3D Home Planning Software?

thorar asks: "I'm willing to move to another flat in town (or to restructure the one I'm currently living in). I'd like to create a detailed map of the apartment to study alternatives without much pencil and paper, possibly with appropriate furniture and 3D rendering. I'm not an expert in Studio Max nor similar softwares. I'd like something as simple as IKEA Kitchen Planner, but all Google serches lead to some software suite that looks unprofessional or Windows95-stylish. What would you use?" There are numerous commercial alternatives for such an application, but is there anything like this available via Open Source?

Comments

Or for the mac...

[Teancom]

I went searching for something like this just last week, and didn't really find anything. I ended up going with a tract home where I'm picking from one of 10 different floor plans, but if I had gone custom, it would have been illustrator or nothing...

the most free/popular building design software

[St. Arbirix]

Radiant.

Widely supported, runs in Windows and Linux, has a huge community behind it, and I'm sure a little digging will turn up plenty of furniture for your lev^B^B^Bhome.

Re:the most free/popular building design software

[mugnyte]

This is a game level editor and visualizaer. I'm sure the modelling is strong, at least for primitives, but the focus on real time effects may make things like lighting effects suffer.

Re:the most free/popular building design software

[St. Arbirix]

From the posted question:
I'd like to create a detailed map of the apartment to study alternatives without much pencil and paper, possibly with appropriate furniture and 3D rendering.

If you want realistic lighting then go with something like POVRay or Yafray (yafray blows my mind with its realism). Radiant will give him some 2D plans to work with as well as letting him walk around in the rooms with some idea of flow. Perhaps a level written to run in the HL2 engine or Doom 3 engine would give you better lighting effects.

Re:the most free/popular building design software

[cgenman]

Exactly. And how else would you find choke points in your house when you get swarmed by the undead?

I like to keep my respawn in the bathroom. That way I have an excuse to spawn camp.

Only on Slashdot

[GuyMannDude]

Only on slashdot would someone be requesting software to perform a task that any woman would do for free or actually pay you to do. Next on Ask Slashdot: "Can someone recommend an open-source software tool that assists me in selecting shoes?"

GMD

Re:I used POV-Ray

[idiotfromia]

It's not smooth around the edges, but I'd try Moray. It's a modeling program that can use POV-Ray to render the images. Just create rough shapes in the size of your furniture and drag them around the room. The more time you spend, the better looking and detailed you can make the furniture.

Moray

[mugnyte]

I went for cheap and just downloaded Moray. I plugged in accurate measurements, added a few simple textures, and could imagine the space easily. Traced out in POVRay, the pictures are pretty and cost zippo.

You'll have to find good models for your smaller items, if you want to use models. I didn't use them. There are plenty of models for Pov-Ray, but not a lot for dedicated to Moray. I haven't looked into that side of it much. However, building your basic nighttable/bed/lamp is easy in CSG, just for verifying that your space will fill as you imagine.

Space planning and room "look" was very nice with this, and very quick, since Moray has some crude group tools. Sadly, it doesn't seem to do low-level renderings (non-reflective,etc) and the CSG Evals are still only wireframe (and messy on big pics). Your quickest bet for POV speed is smaller pictures, which are useless.

Export the scene text, plug the camera math into a "clock" POVRay variable and you can spit out a directory of frames, with pretty good quality, overnight on most machines/scenes. There's a cl MPG builder to link them up, allowing for frame pauses and other simple tricks. This gives nice walkthroughs.

It is more labor intensive than the pro tools available, but it costs nothing. You learn a simple modeller, and with POV-Ray you can raytrace shiny things to your heart's content.

The Sims or The Sims 2

[Nighttime]

I know that a lot of people don't bother to play with their Sims but rather prefer to use the game as a house design tool.

Granted that the grid-based system that The Sims employs for house design means you cannot get an exact scale model of a property. However, you do get a variety of different furniture items with the game and it is possible to design and import your own wallpapers and floor coverings.

Re:Just go to IKEA

[St. Arbirix]

Yes, but only with Radiant will you ever be able to test the defensibility of your new home design.

Jordans

[AlexisKai]

Jordan's Furniture has an online room layout program. In theory it's designed so you lay out a room and then get advice about it from Jordan's, but that didn't prevent me from creating a 2D representation of my entire apartment, sizing furniture to match my own, and dragging things around for hours. Even though it's Web-based, you can save multiple layouts and come back to them months later.

Re:I used POV-Ray

[Kismet]

POV-Ray is great for rendering images if you want a nice picture (and have the time to play with textures and lighting). However, POV-Ray is not great for modelling because it only supports its own scripting language natively. I doubt anyone would want to script their house-plans in POV-Ray SDL.

Others have suggested Moray, which is a CAD-like modelling program meant to be used with POV-Ray. It isn't free like POV-Ray is, but it is inexpensive, and well worth the price. Still, even Moray isn't the greatest CAD software, and it only runs in Windows right now (I tried Wine, but I couldn't get it to work).

Re-evaluate your criteria

[Wwolmack]

"I'd like something as simple as IKEA Kitchen Planner, but all Google serches lead to some software suite that looks unprofessional or Windows95-stylish."

You're doing something on a non-professional level, and expect professional level results on the cheap? I don't think its going to happen.

You could use some fancy 3d modeling program, but it sounds like all you really need is pencil and paper:
1. Draw out a floorplan. Its not that hard, just use graph paper. You were going to measure it out anyways (RIGHT?).
2. Make photocopies of the floorplan. These are to come up with layout ideas on.
3. Sketch or take photographs of the area, maybe move some furniture around so you mostly see the walls.
4. Photocopy the sketchs/photos, and draw over them so you can get an idea what it would look like furnished.

