Hungary
Joined: Mar 15, 2016
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Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
Hi Guys, I installed the software yesterday and I decided to learn it today but I am having some real frustrating problems that I hope I can eliminate soon. I have admit that I've used Google Sketchup many times in the past, so I do have a basic idea of what a 3D drawing should be able to do, and it is quite possible that this background is the cause of my problem and it would make it easier for me if I wouldn't know how to use Sketchup.
Well, here is the list of my problems in the sequence of frustration, being the most frustrating ones on the top:
1. Zooming in and out: I draw something then I do a zoom in 2-3 times, the object disappear from the screen. I zoom out the same amount of times, the object is gone. I have to zoom out 4-6 times to find it again way off the center of the screen, I drag it to the center in the fond hope that it will stay there but nope, I zoom in 2-3 times and it disappears again. Sometimes I can manage the object to stay in the center by pure accident but so far I am in the total dark what is the logic behind the currently experienced behavior during zooming in and out.
2. Still zooming: First time I tried to zoom in with the mouse wheel, instead of zooming, it was scrolling the sheet up or down.
What was the point in making the mouse wheel to scroll vertically instead of zooming? When I draw, I zoom in and out all the time to see the result of my last steps and to do it by clicking on the zoom + and - buttons zillion times is a major frustration for me especially if it is combined with the No. 1 problem described above.
The sliding bars on the bottom and the right side of the drawing board can be used so easily to get around the drawing board up or down, left or right, could the zooming function be switched to the mouse wheel? Please???
3. Snap to object or guide or grid: wonderful features in Sketchup that makes drawing anything just a "snap" literally speaking - missing in action.
4. When I draw a wall, or let's say a room with 4 walls, by the time I finished the room, the size of the room is unusable because the center line of the wall is used for measuring distance, because of that the length and the width of the room will be shorter with half of the wall width.
5. Now I added dimensions to the walls so that I could drag them to correct the size of the room, but to my surprise when I drag any side of the room it doesn't have any tendency to maintain the horizontal orientation of the horizontal walls but instead depending on how "shaky" my hand with the mouse, it skews the regular square into a rhomboid either upward or downward. So, I gave up on wanting to resize the room.
So, my question is that what is the simplest way of drawing a room with the expected inner dimensions and a given width of walls and later if you change the width of any of the walls, it will increase the width outward instead of evenly outward and inward and messing up the room dimensions?
6. When I make any of the wall or item in focus or active, the contour lines of the wall or object becomes so wide, that it makes it impossible to place it precisely next to any other line or object.
7. The Magnetism is enabled in the preferences but as far as I can tell, it isn't noticeable, no matter how close I move any object or line to another object or line the snap just doesn't happen.
Basically I just realized that what I'm wishing for is a merger between Sketchup and Sweet Home 3D, where the floor plan could be easily created in Sketchup but adding furniture, doors and windows would be done in Sweet Home 3D. So, can someone tell me whether you can import 3D drawing into SW3D somehow?
That's it. There were other issues that I had problem with but these are the major ones. :)
Denmark
Joined: Jul 7, 2013
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Re: Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
Yes, the zoom function is a bit... well, peculiar, but: If the object ( your selected object, that is ) disappears from your screen when you zoom in, hitting the up and down arrows once, will make it appear somewhere within your window. The position is not quite predictable, but it's easy to spot. And for the camera ( when it's lost): touching the preview window will make your camera visible.
If you haven't already found out: Holding the cmd-button, you can zoom inn/out with your mouse.
Holding shift, your walls maintain their horizontal or vertical positions during move.
Magnetism works only on walls and on heights ( if I have got it correctly) and all other snapping is done with the align-tool.
...and when all else fails, you can always consult the manual.
France
Joined: Nov 7, 2005
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Re: Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
1. Zooming in zooms in the middle of the current plan and doesn't take into account the current selected items. Nobody never requested such a behavior yet but I'll try to improve this in the next version.
2. Mouse wheel in the plan moves the scroll bars like in any drawing program. It zooms around the point where the mouse lies only when Ctrl key (or cmd under Mac OS X) is pressed.
3. There's no snap to grid because in the real world, houses never snaps to a grid, and adding this kind of feature could wrongly interact with magnetism. If you need precise dimensions while you draw walls or rooms, press <enter> key and enter the size with the keyboard.
