Hacker News Reader

Comment by alanbernstein | Hacker News Reader

I had a need for this kind of tool a while ago, and this was the ONLY decent option I found. I'm just wondering what alternatives are even available. I figured there must be some professional software for this, but if so, I don't know what it is.

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.

View on HN

This is pretty neat https://home.by.me/en/

Agreed, I use it a lot for personal projects and it's quite straightforward to use while still pretty powerful. I'd just like to export the data somehow though

I like magicplan[0]. It's not perfect, but I like that I can just point my phone around the room and tap on points to create a rough layout. You can add in precise measurements later if you choose to.

[0] https://www.magicplan.app/

I‘ve been working with sweet home 3d a bit but then gave up on it after running into rendering issues.

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 figured there must be some professional software for this, but if so, I don't know what it is.

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.

I think "floor plan app" is the keyword you want to use, there are a bunch of these. You draw a floor plan and then most of them can give you a 3d render based on that. I used floorplanner.com, but there are several options.

I figured there must be some professional software for this, but if so, I don't know what it is.

There's a whole category of such software, it's called CAD. The professional products are notoriously expensive.

I'm quite familiar with CAD for the purpose of designing things from scratch. What I want to do is, essentially, create blueprints for an old, poorly designed and built house. The tools I have tried for this are not really well-suited to this task.

> this was the ONLY decent option I found

Can SketchUp do any of this?

It can, but when I last looked, you needed the paid version to have similar features.

Fusion 360 is free for personal use. It could probably do this

Wow didn't expect down votes on that response.

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.

I kept the installer for the last free version of SketchUp around for exactly this reason.

Floorplanner is pretty good imo but it’s an alternative with roughly the same features and functionality

Reply on news.ycombinator.com