Sweet Home 3D will also prove useful at my new job. Now, all I have to do is load up the moving truck and head south. My wife was able to see (almost) exactly what I saw, and we could even start arranging furniture ahead of the move, too.

The Video function was most useful, as I could create a starting point, draw a path through the house, and record the 'journey.' I exported the video as a MOV file, which I opened and viewed on the Mac using QuickTime.

After I mapped the rooms, I added the walls, which I could customize by color, thickness, height, etc.Īfter I finished, I exported the plan as an OBJ file, which can be opened in a variety of programs, such as Blender and Preview on the Mac, to spin the house around and examine it from various angles. I downloaded Sweet Home 3D onto my MacBook Pro and added a PNG version of a flat floorplan of a house to use as a background base map.įrom there, it was a simple matter of using the Rooms palette to trace the pattern and set the 'real life' dimensions. Sweet Home 3D was developed by Paris-based Emmanuel Puybaret of eTeks. The website is very informative, and I was able to get it up and running in no time. Sweet Home 3D is available on Sourceforge and released under the GNU General Public License. Sweet Home 3D did exactly what I wanted it to do. Since this was a rather tedious and not very accurate way to present my findings, I went in search of an open source solution to better illustrate what our future dream house would look like that wouldn't hinge on my fuzzy memory and blurry photos. At night, I would upload the photos into a Google Drive folder, and my wife and I would review them simultaneously over the phone while I tried to remember whether the room was on the right or the left, whether it had a fan, etc.

I contracted with a real estate agent and looked at a few houses, taking many pictures and writing down illegible notes. A house that she would not see until we moved into it! Since my wife was working and watching our house in New York until it sold, it was my responsibility to go out and find a new house for us and our cat.

I recently accepted a new job in Virginia.

Sweet home 3d pro