Pencil and paper are great tools, you shouldn't be so quick to discount them just because some program exists. They've been around for a long time, so there must be some advantages to using them.

The majority of people who probably use home design software are probably not OSS geeks. I'm willing to bet a lot of them are (gasp!) interior designers, landscapers, and architects. Hell, they just might still use Windows 95.

In any case, here are two possible candidates.
http://www.imsisoft.com/prodinfo.asp?t=1&mcid=244& cid=

https://secure.chiefarchitect.com/xcarthd/customer /home.php

Re:Re-evaluate your criteria

[Bios_Hakr]

I second this.

Using a computer here is a real crutch. At least in the way you want. Pen & paper will save you gobs of time.

For lamps, TVs, computers, phones, etc, make sure you have the measurements for the power and network lines. Nothing worse than having a perfect layout only to discover that your phone is all the way across the room because that's the only jack.

If you want to be real geeky, use HalfLife2 and create a level of your apartment. Furniture won't be that hard and you walk around and get a feel for it. If you enable physics and tweak them a bit, you could even move furniture around inside the level.

Take pictures of your floor, walls, celing, couches, etc in order to texture everything properly.

You could probably do a HL2 level of your apartment in a few days.

P&P would take an hour.

Lots of Mac CAD options

[green pizza]

Illustrator isn't so bad with this plugin: http://www.hotdoor.com/CADtools

But there are better options:
Microspot Interiors, etc
Sketchup
VectorWorks 11.5
Form*Z
PowerCADD
VersaCAD
Cadintosh

But there is no current Mac version of AutoCAD, Pro/E, or Microstation. Bad news if you're planning on designing a new aircraft carrier on your new Mac Mini...

Re:3D Home Architect

[antifoidulus]

Um, no there isn't. The original poster made no restrictions on whether or not the product is open source. The little open source comment is outside the italics so it was made by the editor. IE this is /., so the words open source have to be thrown around everywhere, even when they don't matter.

a number of non-free options

[NaturePhotog]

I recently designed an addition to our house. (It's currently in to the city for design review and building permits). I tried a number of software options, including Punch! Pro and Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer. The latter is produced by Chief Architect that makes the professional level Chief Architect series -- heavy-duty stuff, even more than I needed to make permit-ready quality drawings.

Punch! Pro and BH&G Home Designer are each $100 or less, and even those are probably overkill for what you need for redesigning an apartment, but either would get the job done. I settled on BH&G Home Designer (the Pro version, about $500, because it had features I needed for the design approval and permit process). Both have some annoying aspects, but are pretty easy to use to lay out a house or other building. Punch! Pro is probably the easier to use of the two, but BH&G Designer is more powerful, and produces nicer-looking overall results and particularly nicer-looking 3D renderings. The 3D renderings part was important for me not for the design and permit process, but because my wife has a harder time visualizing things in 3D, and the renderings I could create with BH&G Home Designer let me easily show her what different design changes would mean.

One definite advantage that Punch! Pro has is that it lets you design your own 3D objects, which is nice for rendering a particular fixture or piece of furniture that's not included in the library. Making your own objects is definitely harder than just drawing a house, though. And that's where a fair number of the quirks in Punch! Pro reside -- the 3D custom workshop where you create your own objects.

All that said, I'd be interested in hearing about any open source alternatives as the follow-on question by Cliff asks. I've learned enough in the process of designing my own addition (and rendering the current house) that I'd be interested in contributing to an open source program of this nature, too.

Party Planner Software

[astrojetsonjr]

You might want to try Party planner From the site: You can use PartyCAD to design parties, weddings, banquets, conferences, meetings, trade shows and mall shows. You can also design stores, residential interiors, offices and libraries. In fact, you will find that the package is flexible enough to design nearly any space.

I've used an earlier version of this to do office and house layouts. There is a 30 day demo version available.

Trash Paper

[digitect]

I'm an architect and my best tool is trace paper and a pencil.

We have a full blown suites of AutoDesk software, but in early design phases you want to explore ideas so quickly that no software is going to react as quickly as sketches suggesting what your brain is thinking. That's the trick. Depicting reality before you've considered the possibilities locks you in, it restricts what your mind can consider. Once you're confident of having tested all kinds of crazy approaches, then you can start trying to depict it. Using light scribbles still keeps it fuzzy and flexible enough until you've worked out the next level of design.

What then? If you want to waste a lot of time learning software, by all means use CAD. That can help you build a scale and measurable model that can be dimensioned and taken off for construction quantities. I've been using CAD for 16 years now and it is certainly my tool of choice for drafting. (As opposed to the old ink on bond/vellum/mylar.)

After that, you might want to use some sort of visualization software. I've used Max and Vis, but have been learning to use Blender lately and find it can do just as well. (Plus it's Free! And multi-platform.)

But you are going to spend weeks and months coming up to speed on software when you could much more easily draw some scaled drawings that will do just as well. Remember, it's only been the last twenty years that *any* building has been digitally rendered... there is quite a bit of architecture accomplished without it.

I learned in school that you can't draft what your mind hasn't yet conceived. Drawing is a tool to help you see, to explore something that doesn't exist yet and to consider it's properties on your own terms. Of course it might be fun to make a huge solid block in Blender and slowly carve it away into a room. But it's certainly not the easiest!

Hope that helps.

Since when is looking Windows-95ish. . .

[munpfazy]

. . . a reason not to use software?

Surely the decision to make one-time use of free software for performing a quantitative task in a non-professional environment ought to be made based on something other than whether it comes with super-nifty 3D shadowed buttons in your favorite candy-apple color.

I say, give those windows95ish program a try, and don't ask for alternatives until you've found them lacking in function rather than style.

Besides, just think of all the fun you can have with those extra cpu cycles that won't be wasted drawing pretty pictures around the border of your software.