House designer that easily exports to Daz

[TheBrain]

I've been looking around at house/interior design programs to make some interesting scenes for Daz renders, as an alternative to using ready-made scenery. I came across Sweet Home 3D (http://www.sweethome3d.com/), which I thought I should share (and no, I have no affiliations to the project). It has a reasonably easy to use interface, and most importantly, it supports exporting the house and interior to .obj format, which can be readily imported into Daz. It also has a nice library of free objects available (http://www.sweethome3d.com/freeModels.jsp) and supports importing other formats as well, I think. The only major downside I could find is that the exported model does not create proper texture coordinates if no texture was applied to the object, so it gets a bit finicky if you want to apply Daz materials/shaders to untextured objects. And creating roofs is a bit hard...

Anyhow, I wanted to show some results I got while playing around with this program and getting it into Daz. If you're interested in more details on how to get this working, I'm happy to share, but for now I'll wait to see if people are interested in this kind of stuff .

So I went from this in Sweet Home 3D (don't mind all the weird textures):
http://i.imgur.com/UNnimZ4.png

To these renders with Iray in Daz:

[Mortze]

Very cool!
I'll look into this for sure!
Thanks.

[K84]

Thanks for share this. I always buy environments or do this props in blender and it's hard to do something realistic. I work in Linux (DAZ 4.9 in wine) and this app have Linux version, this is fantastic for me. Sorry for my english and thanks again.

Regards

[Greyelf]

@TheBrain: Thank you muchly for a very timely find!!

I had briefly looked for a solution to this problem only recently and was about to start building a couple of houses by hand using existing props.

[GDS]

For anyone that is going to use this I have one tip to make it even more amazing:

All the shapes looks great for the objects, but the textures doesn't,
so just dont worry about it and finished your room and then export it into DAZ, after exporting on DAZ you add textures(found on google) and shadows effects.
And now you have a amazing room free that looks like those $49,00 rooms on the DAZ store

[TheBrain]

For anyone that is going to use this I have one tip to make it even more amazing:

All the shapes looks great for the objects, but the textures doesn't,
so just dont worry about it and finished your room and then export it into DAZ, after exporting on DAZ you add textures(found on google) and shadows effects.
And now you have a amazing room free that looks like those $49,00 rooms on the DAZ store

Yep, that's exactly what I did in the images I posted. The only caveat is that you have to apply some unique texture to each surface in Sweet Home 3D, otherwise the stored .obj file won't contain proper texture coordinates (i.e. applying a texture in Daz to a surface that only had a colour won't work properly).

[GDS]

For anyone that is going to use this I have one tip to make it even more amazing:

All the shapes looks great for the objects, but the textures doesn't,
so just dont worry about it and finished your room and then export it into DAZ, after exporting on DAZ you add textures(found on google) and shadows effects.
And now you have a amazing room free that looks like those $49,00 rooms on the DAZ store

Yep, that's exactly what I did in the images I posted. The only caveat is that you have to apply some unique texture to each surface in Sweet Home 3D, otherwise the stored .obj file won't contain proper texture coordinates (i.e. applying a texture in Daz to a surface that only had a colour won't work properly).

Are you sure m8?
Because I can add color and custom texture on everything on Daz even if its only a shape, maybe you were looking at the wrong tab? (there are a couple of tabs about textures I think)

Here: I took this place from ShareCG and it was only objs with nothing as textures and I add everything:

it was all gray out

[TheBrain]

Are you sure m8?
Because I can add color and custom texture on everything on Daz even if its only a shape, maybe you were looking at the wrong tab? (there are a couple of tabs about textures I think)

Here: I took this place from ShareCG and it was only objs with nothing as textures and I add everything:
.. IMAGE ..
it was all gray out

Yes, I am sure. We're talking about the .obj files exported from Sweet Home 3D, taking something from ShareCG is not the same thing. Simple thing you can try is creating just one floor with no texture, export it to .obj. Next, add a texture to that floor, and export it again. Open the .obj files in your favourite text editor and you will see the one with textures has lines like this added: "vt 12.375 -20.06848 0". These are texture coordinates. For each vertex, they tell what part of a texture applies at that vertex. For complex models this tells how a 2D texture wraps around the entire object.
Now try opening both these .obj files in daz, and applying a new texture to your floor. It will only work properly for the one which already had a texture in the first place.

[ptypoe]

Thanks Brain, nice lead.

I recently found another solution to this issue of free housing. Inlite Studios do sell stuff (I have no affiliation with them) but they also have some great freebies such as this holiday apartment - http://inlitestudio.com/3d/product/holiday-apartment/

High quality, lots of content and ready to use in Daz, and you can turn every item on or off. I have been doing some IRay renders in Daz today and this apartment is very nice to work with.

[Eldormain]

I'm all over the place today.

I just exported a test room and imported it into DAZ 4.9. The first attempt appeared to have the room and everything in it as one object. Am I missing something? Do you need to do something specific that I need to read up on and learn to select a chair, for instance, and apply a texture?

And, if so, can you apply multiple textures to one item (say the chair has leather and metal bits)?

Eldormain.

[Mik]

I don't know "Sweethome 3D", but I can tell you some basics.

Every 3D-Model is based on some wire frame or mesh model, so if there is a room for example, it can contain single meshes for each piece of furniture or one big mesh that is like "thrown" over everthing your room contains.
And even if everything in Sweethome 3D itself is a single mesh, it is likely that the export function "welds" it all together.
This program was meant to plan and visualize some interiors, not to create versatile content for 3D posing programs... , they made an export function to create renders of your visualized content with an external render program, but I'm sure people who have used it are able to tell you more about this...

Every 3D-Model (obj) needs a related UV-Map, which is like a "pixel coordinate system" to tell the shader of your rendering program where to put a certain pixel of your 2D texture on your 3D-Model mesh...take a look at the discussion in this thread earlier.

The mentioned shader presets do a tiled texturing of the selected surface with seamless patterns, but they also need a UV-Map for this.

Edit: It might be possible to split up geometry and/ or create surfaces with the Geometry Editor tool in daz, but I don't know about that...

[Eldormain]

Ugh, okay looks like I have more reading to do. Maybe I will shift my focus and power through walkthroughs for various tasks and then play with it in DAZ.

I appreciate the info, Mik. That was a good clarification.

And, naturally, anyones 2 cents with some experience with these programs and the processes would still be appreciated.

Cheers,

Eldormain

[Mik]

YW, this guy seems to have a similar problem exporting his work as an object file from blender...

http://blender.stackexchange.com/questi ... rate-parts

object groups seems to be the magical word, but I have no blender installed atm to try this...

and though my model program has a obj export function with an option to export different object groups for different materials it didn't work out in daz

have you tried to assign materials/ textures to your work in sweethome before generating the obj file, maybe this would do the trick (you need to do this anyway as discussed in this thread earlier) ?

[Eldormain]

Yep, sure did. I tested it a few different ways. Everything textured. Everything I would want to retexture in DAZ textured. And then just the bare room with different textures for the windows, walls floor, etc.

I like the terminology usage in replies to posts. They give me arrows to look towards. Love it.

Cheers.

[sylakone2]

I have to say I am very glad The Brain suggested Sweet Home 3d.

I have been working on a house scene for a future Game I am working on and I am very happy with the REsults let me know what you think.

https://mega.nz/#!ZgFD3Y6C!7dLBcCfYrOdI ... ZJhYt9MU_k
https://mega.nz/#!98lUnJwJ!p0Nf9EyihhtA ... ZpBrDk8YYA

I have built a 5 bedroom home with Pool these are 2 of the rooms from it

Cheers

Sy