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Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
I have tried to import a .jpg of my house floor plan. The latest attempt is still running, after 12 hours, and all that is displaying is the Background image wizard window with a little clock icon in the middle of it and the "Go back" and "Continue" buttons are greyed out.
I downloaded and installed XQuartz - as the replacement for X11 - but, to be honest, I'm not sure whether or not I'm supposed to do anything with that other than have it installed and open.
France
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Re: Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
Maybe you used a too detailed image. How large is your image (file size and pixels)?
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
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Re: Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
Thanks for responding.
The smallest I've been able to get it down to is 5.9MB. I printed a plan, from Home Design Studio, as a PDF which I opened in Photoshop and then saved as a .jpg.
France
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Re: Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
As for pixels, it's 25200 × 17820.
25200 x 17820 = 500 MB in memory for a black and white image, and 4 times more in color! All that to help you draw walls upon it. I'm not astonished the program can't handle it and anyway, you don't need that much precision. Make the image at least 10 times smaller (i.e. 2520 x 1782 pixels) and it will be largely enough. Reducing the JPEG quality won't help.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
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Re: Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
Thank you. I'll work out how to do that. To be honest, I work on IBM mainframes and, most (all?) of the time, my MacBook copes with anything I throw at it. Size isn't something I usually have to worry about.
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Re: Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
These days, few pay attention to file sizes. But doing so still makes a lot of sense. And most images can be cleaned and scaled to work better as textures or background images. There are many ways of doing this, but as a general rule for simple plans with few colours, an indexed .png or .gif will give a smaller (and clearer) background image than a .jpg. Here is my approach when I need a background image - using the GIMP (but other image software can be used too):
Import image - often using Screenshot and Edit > Paste as > New Image - to the GIMP.
Select part of image you need and use Image > Crop to Selection.
Image > Scale Image to a size where it is still usable (usually well below 1000x1000 for a background image - depending on the size of the plan, of course).
Colours > Posterise to a point where the colours I want are clear, usually below 16 colours, depending on the original. (To get a B/W image, try Colours > Threshold instead of Posterise.
Image > Mode > Indexed reduces the size significantly.
File > Export using .png extension.
At the same time, I use the opportunity to remove unwanted information, maybe my own text, ensure the correct rotation etc. etc. When this image has been imported as a background, I end up with a .sh3d file where the (each) background image usually is less than 50 KB. ok
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Re: Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
Thanks to both of you for your excellent advice.
By the way, as a software developer myself, albeit banking software on mainframes, I appreciate the tremendous effort that goes into development of something like Sweet Home 3D. To be able to get something of this sophistication and quality free is astonishing. I congratulate everyone who contributes to this project, and others like it, for nothing more than the satisfaction of seeing a job very well done and the fact that so many others can share the benefits.
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Re: Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
To be able to get something of this sophistication and quality free is astonishing.
Hear, hear. And for a one-man-operation, it is really unique. Kudos to Emmanuel Puybaret for his job. I am not a developer, but I have been chairing for some pretty hefty development projects, but none as tidy and bug-free as SH3D. Even with some of the main software houses. Also, sorry for the detailed (patronising and not very accurate) file format lesson. Put it down to a personal hang-up with bloated files and software. And also, as this is a forum, maybe a very basic and rough intro to graphic file formats can be of use... ok
France
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Re: Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
You're too nice guys
Jon, in case you didn't know, you can also simply reduce the size in pixels of your image with Preview application if it accepts to open such a big image.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
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Re: Am I the only one who can't import a background? (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.9.3)
I started off in development in 1979 on an IBM System/34, that was around 7 years before IBM launched the PC (under DOS).
I was an operator before that, on an ICL 1901T and an ICL 1904S. Both of those machines had "knitted core", i.e. the main memory was comprised of ferrite rings with 3 wires through each of them. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory , noting especially the last photograph at the bottom, right hand side of the article.)
We also had exchangeable disk drives. If you have reasonable broadband, you might like to download the Operator's Manual of Peripherals for ICL 1900 series at http://www.datasheets.pl/computers/ICL%201900...Manual_of_Peripherals.pdf . Page 32 explains how I used to clean the surfaces of the actual magnetic discs; you couldn't have any dust particles between the read/write heads and the (1KB per platter, as I recall) disks when you loaded them onto the top-loading washing machine, er, sorry, hard disc drive... it's just that it was the size of a washing machine. We were fairly advanced where I worked, we not only had 4 platter discs/disc dives, we also had 8 platter discs/disc drives. :-) (Smug!)
Nowadays, one of the uses to which I put my MacBook is processing of photographic images. I have a Canon 7D and I shoot in RAW format. RAW format images, on my camera, average around 24GB. Yes, twenty-four gigabytes, and we're talking 8 bit bytes, here, not the 6 bit bytes we had on the ICL 1900s (they worked in Octal).
I realise that I am, indeed, a boring old fart but, hey, I've really tried to keep up with the crowd and down wid de yoof, innit?
I'm 61 now and I'm being made redundant at the end of the month. I've been talking to some agencies about IBM i contracts (my main language is RPG). They tell me that there are some around but they are rare. They also told me that, when they do come up, they have difficulty filling them. Needless to say, I told them that's because most of us are dead. :-)
It's great to see the advancements that come along so frequently, now, (apart from the phenomenal waste of time [as I see it] that is playing games on consoles instead of playing real games outside). I don't think that I could have been born at a better time in history (1953). I was alive when the Everest was first conquered, when man first went into space, when supersonic passenger flight was available and I watched, live, men landing on the moon. I've witnessed geometric growth in computer power, coupled with a massive reduction in the size of, well, just about everything. My TV is hanging on the wall - as BBC's "Tomorrow's World" predicted it would, back in the 1970s - and I can communicate with the whole world (apart from some backward Muslim and communist countries) freely, 24 hours a day, over the internet using the world wide web.
What could possibly go wrong?
By the way, I'm now flying with Sweet Home 3D. It's totally brilliant. My only question, to myself, is how stupid was I actually paying money for Home Design Studio which is totally crap in comparison?
