This is just for messing around to see in digital form the house that I dream of in my head. Is there a truly free one that does a decent job?
I’ve played with it in Sims 3 but I was wondering if there was something more realistic out there. Bonus if it’s something where I could generate a noob file that a pro architect could use to base a real design on.
I made a 3d model in Blender and showed it to an architect, with the huge caveat that I only work in vfx and games and have absolutely no idea how to build real things, so please just consider it a “napkin sketch”. This model was just flat colors, I didn’t bother with texture maps.
I also used QGIS to show him a map of the site, along with some LIDAR elevation data I downloaded from a government website. He just took elevation/plan images and did a great job translating it into a real set of drawings with some major improvements.
After that I took his drawings and did a 3d model in FreeCAD, to help determine where our existing furniture will fit before I broke my back moving it around.
Yeah, I was going to suggest Blender as well but it will obviously be a huge undertaking if you don’t know your way around 3d software already …
Ooh, does that mean you had a house built?
That’s awesome. It seems like you did to the architect what architects normally do to engineers: design something cool and pass it off for someone else to do the math on how to make it work.