Live Interior 3D 1.1
Reviewed by Ted Bade
BeLight Software, Ltd PO Box 47 65005, Odessa Ukraine +380 48 738-08-49 http://www.belightsoftware.com Released: April 2007 $80 USD |
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Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later; Universal binary; 600 MB Hard Drive Space; CD-ROM drive. Strengths: Great Mac-like interface, terrific 3D rendering at a click of a button, A good-sized database of objects to work with and access to the Google 3D Warehouse. Weaknesses: The objects in the database are mostly generic, not specific and Object filename descriptions are terse. There is a learning curve in getting to understand the program’s interface. |
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Live Interior 3D is a home design program. With it you can create a digital version of a room, then modify it to get an idea of what it would look like if you changed certain parts, such as the color scheme, the furniture, or even moving the rooms light sources. It is a good program that is relatively easy to use.
It has been a while since the Macintosh platform has had a home design program. There are several programs for Window’s users, but until now, other than using a generic Computer Aided Design (CAD) program, there were few real choices for the Macintosh. Leave it to the great people at BeLight to be the first to bring one to the Macintosh platform!
What Live Interior 3D does is offer a set of tools designed to simplify the task of creating a digital rendering of a room. Once the room is created, you can then furnish the room using items from the provided 1000+ database of objects, or pull them from Google’s SketchUp database.
I have played with a number of programs like this and a few
CAD programs over the years. They are usually difficult to learn and don’t
generally produce exactly what you really want. While Live Interiors 3D fits
right into this definition, I have to admit it has one of the better interfaces
I have yet dealt with. It is definitely one of the most Macintosh-like programs
of this genre I have ever seen, which should be taken as a seriously positive
comment.
These programs tend to be CAD programs with a toolset that benefits a specific task, in this case, creating a room. CAD programs tend to have rules and requirements that seem unnatural to the way the average user thinks. An easy example of this is that you would never try to place a large cabinet in a room upside down or a coat rack 3 inches off the floor. A CAD program has no concept of what the object is, so there needs to be a way to define which side of the object would naturally touch against another object, such as the floor or a wall. Live Interiors 3D provides ways to manipulate and define objects so they take their natural place in the room.
(This is the 3D view of a sample room)
When you first look at a program like this, it is always best to play with some of the provided finished products to see what you can do, once you learn how to use it. Live Interior 3D offers a handful of completed rooms which can be used to learn about the 3D walk around aspects of this program. Let me say that the rendering this program provides it really nice. You can turn on or off light sources and shadows. If your Mac has the power, turning everything on gives a really nice view of the room.
While the image is nice, I find that the perspective one
gets in the program is not anything like the perspective I would get if I stood
in the room, (or at least what I think I get). When viewing a room with this
program, I get the feeling that I am a man trying to view a tiny Hobbit’s
space. If you have ever tried to take a photo of a small room with a standard
camera lens, you will probably know what I mean. The resulting images never
truly represent the room.
I also found the navigations tools in this program a bit difficult to manage. There are three means of moving. The footprint icon gives you QuickTime VR type controls. I found the controls acted too quickly; it was difficult to get the perspective I wanted. Another control lets you spin in place and a virtual iPod-like click wheel can be used to maneuver about. In the real world, you can back up until you hit a wall. In the virtual world, you easily go through the wall, so as you back up, suddenly you are outside the room,looking at the other side of the room’s wall. Being able to get a perspective from beyond a wall would be nice, if the wall would become invisible. The controls take a little getting used too.
After you complete your project, you can place one or more cameras in the room and use these for making images and to start your view whenever you open it. This is also a good tool for creating a still of your planned project. It would have been nice to add the ability to change the camera (you can move it about) so that you could get a slightly smaller perspective. In the real world this would be like using a fish eye lens to view the room.
Although playing with the canned rooms can be a real treat, the real value of a program like this is to be able to create a room in your house that you want to work with. Live Interior 3D was good at helping me do this. I won’t say it made it an easy task, but the program is designed in such a way that the difficulties of doing such as task can be dealt with.
To give this program a whirl I decided to reproduce my living room. We wanted to replace the drapes and would love to see a variety of colors in the room before we bought anything. So I set out to build the living room of my house as a test project.
