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This blog presents news and tips about Sweet Home 3D.

Sweet Home 3D 7.0

Sweet Home 3D 7.0 was released on July 13, 2022. This new version contains many improvements described in version history. Here are the most important ones.

Yafaray rendering engine

After a few years of successful tests as a plug-in, YafaRay rendering engine is now available in Sweet Home 3D itself. It can be selected from the new Renderer dropdown list shown at the two best quality levels in the photo and video creation dialog boxes (which are now resizable). This list proposes SunFlow and YafaRay renderers, the default engine remaining SunFlow at the moment.

YafaRay renderer gives results very similar to SunFlow but generally runs twice to three times faster. It gives also some less shiny renderings which may satisfy the ones among you who don't like to adjust shininess with SunFlow.


Studio with mezzanine by Véronique Puybaret

YafaRay renderer is not available under Windows XP and Vista, as well as under Java Web Start.

More lights capabilities

Until now, light sources in a rendered scene were always a sphere. This worked quite well but in special cases like very flat lights, it gave only approximate results. Now, a light source can have any shape thanks to a new parameter which can be added in the PluginFurnitureCatalog.properties description file of SH3F furniture libraries. Such a light source is defined by using a furniture property starting by lightSourceMaterialName# with a value equal to the material(s) of the shapes which should be used as source(s) in a 3D model.

To help you start with this new feature, you may use the LightShapes.sh3f furniture library which proposes 5 different kinds of light shapes:

  • a double faced Light panel,
  • a one faced Invisible light panel,
  • an Invisible light sphere equivalent to default catalog light source (but this one will emit the color selected in its furniture modification dialog box),
  • an Invisible inward light half sphere which may be used to light a scene with soft shadows,
  • and a Mini spot you may place under a ceiling (like the three ones placed under the mezzanine in the studio image).


Mini spots placed below a surface

For more information about this feature, read this thread in the forum.

Levels menu

Version after version, Sweet Home 3D menus grow with new features. As the Plan menu ended to be too long on small screens, all the items about level management were moved to a new Levels sub menu to reduce its size.

Magnet button

Magnetism can now be activated and deactivated also with a button added in the tool bar, but keep in mind that you can also toggle magnetism with Alt key (cmd key under macOS) while drawing in the plan.

Entering room dimensions by triangulation

After adding new temporary dimension lines in version 6.3 to help you draw a room by triangulation, it's now possible to enter directly the diagonal value at the current point in the room creation tool tip, once you pressed Enter key. The following video shows how it works.

Preventing undesired sloping ceilings

When a room at the last level is surrounded with walls of different heights, Sweet Home 3D tries to compute a sloping ceiling for this room, but this doesn’t always work well, leading to some weird triangles in the 3D view and reports from users who think they encountered a bug.
To avoid this behavior, the Flat ceiling only check box was added to the room modification dialog box to prevent Sweet Home 3D from trying to compute such slopping ceilings. By default, a new room will have this option checked, i.e. the elevation of its ceiling will be located at the highest wall if the room is at the last level. If you want to try the slopping ceiling feature, just uncheck it.

Hiding edges in imported 3D models

It's been a while since 3D models at Trimble 3D Warehouse have been made available with their edges around their shapes. As most of the time, these edges are not interesting, a new Hide model edges check box was added to the second step of the Furniture import wizard to easily hide edges of Collada / DAE files. The following screenshots show the difference when this new option is selected or not.

Note that this option is usable only when importing 3D models with material names starting with edge_color.

Other features

Finally, here are some other improvements that you might find interesting:

  • The virtual visitor is now represented with a camera symbol at a fixed size in the plan when the default virtual visitor gets too small to be handled easily.
  • Inch/Fraction and Foot/Decimals units were added to the preferences pane. Inch/Fraction displays lengths in inches followed by the closest eighth inch fraction and Foot/Decimals unit displays lengths in feet followed by decimals of a foot.
  • Additional prefixes can be used for the shape names of a 3D model to specify the possible moves of shapes attached to other moving shapes (see this subject for more details).
  • The 3D model preview shown at the last step of the furniture import wizard now supports zooming and rotating around two axes to let you generate a nicer icon of the imported model.
  • It's possible to select a material directly in the 3D model preview in the furniture materials modification dialog box. If you want to select more materials, just press the Crtl key (cmd key under macOS) while clicking in the 3D preview.
  • Sweet Home 3D now supports controller / skin elements found in Collada / DAE format to be able to import 3D models exported from MakeHuman software.
  • The /checkUpdatesDisabled installer argument was added to the command line of Windows installer to remove the ability to check updates from Sweet Home 3D.
  • Sweet Home 3D Online and Sweet Home 3D JS Viewer were updated to support the new features.

As a bonus, you'll find in the gallery the SH3D file of the studio shown in the pictures of this article. A small place optimized with a mezzanine and a tiny bathroom.

All my thanks for the contributors who translated this new version and helped to test it. And a special thought to David Bluecame from YafaRay team for his help.

[Note the version 7.0.2 was released on July 31, 2022 to fix some issues bound to version 7.0]



Avatar: Anonymous

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

I don't sse Yafaray as an option on the Create pictures from multiple view points menu. Am I missing something, or is this correct behaviour? I would appreciate this option.
Avatar: Emmanuel Puybaret

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

The chosen renderer is recorded at each stored point of view, the reason why it's not available in this dialog box to let you mix renderers.

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

请问是否有 Steam Store 售卖计划吗,我更喜欢在 Steam 上购买和支持 SH3D 副本,谢谢
Avatar: Emmanuel Puybaret

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

There’s no plan to add Sweet Home 3D on Steam. Delivering a new version on SourceForge.net, sweethome3d.com, Mac App Store, Microsoft Store and Amazon is already a tedious task.
Avatar: Anonymous

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

Problems since upgrade - app crashes when I try to render any photo in yafa ray at all. Whether by the create photo with YafaRay box, or 3dView - Create photo menu route. Sometimes it gives a red x, sometimes it goes black then crashes and exits the app. Essentially I am now unable to make photos after the upgrade. Can I walk back the upgrade?? Please advise. Thanks, Graham (used SH3d for 2 years now without this issue before)
Avatar: Emmanuel Puybaret

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

I feared that YafaRay might not still work for a few users :(
At the moment, the solution is to select SunFlow renderer which is still available. Please send me the SH3D file that you didn't succeed to render with YafaRay.

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

moi sa marche correctement

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

Nice Update thanks! I also use Freecad. It would be nice If you could work together with freecad to get some enhancement on the Drafting. It currently do not feel that smooth as it could be. Especially the posibility to modify measure by edit their meassure.
Avatar: Anonymous

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

Problem since upgrade. Aerial View non-responsive and system locks up after selecting a file for furniture import.

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

Please use the forum to discuss about this issue, probably in this subject if you're a macOS user.

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0

Thank you for your great work on this. Especially the magnet button is something I have been waiting for for a while. Keep up the great work
Avatar: John T

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0.2

After updating to 7.0.2 I opened files created in 6.6. All furniture shapes were gone. There was a dimension box and Name but no image of the furniture piece. What do I need to do to recover the furniture images?
Avatar: Emmanuel Puybaret

Re: Sweet Home 3D 7.0.2

See this subject in the forum which might match your issue.
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