4. As soon as you allow to draw more than a room, draw rooms with a concave shape or with other angles different than 90°, you'll soon realize that drawing walls from their middle is a reasonable trade-off. But as suggested in many places, if you want to draw only one room, draw it with the room creation tool then create the walls around it by double clicking in the room with wall creation tool.
5. As suggested by Ceciliabr, press Shift key to move objects only vertically or horizontally, or use key arrow on the keyboard.
6. Strange, you're the first user to report that you're bothered by the half transparent selection contour! Maybe the selection color in your system is very dark???
7. Magnetism is active mostly on furniture, not on dimension lines or polylines. For furniture, it helps to place pieces side by side and along walls.
You can export 3D an object from Sketchup at DAE/Collada or OBJ format, and import it in Sweet Home 3D but only as an additional piece of furniture, not as a house plan. So I guess your idea to draw the plan in Sketchup, then import it in Sweet Home 3D can't be achieved.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
Hungary
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Re: Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
Thank both of you for the detailed replies, the CTRL key info for zooming made my day
once I read it, but all of them were very useful info for me.
About using the scroll wheel for up and down scrolling of a page, I have to disagree
with you on that a bit: In my experience the scroll wheel of the mouse is used for
that is common in text editor, text viewers and internet browsers where the main
object is text. In graphics editor applications in my experience the scroll wheel is
used for zooming by default. I can only refer to applications that I am familiar with
and use frequently:
Corel Paintshop Pro - image editor Google Sketchup - 3D engineering design tool Autodesk AutoCAD - 3D engineering design tool
When you zoom in our out in these applications the focus or center of the zooming is
not the object in focus but the position of the mouse pointer. And I think it makes
perfect sense since when you're looking at a detailed image, you zoom in to a
specific spot that needs some detailed work, center of the aktive object would
require to click on an object first, but sometimes there is no object to center to,
for e.g. where two walls meet or don't meet especially if the reason of zooming in is
to find out whether the edges of the walls do meet or there is some tiny gap between
them.
About "Snap to": I mentioned 3 different "snap to" options in my first posting:
about the "grid" version, you might be right about when it comes to real life.
but when it comes to objects, I am not sure if it always works the way you described it: here is an example:
draw a wall vertically then another one horizontally, so you created a corner. Place a cooker in the corner, it will nicely snap to the walls but when you place a fridge next to the cooker, the fridge will snap to the horizontal wall but it won't snap to the cooker, you can slide it left and right, it will never snap. It looks like an object will snap to a wall won't snap to another object.
About the selection color: Yes, on my laptop it is very dark, it is actually dark blue or blueish gray. I think it would be much better to leave the contour lines alone when you make an object aktive or focused and instead just change the filling color of the object dotted. Same filling color but small dots on it while it is aktive.
Since the snap to doesn't work, placing an object next to another is cumbersome because I cannot see the edges of the object clearly (at all) that I am dragging.
Denmark
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Re: Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
When you zoom in our out in these applications the focus or center of the zooming is not the object in focus but the position of the mouse pointer
Yes. That's the expected behavior.
lace a cooker in the corner, it will nicely snap to the walls but when you place a fridge next to the cooker, the fridge will snap to the horizontal wall but it won't snap to the cooker, you can slide it left and right, it will never snap. It looks like an object will snap to a wall won't snap to another object.
That's where you use the align tool. As I mentioned; the magnetism only works on walls and heights: snapping objects to a wall, or placing them correctly on an elevated plane, such as a table. Using the "side by side"-option in the align tool, is the best solution. Shortcut: shift+cmd+b on OSX, so probably shift+ctrl+b on windows. Fast and simple.
Hungary
Joined: Mar 15, 2016
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Re: Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
Yes. That's the expected behavior.
Do you mean, that that's your expected behavior from Sweet Home 3D or in general that's what you'd expect from a graphics editor in general?
I tested this again, and can tell that with the Ctrl key zooming is much more pleasant but focusing on the mouse pointer would make it perfect.
Using the "side by side"-option in the align tool, is the best solution. Shortcut: shift+cmd+b on OSX, so probably shift+ctrl+b on windows. Fast and simple.
Thanks for this suggestion (you forgot to mention that 1st both objects have to be selected) it works.
But here is another suggestion that I think would greatly enhance this nice software:
If I want to drag the canvas I have to do more than one step to accomplish it:
either by clicking on the toolbar icon "pan in plan" or using the slide bars on the bottom and the right side. But how about this:
If the toolbar button "Select objects in plan" has already been selected but you decide to drag the canvas in any direction, you would just simply click on any empty space of the canvas and just simply drag it. (it isn't my original idea, SketchUp has it.)
