Sweet Home 3D - Free Architecture/Modeling Software for Mac, Windows and Linux

Have you always wanted to design your own home, or at least figure out a nice way - before dragging the couch back and forth all day - to rearrange your living room?

Well, thanks to a totally free program called Sweet Home 3D, you can! Okay, maybe downloading Sweet Home 3D won't be enough for you to design your dream home, but you'll certainly be able to reorganize your living room, and have a good time doing it.

Sweet Home 3D is a product very similar to Google's SketchUp, so if you've used SketchUp, you'll be familiar (at least in the basics), of how Sweet Home 3D works.

When you first open Sweet Home 3D, you'll see a large window with four areas. In the upper left is a list of folders, with such names as Bathroom, Bedroom, Doors and windows, and other household areas. Below that is another area, this one completely empty. To the upper right is where you'll be doing your design work, while the lower right is where the finished "product" will be shown, in 3D.

What's nice about Sweet Home 3D is that you're placing the items in an easy to use 2D environment (the graph paper type area in the upper right). This makes it simple to align things to a perfect 90 degree angle, gauge distance and relationships, and in my opinion makes it simpler to do your actual design work. Google's SketchUp, on the other hand, which also offers both 2D and 3D environments (and is always working in 3D no matter which view you choose), only offers one view at a time. This makes for a less cluttered interface, but I think I like the way Sweet Home 3D goes about things a bit better.

Once you're ready to go, the first thing you'll want to do, most likely, is create the shell of your room... the walls. Simply click the "Draw Walls" tool in the toolbar, and get to work. Click once and start dragging, and you'll see the wall start to take shape. Click again, and the first wall is "finished" and the connected wall is begun. What's really nice about this is that when you're working at a perfect 90 degree angle, you'll get a visual confirmation of that, just as you'll receive confirmation when your opposing walls are the same length. This makes it simple to create a perfect rectangular space.

It's easy designing a new floor plan. Here you can see I'm in virtual mode in the bottom pane.

Credit: Eric Fleming

Copyright: Eric Fleming