Sweet Home 3D is an interior-design application for Windows, macOS and Linux that combines a measured floor plan with a three-dimensional view of the same home. You draw rooms and walls, place furniture, and inspect how the arrangement looks from above or from inside the building. Changes made on the plan appear in the 3D view as you work, keeping the layout and its visual representation connected.
Floor plans
An existing blueprint can serve as a background for drawing. Sweet Home 3D imports BMP, JPEG, GIF and PNG images, then lets you establish their scale using a known distance. Setting the image’s origin positions it beneath the plan grid. This gives you a reference to trace; the image remains a background rather than becoming editable walls automatically.
Walls are drawn between points, with alignment guides helping adjacent sections meet. On the desktop, you can enter a wall’s length and angle directly, then adjust its endpoints, split it, or change its thickness and height. The wall tools also support curved walls and sloping heights. Each side can receive a different color or texture, so a shared wall can have different finishes in neighboring rooms.
Rooms have their own floor and ceiling surfaces. You can mark their corners or create a room by double-clicking within an enclosed space, then add its name and area to the plan. For a house with several floors, Sweet Home 3D separates levels into tabs with individual elevation, height and floor-thickness settings. Faint outlines from the lower level help position walls above it; negative elevations allow basement levels.
Furniture placement
The furniture catalog groups objects by category, while a separate list records the pieces already used in the home. Dragging a catalog item onto the plan adds it to the list and the 3D scene. Its position, rotation, width, depth, height and elevation remain editable, allowing a piece to be fitted to the available space.
Doors and windows interact with the building rather than simply sitting on top of the drawing. Sweet Home 3D cuts openings in the walls where they are placed. With magnetism enabled, an opening aligns to the wall and adapts to its thickness. Furniture can also snap with its back against a wall, while an object dropped onto a larger piece can be raised onto its surface.
Materials, mirrored shapes and visibility controls offer further changes to individual pieces. Hiding an item removes it from the plan and 3D view while retaining it in the furniture list, where it can be shown again. The free Windows edition starts with a smaller furniture and texture collection; the paid Microsoft Store edition includes a larger bundled catalog and automatic updates.
Expanding the Sweet Home 3D catalog
Sweet Home 3D can add furniture beyond the supplied collection by importing OBJ, DAE and 3DS models, supported model files inside ZIP archives, and KMZ files. The import wizard lets you orient the object, set its dimensions and elevation, and identify it as furniture, a door, a window or a staircase. The resulting item can enter the catalog for reuse in later plans.
Desktop furniture libraries in SH3F format add groups of models at once. Texture libraries expand the available surface finishes, and individual images can be imported as textures for walls or other surfaces.
Virtual visits
The aerial view presents the overall arrangement, while the virtual-visit mode places a movable observer inside it. The observer also appears on the floor plan, making its position and direction visible in both views. You can change eye height, viewing direction and field of view to inspect the interior from different positions.
The 3D settings control the ground and sky appearance, brightness and wall transparency. Adjusting transparency makes the room contents visible through surrounding walls without removing those walls from the plan.
Photo renders and video tours
On the desktop, Sweet Home 3D creates PNG images with selected dimensions, proportions and rendering quality. The higher quality settings use light sources with adjustable power and sunlight controlled by time and geographic location. More detailed rendering takes longer to calculate.
Video creation uses a camera path assembled from successive viewpoints. Each recorded position can include the camera’s elevation, direction and field of view. The path can be previewed before the frames are rendered and saved as a QuickTime video, producing a moving tour of the design.
Sharing a finished design
A saved home can be exchanged with another Sweet Home 3D user, including imported models used in the project. For a printable record, the desktop application can combine the furniture list, floor plan and current 3D view on paper or in a PDF. Page settings control the plan’s scale and which components appear.
OBJ export takes the visible 3D scene into other modeling or rendering software. It writes the geometry alongside an MTL material file and the texture images used by the design, preserving the separate parts needed to reconstruct its appearance.
Browser and mobile editions
Sweet Home 3D also has browser and mobile editions, with differences that affect this workflow. The browser edition saves registered users’ homes on the server but does not import 3D models. Photo rendering, video creation and OBJ export belong to the desktop application and are unavailable in both the browser and mobile editions.
