Sweet Home 3D: Importing Floor Plans

Yesterday we finished working on our Sweet Home 3D house design. You should have taken several "photos" of your house and uploaded them to your portfolios. We also got grade printouts and corrected any errors or missing assignments that weren't uploaded.

Today we are going to continue using Sweet Home 3D, but we will be importing a pre-made floor plan.  You can locate floor plans from a variety of locations on the web.  One place to find nice plans is TheHouseDesigners.com -- a site which includes the ability to search for single stories, a certain number of bedrooms, etc.  Another way to find plans is to do a Google Search.  The important thing to remember is that you will need a plan with some measurements so we can correctly scale our models.

We will import the base floor plan, set the origin point [to the upper left], draw the walls, add doors and windows, and then decorate and furnish our house.

When finished, we will post the floor plan and "photos" of our completed model.


INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Locate a floor plan with dimensions and save the image to your Thawspace
2. Open Sweet Home 3D
3. Go to PLAN > IMPORT BACKGROUND IMAGE... > CHOOSE IMAGE
4. Select the image (floor plan) you saved in step 1
5. If the image looks correct, click CONTINUE
6. Adjust the blue line to span across a room with known dimensions (i.e. a room that is 10'6")
7. Enter the number of inches your line represents (in the example 10'6" would be 126)
8. When asked for the Origin Points just leave it at 0,0 and click CONTINUE
9. Draw the walls as indicated on your floor plan
10. Create rooms using the Room Tool
11. Add windows and doors
12. Add colors/textures to the walls, doors, windows, ground, sky, etc.
13. Lock your "Base Plan" to prevent changes
14. Furnish your house
15. Make necessary adjustments (you may need to unlock the base plan)
16. Begin creating "photos" of various locations / points of interest in your house
17. Add your floor plan and photos of your house to your portfolio

Rhino: Basic Room (Floor & Walls)

Today we are going to create a basic "room".  Really, it's just a floor and two walls, but we will use it to display some of our Rhino creations.

The room pictured here has a floor (with a texture and a bumpmap), two walls (with texture), and a couple small trim pieces.  I also added some lighting effects.

You may want to create a few different "rooms" (some with wallpaper, some with wood floors, some with wood or painted trim, etc.  Again, these will be your "stage" to showcase some of your creations.

If you are adventurous, you can copy your table (from yesterday) and put it in the corner:

1. Save your Room
2. Open up your table file
3. Select everything (drag a box around it or CTRL+A should do it)
4. Copy it (CTRL+C)
5. Open the Room file again
6. Paste (CTRL+V)
7. Scale your table (and anything that came with it) to fit nicely in the corner