(A 2D view of my project)
One would think that a room is four walls, a door, some windows, and perhaps a few other features. To reproduce one’s actual space can be a challenge. Getting the correct dimensions is the first challenge. There is a lot of “homework” associated with getting the actual dimensions of your living space. This includes items one might consider minutia, such as the thickness of walls. While it won’t matter for the interior look, if you are putting together an entire house, wrong wall thicknesses can cause some issues.
In Live Interior, it’s easy to build a room. To create the wall, you select the wall tool, drag for the length of the wall, then click to stop. Since the tool was designed to draw a room, it wants to continue around the corner to make four walls. My living room opens to the dining room and really has only two walls, the third wall is a railing which is open to the stairs down to the front door. Once I got past the fact that I had to convert my carefully measured lengths from feet/inches [Editor: the Preferences can be changed to feet/inches] to all inches, it was easy to adjust the wall to its exact dimensions. However, I still don’t know why one cannot just simply type in the dimensions one wants and let the program draw it. I was never very good using a mouse to draw a measured distance, so I struggled a bit trying to get things exactly right.
Now I had the two walls of my living room, with an opening from the adjacent dining room and an opening to where the railing is. Next we paint the walls. The standard wall in Live Interior 3D has two sides, and molding near the ceiling and the floor. Each of these parts can be colored separately. Live Interior 3D offers a fair selection of paint colors. Again, they are generic rather then those offered by a particular paint manufacturer. However, you can use the materials tool to create a custom material. In my case, I went to the manufacturer of the paint I used in my living room and found the color, made a copy of the paint chip they provided and pulled that into Live Interior 3D. A little work, but not that hard. Besides paints, Live Interior 3D offers a wide variety of other materials to use and you can create just about anything else. What is cool is that you can enter the 3D view, select the object you want to color and see the effects of the color as you change it! Just be sure to turn on lighting, otherwise you will get a dull image.
(Light are off, a dull image results)
Next we added the windows. Live Interior 3D is very nice about how windows are added. You select the window, make sure the dimensions are what you want, including the height of the window above the floor, then place the window where it needs to be on the wall. The program takes care of removing the necessary piece of wall. The window then becomes an see-through object. That was very cool. My problem was finding a window that looked remotely like the ones I own.
This is a little item of contention that I have with programs like this and the building industry in general. Companies are so caught up in licensing and “protecting” their rights that a designer or a consumer finds it very difficult to get a digital rendering of the items he or she actually wants to use. Live Interior 3D includes a number of basic items, which one can use in a pinch, but ones which your probably won’t find in your house.
Live Interiors also includes an interface to Google’s “Sketch-Up” item database. You can use Google’s search engine to locate an object that closely resembles what you have. Even in that database I couldn’t find many of the actual items in my basic living room. While this is not a problem specific to Live Interiors, I am frustrated about it. The advantage of accessing Google’s database is that they provide the tools to create items, so a lot of people have created and then share what they create. [Editor: They also “forgot” to add bathroom features to the basic room set.]
Live Interior 3D will let you manipulate the dimensions of an object. In my case, I chose a standard window from their database which looked a little like those I own and manipulated the size to match mine. An issue I had with the program comes in here. Objects used in this program obviously have a lot of properties, all of which can be manipulated to suit your design. For some reason, the designers created two separate means of accessing these properties, which the user accesses in different ways. In the case of my windows, I wanted to change the standard dimensions to match those in my project. There were boxes to put the dimensions in, but I couldn’t get it to work, until I discovered that the other means of accessing this object had a lock on the dimensions and the dimension ratio. The “keep ratio” lets you change one dimension and the other dimensions change in a similar fashion, basically changing the size of the object. If you need to change the shape of the object, you need to turn off the ratio feature as well. Besides the dimensions of the window there is an important dimension of height above floor! I forgot to write this one down and had to run back upstairs to get it!
Adding the other objects in the living room was also a task. Few items I could find were close to what I actually own. I wasn’t impressed with the objects in either the Live Interior 3D or the Google database. At best, I was able to locate things that were close. What I would like to do is recreate my actual environment, and use this basic model to try design features. Is it too much to ask that I actually be able to see representations of my actual furnishings? [Editor: images can be imported as PDF, JPG or PNG files.]
Then there was the wall of my room that is a railing and a stairway. Don’t get me started about that. Live Interiors offers a variety of objects including vases and painting to put on the wall, but no railings. They do offer columns, but that would require finding one I like, shrinking it down and finding an object to set on top. It is doable, but not something I was going to try for this review. I finally settled on just putting a wall there, leaving the opening for the central corridor.
