Open Source Software: Sweet Home 3D

Designing home furnishings has never been so easy and fun! Sweet Home 3D with just a few clicks of the mouse we can give vent to your creativity to optimize the layout of furniture and accessories in every room of the house, while designing the furniture we can move within the virtual representation of environments in 3D.

Sweet Home 3D is an open-source cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris) developed in Java and released under the GNU / GPL License.

The ease of use of the program has a majestic structure of the user interface consists of four panels:

- or catalog of furniture in which the objects are grouped by category and accessories of furniture available in the design;

- or a list of furniture that CONTAINS the elements included in the project;

- or the map that represents the sheet of squared paper in which to draw the rooms of the house and add the pieces of furniture;

- or the 3D view to the 3D representation of the plant and the virtual tour of the rooms.

Menu and toolbar complete user interface immediately making available the essential functions for the rapid realization of the plan of the house and the furniture in the rooms.

First, draw the outer walls of the house using the Plane tool -> Create walls: click on the map and move the mouse while it will show a label with the length of the wall that we are tracing, and pressing the Enter key can activate the mode keyboard entry of the values of length, angle and thickness. While we plan to map the walls will be "built" into the virtual view in 3D!

In this phase of the design of the plant we can use a background image (in BMP, JGP, GIF, PNG) on which trace the perimeter of the rooms, by selecting the menu item 'Plan -> Import Background Image ...' you start the wizard that will help us to put the background image in the plant giving the parameters of scale.

After completing the perimeter walls, add doors and windows with the mouse select the type of window furnishings from the catalog, click on it with the right mouse button and select "Add to Home" to add it to the drawing sheet, then just place opportunamentesulla map by dragging it with the mouse.

Finally, we put the pieces of furniture and accessories: for these, simply select it from the catalog of furniture and adding them to the map with the right button.

We can enrich the catalog of furniture importing additional libraries (file SH3F) of 3D models available in the directory SweetHome3D-models which can be accessed from the link 3D models library's download page in English Sweet Home 3D.

For example, download the archive library furniture "3DModels-Contibutions-1.0.4.zip" and we explode the archive to a folder on your PC, from Sweet Home 3D, select the menu item 'Furniture -> Import Library decor ... ', and finally, the dialog box select the file "Contributions.sh3f" in the catalog of furniture will find new categories of elements and objects most unthinkable as the beer barrel, the bowl with goldfish and even the 'clock of Ubuntu!

Regarding the 3D representation has two display modes: the first is the view area that allows you to view the entire plant in 3D with zooming and rotation in space using the mouse;

the second, more astounding, is the Virtual Tour with which we can move between the rooms of the house using the mouse and viewing in 3D virtual environments and glia furniture we have achieved.

As I said at the beginning, designing the furniture with Sweet Home 3D is really fun as well as easy and practical, of course, must be content with simplicity and immediacy of the functions of the program and not ask for anything more.

Before you indulge in the design of the furniture, I suggest you view the online help (F1 key) is a guide very concise but clear and effective way to learn in a few minutes to better use this useful program.

Downloading and Installing Ubuntu

The installation procedures of Sweet Home 3D for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are described in the download section of the official website.

Basically there are two types of installation depending on whether Java is installed on your computer or not.

If your PC has Java versions 5 or 6, we can install Sweet Home 3D through the Jave Web Start: just click on the link "Launch Sweet Home 3D with Java Web Start" on the page to start the download and installation of the program for the operating system you are using.

Otherwise, if there is no existing Java, and in all cases where the installation with Java Web Start is not successful, are available for the different platforms, the installation packages that also contain the JRE (Java Runtime Environment).

Install Sweet Home 3D with Java Web Start on Ubuntu

Procedure tested on Ubuntu 9.04 and later (32-bit and 64-bit).

1. download the file SweetHome3D.jnlp

2. launch the installation by double-clicking on the downloaded file and the dialog box, select Open with Sun Java 6 Web Start;

If the installation failed to create the menu, create it manually like this:

1. System menu -> Preferences -> Main Menu;

2. select the menu, including those listed on the left, where you want to add the new entry for Sweet Home 3D;

3. to press the New Entry button and enter the following parameters:

- Type: Application

- Name: Sweet Home 3D

- Command: javaws <path> / SweetHome3D.jnlp

where instead of '<path>' we're going to enter the full path of the folder that contains the file SweetHome3D.jnlp.

Install Sweet Home 3D installer on Ubuntu Linux

Procedure tested on Ubuntu 9.04 and later versions.

1. download the compressed archive file of the latest version SweetHome3D-2.x-linux-x86.tgz Under (about 43 MB);

2. unzip the archive into the folder 'SweetHome3D-2.x': the Nautilus file manager, right-click on the downloaded file and select 'Extract here' context menu;

3. the new folder 'SweetHome3D-2.x' will hold the application's startup files 'SweetHome3D': if not, move the folder inside one of our choice to contain other executable applications;

Create the entry in the Applications menu in Ubuntu:

1. System menu -> Preferences -> Main Menu;

2. select the menu, including those listed on the left, where you want to add the new entry for Sweet Home 3D;

3. pressing the button new entry and set the parameters:

- Type: Application

- Name: Sweet Home 3D

- Command: <path> / SweetHome3D

where instead of '<path>' we're going to enter the full path of the folder that contains the file 'SweetHome3D'.

----------------------------------------

Translated via software

----------------------------------------

Source: