Sweet Home 3D comes as a cheaper alternative to using expensive CAD tools for creating a 3D house or room interior designs. The program is open source and you can use it as long as you like without paying a single buck.
You can choose between various project view modes (2D and 3D displays), include as many elements as you like by using drag-and-drop actions, and check the integrated help manual whenever you require assistance. The program provides you with various project components that are nicely organized into groups and can easily be edited when needed. For example, you can change the size of a furniture piece, rotate a bookcase, etc.
Once you finish editing your project, you can create a video presentation showing the design and export it to your local directories. What's more, you can take a snapshot of your design and save it for later. Sadly, the utility supports a limited amount of output formats for completing both of the aforementioned tasks.
Furthermore, even though it comes with a price, the Mac App Store version of the tool provides you with more project elements (more than 1200 elements).
Another thing you need to consider is that the program provides you with a limited amount of exterior design elements, such as front porch furniture and other types of objects. Still, on the homepage of the developer, it says the utility is created for "interior design" projects.
In conclusion, it's up to you to decide which is the best Sweet Home 3D edition for you. Either way, both versions (open source and Mac App Store) provide you with many useful advantages and are very intuitive.
v3.6 [Sep 16, 2012]
- Added the ability to rotate texts, the name of furniture and the name and area of rooms in the plan.
- Improved alignment magnetism of a piece of furniture when its side is aligned along a wall.
- Stored last folders selected in file dialog choosers for each content type handled by Sweet Home 3D.
- Improved furniture catalogs loading at language change and during furniture libraries importation.
- Fixed lens type used in video generation for the two best quality levels.
- Forced blue color for selections drawn over the imported image in the background image wizard when default selection color is not enough colorful.
- Improved selection color management in plan under Mac OS X.
- Allowed homonyms among furniture and texture names in catalogs.
- Refused to open a corrupted SH3D file when it contains some unreachable furniture or textures.
- Fixed a bug that blocked program launch if some files to recover were invalid.
- Signed Windows and Mac OS X applications and installers with the certified digital signature of Sweet Home 3D developer (i.e. Emmanuel Puybaret).
- Replaced JRE 6u32 by JRE 6u35 in Sweet Home 3D installers bundled with Java.
- Other minor bugs fixes and enhancements.
