Sweet Home 3D 3.4

[Puybaret]

Thank you for your feedback. [:)]

I fixed a bug in the version 3.4 beta 37 to improve performances when you set textures on many different walls, rooms or furniture. Hope you can confirm it works better when you try to modify these objects (just trying to move them should make a difference).

[hansmex]

Emmanuel,

How many textures would you consider to be "many" textures?
I prepared a room with 20 boxes in it, all in all 30 different textures, with a compressed file size of 4.1 MB.
I made a second room with 82 different textures, and a compressed file size of 10.3 MB.
Is that enough?

Moving boxes is as smooth as I would expect.
Rendering in Q3 with just the ceiling light at 800x800 is fast.
The 3D preview rotates smoothly as well.

I can share the file(s), or prepare an even bigger one.

Hans

[Puybaret]

Thank you for your tests.

[...] Is that enough?

I would say it depends on the power of your processor. Recently, some users complained about some performance regression and the bug I found could lead to some performance loss. But the slowing effect could take place only when trying to compute 3D updates, after moving wall, rooms or furniture which use some texture, or changing their size. Rendering speed won't get faster in the photo creation dialog.

[hansmex]

Emmanuel,

I have a dual core machine, not sure which processor exactly, about 3-4 yrs old.
Maybe the problem is mainly with "older" machines with even lower specs?

Hans

[Puybaret]

It wasn't annoying on my Intel i7 too, but I clearly measured a waste of computation in textures handling that wasn't supposed to happen.

In version 3.4 beta 38, I improved ground management to be able to handle elevations up to 1000m without viewing some black parts at the horizon in the 3D view. Miserably, SunFlow renderer starts to render incorrectly the ground at an elevation higher than 100m, and it's getting worse at higher elevations. Not sure I'll try to fix that soon or I'll limit it back to 100m.

[Puybaret]

In version 3.4 beta 39, it's finally possible to visit underground levels by setting a negative elevation. The minimum elevation of the point of view depends on the current minimum elevation of levels.
To avoid quality problems, I finally limited the max elevation to 100m.

The minimum elevation is set to -10m at this time. If you find a good reason why I should allow a smaller value, please tell me before I release version 3.4 (it should happen soon).

[pencilart]

Great work Emmanuel!
I made a swimming pool in the back yard of a house I'm testing. I also made a "basement" but it's more like a crawl space. You can't see it unless you go down there.

I'm attaching snapshots so you can see.

[Puybaret]

Sweet Home 3D 3.4 was released tonight.
Thank you all for your feedback and support. [:)]

[pencilart]

I just thought of a question about importing libraries:

When importing a furniture library and there is a piece that has the same name as one already in the catalog, will it ask to rename it or simply overwrite it, or make a duplicate of it?

I'm asking because I'm planning to import my furniture library onto this new(ish) computer and I have a few of those pieces in my catalog already and I don't want a lot of unnecessary duplicates. I would need to know the difference between the newly imported pieces and the old ones so that I could go back and delete the old ones. This is because I have set different default measurements on some of them.

[pencilart]

I just discovered something with the Windows version (on Windows 7 that has Java version 7 update 2 installed).

The "virtual visit" does not seem to work. When "virtual visit" is selected, the view is still the "aerial view" but there's no home showing at all and the view does not change despite moving the visitor around.