Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application
sweethome3d.com
sweethome3d.com
I ended up throwing together something quick and dirty with Org Mode tables and Metapost: https://github.com/guidoism/wildwood/blob/main/house.org
It works pretty well and the output is pretty.
But please please please show the resulting picture somewhere, it was incredibly frustrating to read through your page's wonderful build-up towards the goal, and then not get to see the rendered result? Poor me.
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.
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.
Basically, my point is that we'll need all three, and workflow won't be trivial to combine them.
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 Matterport is today with their tech then that's good enough for a huge number of use cases.
Pretty much everyone in the construction and remodeling industry right now is prepping for that as the future. We all know it's 3 to 5 years away and want to be the first one to get it right.
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.
MagicPlan[1] and PolyCam[2] seem to be the most focused on building a schematic level building model which could be imported into other tools if needed. They both now take advantage of the Roomplan API[3] which Apple introduced in iOS and iPadOS 16[4]. MagicPlan has been out for ages[4] and originally just worked off the camera and the accelerometer to help build a floor plan. Polycam also supports photogrammetry[5] where you just take a bunch of photos and it builds a 3D model by interpreting what shape the object could be (I don't know if this is also used in architecture scale things, but it could be interesting for ID projects). Both MagicPlan and PolyCam allow you to tweak dimensions of rooms, doors, windows, furniture, etc. in a somewhat parametric way. This is where you likely want a laser measuring device to quickly update the dimensions. These can be used through Bluetooth to enter the measurements directly into the floorplans in MagicPlan[6]. I didn't try this, but if I was doing this all the time, it seems like it would be essential.
Matterport is starting to get into mobile[7] (phone, tablet) capture, but they've built their business up on their branded hardware and cloud platform. They provide floorplans as a service[8] and everything adds up, but from what I see in the real estate market, they are ubiquitous.
And if you want to spend a bunch more for very pro level app for documenting things like crime scenes, shipbuilding, infrastructure, etc. there's Dot3D.[9]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@LiDAR3D
[2] https://poly.cam
[3] https://developer.apple.com/augmented-reality/roomplan/
[4] https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/15/ios-16-roomplan-api-3d-floor-...
[5] https://www.magicplan.app/about
[6] https://help.magicplan.app/laser-distance-meters#laser-tutor...
[7] https://matterport.com/3d-camera-app
EDIT - PLY not PCL
One thing I struggle with though is making sure that the capture is robust enough before I move on. I usually only really know that something is off when the capture is done already. Can I “touch up” an existing capture by doing another local scan of a problematic area?
I haven't used that tool for a while, but I think that it includes a table with all the items (walls, etc.) where you can enter the measurements.
Ultimately I think of sweethome3d as a sweet spot between paint and a full-blown CAD program. Nowhere as powerful as the latter but so much better than the former. Also my daughter had a moment when she preferred sweethome3d over Minecraft et al. as a building game.
I have actually used it for that (actually I did full 3D modelling of part of my house) and it worked ok, however I would say that measuring things with a laser and copying them into CAD is not a very accurate way to do things.
You will end up with large accumulated errors, and most houses are not as square as you think they are.
I haven't ever used one but I suspect those phone based AR measurement apps have a good chance of being more accurate.
I'd say most houses don't even have straight walls, so you should be very happy if what you got is vaguely a trapezoid.
I did plan custom designs that my contractor used. It’s also great when I want to get a new desk or sofa or whatever so that I can visualise everything first. Possible to make pretty realistic 3d walk-through videos that would be fine on any design tv show.
Of course you did....
Gods above I love org-mode.
OpenSCAD is my go-to since you just write code.
I rendered my whole house in Solidworks to plan for a remodel and it was extremely well suited for the job.
The nice thing about FOSS though is that it's worry free. I can keep OpenSCAD and Cura, and my projects will build years later without me having to think about it.
The stuff I built with 3DS Max educational license, though, is not accessible. So I am hesitant to jump ship for Solidworks (even though it's the industry standard).
Obviously you just get an image, but for what I needed (map in home assistant with sensors overlaid) it was enough.
I was pretty happy with this for whatever project I was doing at the time. I recently started using inkscape, for a general purpose drawing of my house. I can also include layers with other kinds of information like a circuit map. I can also include exterior information, like landscape design, buried utility lines, or assorted raster maps.
It just seems like a "whole-house visual diagram" software tool should exist.
Can SketchUp do any of this?
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.
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.
There's a whole category of such software, it's called CAD. The professional products are notoriously expensive.
As an architect I can confirm that there's indeed a lot of professional software for this. The ones I usually work in are Revit and ArchiCAD, which are tailored for architects. Our interior architects also use Sketchup a lot. There's also more general-purpose CAD software like AutoCAD and Vectorworks available.