So, by any chance is there a way to change the dark blue color of the object selector to let's say to a standard yellow as a quick fix?
Denmark
Joined: Jul 7, 2013
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Re: Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
(you forgot to mention that 1st both objects have to be selected) it works. (you forgot to mention that 1st both objects have to be selected) it works.
Well, you found out, didn't you? Maybe I "forgot" on purpose...
France
Joined: Nov 7, 2005
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Re: Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
George59 and Ceciliabr, may I suggest you read (or read again) the tips in the help included with Sweet Home 3D? You might find a lot of useful information there!
In the graphics editors I inspired myself from, the mouse wheel doesn't zoom in / out without pressing a key (generally the same one as in Sweet Home 3D).
About magnetism on objects, there are already a few behaviors you probably didn't pay attention to: - doors and windows are placed automatically on walls - other objects don't cross walls - objects placed on other ones are automatically elevated when they are added - an object placed beside an other one won't overlap it if they intersect vertically and their bounding box intersect of a few pixels (go gently).
The selection color should come from the matching setting in your system. What system do you use?
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
Hungary
Joined: Mar 15, 2016
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Re: Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
Puybaret, thanks for pointing out the tips page for me, I should have read it and watch other training videos before start asking questions. I'm not at the stage of adding windows and doors, I'm still at the stage of learning the basics because I don't want to realize few weeks down the road that I have to redo everything from the getgo because I didn't create the floor plan the way that I should have for my purposes.
For example, you can create floor plans using background image, I do have one but the lines on the scanned image are not sharp but fuzzy, so I hesitate to use that because of that. Or you can create a room from individual walls, or directly using the room creator tool. Which one should I use not to waste any time later because of my uninformed decision?
I just tried to create a simple room (1 m x 1 m) with the room tool, then I modified the thickness of two walls (30,30,10,10) and according to the software the size of the area is still 1 m2 when in fact it isn't because the walls got thicker both toward the outside and inside and that reduced the actual size of the room, so if I went ahead and continue design a complete room with furnitures, I would end up with a mess because the plan would not match the real life scenario.
So, how do you design a room with 1m long walls on all four sides, one of them is 30cm wide, the other one is 40cm, and the other two are 10cm wide each and at the end the inner size of the room is 1m x 1m and the auto display of the area shows 1m2?
The selection color should come from the matching setting in your system. What system do you use?"
I'm not sure what you mean on "system". But in general, I have a Dell Latitude D830 15" laptop, NVidia Quadro NVS 135M graphics chipset (designed and optimized for AutoCAD and other 3D drawing applications) with Windows XP sp3 OS on it.
So, going back to the subject of zooming, panning, selecting, moving, according to the tips, when you zoom in with CTRL key, the focus of zooming supposed to be the position of the mouse pointer, according to my experience, it isn't. Indeed, using the Ctrl key makes zooming much more effective than using the + and - magnifier icons on the tool bar, but it does not follow the mouse pointer precisely. Maybe it does by looking at a certain radius around the mouse pointer and it corrects itself if it falls out of that circle, I don't know.
So, let me add an item to the wishlist for future releases: It would be nice to have a option in the preferences to change the function of the mouse scroll wheel: up/down scroll vs. zooming.
I do like the space bar + mouse click&hold way of dragging. Shift+ or Ctrl+ could have also be used since they don't have any function in the same situation, but it is there.
For zooming with keyboard instead of Ctrl-k I'd recommend the widely known Ctrl-+ or Ctrl-- as it is used in Internet browsers like Firefox. New folks, (new to SH3D) will have a faster learning curve if standard shortcuts used when and wherever it is possible.
By the way, may I ask what is your preferred OS, MAC or Windows?
Netherlands
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Re: Several problem with using Sweet Home 3D
Walls are drawn with their X,Y coordinates through the middle of the wall. Room surfaces are calculated from the inside of the walls, thus correctly showing the real surface within the walls. When changing walls' length or thickness, rooms are not automatically adapted.
To correctly calculate wall length in the drawing to get a specific wall length in the room, you will need to calculate the wall length as follows:
(thickness wall A : 2) + wall length + (thickness wall B : 2) as in your example: (30:2) + 100 + (10:2) = 15+100+5 = 120
There have been many (as in MANY) discussions on the forum about changing this behaviour, but no one has ever been able to come up with a good alternative.
