty intuitive.

The ability to import and scale a background image is my favorite feature. I recently used it with a satellite image from my County's property line tool and planned a shed location. It was easy to measure setbacks and other obstacles. I even had fun translating the surveyor jargon on the deed to retrace the property lines.

Re: Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

#117
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend modeling in Blender and importing to Unreal, which has a library of furnishings and real time rendering.

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.

It definitely takes some doing, and you're right about the measurements.

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.

Re: Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

#118
post #14
post #6

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 t…

I wonder if there is a good answer for quick mapping using an iPhone’s LiDAR Scanner?

I have an app for creating large scale, drift free scans using iPhone: https://imagespace.app

Re: Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

#119
Hah, I wish I knew about it before drawing part of my soon to be new house using Room Arranger (https://www.roomarranger.com/). Although from a quick run it seems that RA is easier to use but less powerful, which for someone who knows absolutely nothing about either graphics or house design like me isn't much of a problem. It would be nice if RA data could be imported into Sweet Home 3D; does anyone know of some external tool to do that?

Re: Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application

#120
I used this software to design my tiny house that I built with great success. It really helped me visualize the space. I didn't create an engineering ready floor plan with this so to speak. In other words, I intentionally left the measurements slightly relative which wouldn't work for most construction projects. In other words, if my bedroom ended up being 14ft by 10ft and 2 and 1/2 inches instead of 14x10' I was fine with that, it just meant other rooms slightly smaller. But give or take the width of dry wall and other factors it was worked fine. I found getting super precise measurements with this app difficult and so I didn't even try. I just let the guy building walls have a tad bit of freedom. Like I said, for most projects that would not work. Having said that, this app was a huge life savor and allowed me to really visualize the space and make key design decisions.
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