Found https://pcon-planner.com/en/?privat=530&page=126 instead which is windows only and bon-open source but effectively free.
Pretty impressive stuff. Been very happy so far.
I used Magic Plan on my iPhone to map the floor plan with LiDAR, converted the result to a 2D PDF, and imported that into SH3D. I then drew walls and doors and windows on top of that, effectively recreating the existing home. Then we started experimenting.
SH3D proved to be invaluable at understanding how to utilize existing walls and unproductive space to minimize renovation costs. Being able to “walk through” the various plans we considered was invaluable. And I couldn’t be happier with how my plans worked out.
SH3D has some rough edges and took some time to master. But the learning curve was worth it.
Sweet Home 3D was honestly really useful for giving me confidence that everything I was buying would work well together, and I’m very happy with the result.
A bit of a learning curve but the flexible ability to import 3d models really helped. Now that i have every room in my house I can quickly test new furniture layouts.
Highly recommend it.
The home automation floorplan stuff was a fun project, but I don't really use it. I found that it's not as useful as a simple dashboard page with plain buttons and cards. But it was fun to work on just as a hobby, like painting models or setting up a model train set.
My gf uses https://foyr.com once we have the floor plan nailed to get an idea about what colors, textures & furniture to use in a space. It supports higher def renderings. It's kind of expensive though iirc.
I'd say it will take a few hours to get used to it and after that you can probably do most of what you want to do.
Sweet Home 3D - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325485 - Aug 2022 (2 comments)
Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21652888 - Nov 2019 (115 comments)
It's free and open source, yet it's relatively user friendly. When I need to design another building, I definitely will use it again.
I'm tall, and when I lay out the shelves so they fit me, shorter people can't reach the knobs on the instruments. But if I just move everything down, I feel like I'm wasting space. And I don't want to just chain a short person to the chair for several hours while I build and rebuild shelves.
I feel like there should be ergonomic models for reach and view, for like the 5% and 95%ile of human sizes, but I can't figure out what this is even called.
One great feature is being able to export a 1:12 scale reference for my shed builder. It took some very careful toying with background layers, but I was eventually able to get a large-scale Kinko's printout from a PDF where 1 inch on the printout = 1 foot in the real world.
I've learnt this because the furniture firm designed a wardrobe for us with wrong dimensions and the designer lady was surprised that I showed them why they made wrong - they put the dimensions for outside of the wall, without taking in the account for wall thickness.
It can also export layers (or the whole building) as OBJ which is awesome for 3D printing or working with Twinmotion. I decorated my rooms in Twinmotion and did awesome high fidelity renders. You can even experience your building in VR!
Maybe one day there's an AI that helps you with planning a home.
But all the other similar software I tried ultimately were a big disappointment. In my experience, once the design is complicated enough they tend to fail: some objects start to glitch if you move them by a certain amount, I could never get the right angle between walls, etc. It seems to be difficult to implement a way to put robust set of constraints on geometry yet keep the software easy to use by everyone. Perhaps it works well with more rectangular designs where the walls all have the same thickness though, my place has some weird shapes.
Ultimately I gave up on specialized software and ended up re-drawing everything at scale in Affinity Designer. Of course, it's only 2D and it's basically free-form vector drawing but at least you control everything and it's not too complicated to create your own library of object like windows, doors etc et re-use that. I was very happy with the result.
Maybe they could integrate the Solvespace constraint solver. It seems to be gaining popularity outside its original CAD program.
As others have said it’s not slick but it has a good set of features and does the job well.
Interesting aside: it’s able to export to a fully interactive 3D model that you can embed in a browser! We used this feature to build an interactive trade stand during Covid at my company.
That said, the compatibility is impressive --- which is not too surprising, given that it's Java:
Sweet Home 3D may be run under Windows 98 to Windows 11, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) to macOS 13 (Ventura), various Linux systems and Solaris.
It's got its quirks, but it's good enough to get a good idea of what things would look like. Most irritating is when its 3D viewer fails because of some random error as a separate window and has to be closed and reopened. Then again this was an older version. Maybe things got better since.
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.
Other than that it;s a great little program.
I found Live Home 3D which is cross platform and purchased a license for it. I think it's free on Windows.
If you then look at the request that loads up the preview, the dae/obj file is usually there.
Being able to model it and then “explore” it in 3D was really helpful to settle on our final layout. And especially since the designer we hired gave us one option that stunk.
I found https://floorplanner.com/ to be quite useful as well. The renders are good enough for me to feel like I am looking at the space rather than a sketch.
I'm also surprised that Slashdot still owns SourceForge. Haven't both of these companies split ways and been through several different hands? ThinkGeek, etc.