Sweet Home 3D Help > Creating homes, walls and furniture

|  |  | Drawing walls

To draw walls, you must first choose Plan > Create walls or select the Create walls tool. Create walls tool Click in the home plan at the start point of the new wall, then click or double-click in the plan at its end point. As long as you don't double-click or press the Escape key, each new click indicates the opposite point of the current wall and the start point of the next wall. While drawing a set of walls, the start point of the first wall will be attached to an existing wall start or end point if you click on that point, and the last wall will be attached to another wall start or end point by double-clicking on that point. If you keep pressed the ctrl key (or alt key under Mac OS X) while clicking at the end point of a wall, a round wall will be created and its arc extent will depend on the point where you'll click a third time. The clicked points are at the middle of the thickness of the drawn walls; the thickness and the height of new walls can be changed in the preferences pane. If you already drew a room, you can also create the walls around it by double-clicking anywhere in that room. Walls are simultaneously drawn in the plan and in the 3D view. To end the drawing of walls, choose Plan > Select or select the Select tool. Select tool

• | If you have a scanned image of your home plan at your disposal, import it as a background image of the plan first. This feature speeds up the drawing of walls.
• | To help you draw walls precisely, use the wall tooltip and the alignment lines. If you press the enter key when the plan has the focus, the values displayed in the tooltip will become editable to let you enter with the keyboard the length, the angle and the thickness of the current wall (if you didn't start any wall yet, the tooltip will display the coordinates of the start point of the new wall). Use the up arrow, down arrow or tab keys to edit an other value and press again the enter key to confirm the values you entered. If you want to use again the mouse to draw walls, simply move it over the plan.
• | To help you drawing parallel walls, the angle of walls is a multiple of 15° by default. You may cancel this magnetism by disabling magnetism in the preferences pane or while drawing, by holding down the Alt key under Windows, the cmd key under Mac OS X or the Shift + Alt keys under Linux.
• | The default height of walls is set from the value of New walls height in the preferences pane, and the default thickness of new walls is set from the value of New walls thickness in that pane.
• | Once a wall is created, you may change its location, its length, its thickness, its height, its colors, its textures and its shininess.
• | The unit displayed by default in tooltips, plan rulers and plan grid depends on your country. You may switch to Centimeter, Meter, Millimeter or Inch in the preferences pane.
• | Choose Plan > Zoom in or Plan > Zoom out to change the plan scale, or roll the mouse wheel forward or backward while keeping the Ctrl key pressed (or under Mac OS X, the cmd key pressed).
• | Use default Aerial view while drawing new walls, you'll get a more useful point of view on your home in the 3D view.
• | While Create walls tool is selected, many tools and menus are disabled. If you need these tools, select the Select tool again.