Sweet Home 3D Help > Editing preferences, plan and 3D view

|  |  | Editing furniture

You may edit the location, the size, the elevation and the angle of home furniture, either with the mouse or with the Furniture > Modify... menu item. To edit pieces of furniture with the mouse, select them in the home plan or furniture list first. To select one piece in the plan, click on it. To select multiple pieces in the plan, draw a selection rectangle around them, or click on pieces while pressing shift key. To avoid selecting furniture with other kinds of objects in the plan, lock the base plan by clicking on the lock displayed at the top left of the plan pane or by choosing Plan > Lock base plan out of the menu. This will disallow the selection of walls, rooms, dimensions, free texts, doors and windows, to let you arrange your furniture more easily. Clicking a second time on the lock or adding any object to the plan that is not a piece of furniture will unlock the plan. To move the selected pieces, place the mouse pointer inside the selected box of one these pieces then drag and drop them, or press the keyboard arrows. When the mouse cursor is upon a wall during the move of one piece, that piece will be automatically rotated and resized according to the orientation and the thickness of the wall if it's a door or a window, wheras a piece of an other kind is oriented so its back face lies along the wall. If you want to handle selected pieces as one piece of furniture (for example a table with its chairs), choose Furniture > Group out of the menu. When one piece or one group of pieces is selected in the plan, you may also change its size, elevation or angle with one of the four indicators that appear at each corner of the selected piece.

1. | The rotation indicator shows the corner you can drag to rotate the selected piece around the vertical axis.
2. | The elevation indicator shows the corner you can drag to change the elevation of the selected piece (in relation to the elevation of the level it was added to, if the home contains multiple levels).
3. | The height indicator shows the corner you can drag to change the height of the selected piece. If the rotation angle of the piece around a horizontal axis isn't zero, this indicator lets you update this angle rather than the height of the piece. If the piece of furniture is a light source or a lamp containing light sources, this indicator is a light dimmer. If you want to modify the height of such objects, edit its attributes as indicated in the next paragraph.
4. | The size indicator shows the corner you can drag to change the width and the depth of the selected piece. Dragging this indicator on a horizontally rotated piece or while pressing the Shift key will proportionally update the width, depth and height of the selected piece. This indicator lets you also resize the selected piece only along its width or depth when the Ctrl key (alt key under Mac OS X) is pressed.

When the mouse pointer is upon one of these corners, it changes to indicate you can drag and drop that corner to change the matching attribute of the selected piece of furniture. While you press the mouse button, a tooltip shows the value of the edited attribute(s). The furniture modified with the mouse is drawn simultaneously in the plan and in the 3D view. A piece of furniture may also be edited thanks to its pane, by double-clicking on that piece in the home plan or furniture list, or by choosing Furniture > Modify... after selecting it. In the furniture pane, you may change its name, the abscissa (X) and the ordinate (Y) of its center, the elevation of its bottom from the floor, its width, its depth, its height, its color or its texture, its shininess, its visibility, its rotation angles, whether its name should be displayed in plan or not, and whether its 3D model shape should be mirrored. It's not possible to rotate doors, windows, staircases and groups around a horizontal axis. If you make a piece invisible, it won't be drawn in the home plan and the 3D view, but it will still appear in the furniture list to let you make it visible again later. When one piece is edited (or if the selected pieces are all the same), you may also click on the Modify button shown beside Materials option, to replace each color or texture of the piece by the one of your choice. The Furniture materials pane displays the list of materials you can edit, and a 3D preview of the color and texture changes you made, because materials may not always have some clear or translated names (like bone2 instead of mattress or flyellow instead of frame in the previous figure). When necessary, you can also rotate the object in the 3D preview with the mouse and modify more than a material at the same time after selecting them in the list.

• | When the Visible column is displayed in the furniture list, the visibility of the selected piece of furniture may be changed also by clicking directly on the Visible check box in the list.
• | If you want to modify the attributes of a set of pieces, select these pieces and choose Furniture > Modify.... The values of the attributes that are different from one piece to another in the selected furniture set, will appear blank in the furniture pane.
• | When a currency is chosen in the preferences pane, the furniture modification pane lets you also enter the price and the VAT / Sales tax / GST percentage of the selected furniture.
• | Use the menu items of Plan > Modify text style submenu to change the size or the style of the text displaying the name of the selected furniture.
• | If you want to align a set of pieces, select these pieces and choose one of the Furniture > Align menu items. Furniture are aligned on the first selected piece.
• | A piece of furniture qualified as a door or a window indicates to Sweet Home 3D to automatically make holes in walls at doors or windows intersection location. To ensure this intersection is correctly computed, check that the depth of a door or a window is always larger than the thickness of the wall in which it makes a hole. This computation isn't made for the other kinds of furniture.
• | When your home contains more than one level, a staircase is able to automatically make a hole in the ceiling and the floor of upper levels when its height is higher than the elevation of the upper level.
• | Modifying the power of lights has some effect only in the images computed by the photo or video creation tools, at the two best quality levels available for these tools. A light source has no physical 3D representation and can be seen in the 3D view when selected for feedback purpose.
• | If a piece of furniture is dropped on an other one, it will be elevated to appear on the top of the latter, when its selection rectangle is included in the one of the latter, except in a few logical cases like furniture dropped on a plant. If the border of the dropped piece intersects the border of an other piece, the dropped piece will be positioned along the border of that piece. These automatic behaviors are disabled when magnetism is disabled.
• | When you drop or move a piece of furniture, it's automatically elevated on the top of an other one only if its elevation is equal to zero (on the floor of the selected level). If you want to adjust its elevation after you moved it on an other object, select the Furniture > Reset elevation menu item to avoid you to lower the elevation of that piece to zero and move it.
• | If the objects selected in the plan contain walls, rooms, furniture, dimensions, polylines and texts, all these objects will be moved with a drag and drop or the keyboard arrows. If you keep the Ctrl key (or under Mac OS X, the alt key) pressed while you drag and drop these objects, they will be duplicated.
• | By default, the angle of a piece of furniture is a multiple of 15° to help you placing it parallel to walls in your home. You may disable this magnetism in the preferences pane or during the rotation of a piece, by holding down the Alt key under Windows, the cmd key under Mac OS X or the Shift + Alt keys under Linux. In the same way, the angle, the depth and the elevation of a moved piece may be automatically updated only when magnetism is enabled.
• | The unit displayed by default in the tooltips and furniture pane depends on your country. You may switch to Centimeter, Meter, Millimeter or Inch in the preferences pane.
• | To help you place furniture, change the point of view and/or the transparency of walls in the 3D view of your home.
• | Pieces imported into furniture catalog may also be edited by double-clicking on them.