Sweet Home 3D Personalized Textures

How to create personalized textures for Sweet Home 3D

Document written by Ouais Translated into English by Hans Dirkse

Original French document and images at http://ouais25.free.fr/sweet_home_3d/texture/Textures_pour_Sweet_Home_3D.html

Personalized textures for Sweet Home 3D

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How to create personalized textures for Sweet Home 3D This guide describes how you can make personalizedtextures. A texture is an image that is attached to the surface of a wall, a floor or a ceiling. It is possible to attach a repeating image to a surface (e.g. the default textures in SH3D), but you can also make a texture that covers a surface in its entirety. This second possibility will be described here. The example is for a rectangular bathroom that measures 4 by 3 meters and is 2.50 metershigh. It has a door and a window. Although Sweet Home 3D is chosen here, you could do the same thing in SketchUp (even better, because you can position the texture very precisely). The goal of this exercise is to be able to imagine more easily the tiling seen in a showroom or to make a cost and quantity estimate, but most important it is a good way to try out different ideas or colorcombinations. Requirements The following programs are used in this Windows-only guide. For Macs or Linux-Unix you will need other programs.

• Sweet Home 3D, Powerpoint, Screenhunter, MS Paint.
Sweet Home 3D is used to visualize an apartment or room(s) in 3D. Its advantage is that it's free, simple to use and very good. Powerpoint is a simple to use tool and because it's a part of Microsoft Office, it canbe found on many computers. You can also use OpenOffice, the free alternative office suite. Its functionality should be the same, I guess. Screenhunter is a tool to capture images from your screen. It's also free and allows you to grab very precisely a certain part of the screen. Last of all, Paint is part of Windows. 1. Make the room in Sweet Home 3D Create a room of 4x3 meters. Place a door inthe left wall and a window in the right wall (optional). You will get image 1.

Image 1

Personalized textures for Sweet Home 3D

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2. Find images There are several ways to find images for textures: • Google • sites of tile vendors (the advantage is that you may be able to see the chosen tiles in the vendor's showroom) Do an image search on Google: well-chosen keywords will result ininteresting images.

Image 2
On vendors' sites you can often find information on the size of the tiles, as well as good pictures (see image 3).

Image 3
Then, save the images you found on Google, or use Screenhunter to make a screen capture, after taking care copyrights let use them for personal use. As default, Screenhunter saves images to the desktop. It would be easy to make a temporarydirectory (see image 4).

Image 4
Personalized textures for Sweet Home 3D

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3. Make the texture The texture that we will make, will be used on the wall facing the door. Open Powerpoint and create a new document. Draw a rectangle and check its size. Verify the dimensions of the wall (height and width) by looking at the wall properties in Sweet Home 3D (see image 5). For a wall of 3 meterswide and 2.50 meters high you could create a tile size of 15x12.25 centimeters. (see image 6). Note: the length of a wall given by Sweet Home 3D is measured at the middle of that wall. To get the exact width of the visible part of a wall you must subtract half the thickness of both adjoining walls, if these wall have an angle of 90° with the measured wall. Look at image 5: where it says“Epaisseur” (Thickness) you can see that the wall thickness is 7.5 cm. Assuming all walls are the same thickness, the exact visible width of the wall is then 300 - 3.75 - 3.75 = 292.5 cm. If you want a very accurate texture/picture, this is the width for which you should design your texture. Don't forget to add 3.75 cm of white space on both sides to cover the invisible part of the wall.

Image 5...