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.
v4.1 [Jun 6, 2013]
- Optimized Export to OBJ format feature for big exports.
- Moved the aerial view point of view closer to the first piece of furniture added to an empty home.
- Added support for full screen mode under Mac OS X.
- Fixed a printing bug that didn't always show the expected pages.
- Updated the Online version to ensure it won't display an additional security warning when run with latest Java version.
- Increased the default maximum memory used by the program to 640 MB, and made this size grow up to 1024 MB for Windows 32 bit installer version according to the available RAM in the system.
- Fixed a bug in Sweet Home 3D, the portable version of Sweet Home 3D (119 MB), the Furniture Library Editor (12,3 MB) and the Textures Library Editor (784 kB) that prevented the deletion of some temporary files under Windows at program end.
- Automatically deleted the private working folder of Sweet Home 3D at program end when it stops normally.
- Accepted absolute paths in com.eteks.sweethome3d.tools.temporarySubFolder system property to simplify the way to specify where the private working folder of Sweet Home 3D should be.
- Added com.eteks.sweethome3d.swing.fixedPrintMargin system property to be able to force a print margin (expressed in centimeters) when customized margins entered in page format dialog box aren't taken into account.
- Fixed a bug that kept displaying the available updates of a library even once it wasinstalled.
- Fixed an issue that prevented program launch when the name of imported libraries contained a very long string of digits.
- Updated Spanish help pages.
- Replaced JRE 6u43 by JRE 6u45 in Sweet Home 3D installers bundled with Java.
- Other minor bugs fixes and enhancements.