I had to do a little creative searching and work to locate other objects in the living room as well. Live Interior 3D didn’t provide a fireplace that was close to what I have, but I did find a sofa and lamps that were acceptable. Here again the Google database was a real help.
(A window to Google’s database of objects)
Then came the time to install the curtains, the main purpose of this exercise. You can use a work search when accessing the Google database, but not so inside of Live Interior 3D. The Live Interior 3D side bar shows four “tabs”; three for accessing objects and the fourth shows a project tree of the items in your current project. The three item tabs are “Building Elements”, “Furnishings”, and “Google 3D Warehouse”. I had almost given up on finding even basic curtains, the noticed one of the canned rooms had them, so I searched through all the furnishing sections and found them at the bottom of Miscellaneous. The thumbnails of the objects and their names are cramped into the limited sidebar area, any name more then a few characters is impossible to read. It might have been nicer to open a separate window with these objects, so one could spread out a bit more. Luckily, mousing over the object shows the full name. With the curtain object in hand, I changed their size to fit my dimensions and put them where they belonged.
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(controls)
Using Live Interiors to search the Google database is easy. Finding what you want is like any search, you need to use the same word for the object that the person creating it used. However, Google lets the creator add other words that might help another locate the object. First you select the Google search icon, which looks like a truck. This opens a browser window inside of Live Interior 3D. There is a text box for the search word. Once you enter the search words and hit return, Google returns a group of matches. For my drapery search, I first used: “drapery” which found four entries, two were drapes, a canopy bed and an office space. I selected the curtain item that was close to a drape shape and clicked on download. Live Interior 3D then downloaded this into the program and placed it on my diagram. I then had to change it dimensions, colors, and position to suit the image.
Lighting is an important aspect of seeing your finished design. You need to make sure you account for light sources including ambient light. I placed two stand lamps in the living room I was building, corresponding to where they sit in reality. The program allows you to change the luminosity of the lamps, but I could find no way to manipulate the color temperature of the light sources. The program can show the effects of sunlight or moonlight on the room. You can tell Live Interior 3D which direction the room is facing, then choose a time of day, it will locate the sun (or moon) as a source of light [Editor: It allows for morning, day, evening and night]. One needs to play around a lot with the lights to get a view that resembles what happens in reality. In my case, I needed to place a lamp in the space that would be my dining room if I had continued in that direction, to get a lighting effect similar to what I really have. Luckily Live Interior 3D didn’t have a problem with me placing a light without first defining the room. [Editor: I found the “Luminosity” controls and added them to the other tow control pictures above.]
Floors and ceilings are automatically created when you create a room (four walls). In the case of my two-wall living room, I needed to define and add the floor so I could attach a carpet, which is obviously a source of reflected light. You can capture a color and a texture for a rug (or any other material). All you need is a digital image of it. I didn’t try grabbing colors from an actual image, but I did extract the color and texture from a carpet manufacturer site. The result looks pretty good.
(The finished product!)
If you want to see the effects of changing the carpet or flooring, just create new materials with the correct names, select the floor and go into the 3D view. With the materials inspector window open, you can change between the various items you want to see. Again, the only problem with this is that the color of the lamps in the room might not match those in your home. In my living room I have two floor lamps that have full spectrum fluorescent bulbs in them. The color of these lamps is a lot more blue and a lot less yellow then the standard incandescent lamps that would typically be used in these lamps. The color of your light source has a big effect on the look of the materials in the room.
Conclusion
Overall, I found Live Interiors 3D easy to use, once I got past the learning curve. The learning curve isn’t very steep, but you do need to put a little work into it. There are a lot of aspects of this program I didn’t even try. As with any design program, expect to do a lot of work preparing your space.
If you are a real stickler for perfection, you will probably need to create most or all of the items in you spaces. People who are willing to accept a general idea can easily put a generic space together. BeLight have proved to be a great company, so I expect to see a number of the issues I have with the program resolved as they improve it. I intend to have a little chat with them about light sources!
Recommendation
Live Interiors 3D will help you design a room or floor. It will give you a good idea of how things will look. It might be hard to get an exact image, but it will be easy to use this program to get a very good idea of what it will be like. I think it is well worth the money. It has a definite Macintosh feel to it and is easier to use then any of the Window’s versions I have tried in the past. If you are working on a design project, I highly recommend this program.
