I actually did the same thing so that I could figure out how to lay out my workshop!
What I'd do is:
- Spreadsheet workbench --> Create spreadsheet (name it "measurements"). (This is optional)
- Switch to Part design workbench --> Create body (name it "layout") --> select XY plane --> Create sketch --> Create Polyline
- Zoom out, start drawing the rooms in your house, approximately to scale.
- Before going into too much detail, add a dimension (select line --> "Constrain Distance") to the first line you draw, so that you can do the rest of your drawing approximately to scale. Then the general shape won't get messed up when you add dimensions to everything else.
- (If you have a photo or picture, you can import that to sketch over).
- Add constraints to match your room measurements, mostly vertical or horizontal distance constraints. Be careful not to overconstrain the sketch. (You can put the measurements directly into the sketch constraints, or you can put them into the top-level spreadsheet, create an alias for each cells, and then set the dimensions to reference those cells).
- Once the rooms are drawn, close the sketch and create a new sketch on the xy plane called "furniture".
- Draw some rectangles for your sofas / tables / etc, delete any horizontal and vertical constraints that get automatically added (they look like little | and _ icons), and instead apply perpendicularity constraints. Dimension your rectangles using only the "constrain distance" tool. Now you can drag them around the room and rotate them freely.
- If you want to make 3D models for these too, create new Part Design bodies for each room and each piece of furniture, create a shape binder referencing the master sketches in the Layout body, and then extrude the sketches using the "Pad" operation.
That's about as much tutorial as it makes sense to pack into a HN comment. If you give it a try, I hope it works out for you!
There are excellent tutorials on youtube. Spending a couple of hours doing these will allow you to hit the ground running.
FreeCad is rapidly evolving and quite a few tutorials are already using the v1.1 dev builds. Pay attention to the version used in tutorials as you can run into trouble following them if you are on an older release.
I’ll take a look. I’ve used some of those purpose built tools before and I was never much of a fan. Usually due to how the furniture was handled.
Back in high school I had extensive experience with AutoCAD R14 (3 years with it, after 2 years of board drafting), and then in college I had some more experience with a couple other packages. But this was all a couple decades ago now.
Your CAD experience level sounds like it is similar, but a bit higher than mine (2 years hand drawing, 2 years CAD, some more hobbyistic CAD & 3D modelling over the years for personal projects), so yeah SweetHome3D might not be that much help for you over using some CAD software directly.
I found furniture handling OK, but certainly has its rough edges. Good thing is that one can just import 3d models and so create the relevant pieces of furniture themselves; or use the generic boxes that SH3D has, if it's just for 2d space usage.
I did a few office space modellings with it, i.e. to get a feeling of how the space could be used best, and for that I found it quite OK. The result I got compared to the time invested was pretty good for my taste.
I like using paper and cardboard for this, dollhouse style, much easier to move things around and visualize that way and more fun than clicking a mouse to boot :^)
Inkscape is good for typing dimensions into rectangles tho
This was my plan B. I do have a scale I can use for it.
I’ll check out Inkscape as well. I’ve tried using some raster graphics in the past, but I couldn’t type dimensions and had to use the rules and guides with snapping. It mostly worked, but was a bit annoying.
