5mo ago

(F)OSS 2D floor planner

I’m just looking for a simple 2D floor planner that is easy to use and has the ability to show measurements.

The two most recommended open source tools I’ve seen have shortcomings.

Sweet Home 3D:

Very 3D centric, which over complicates things.
Project was recently acquired/handed off to a company and the iOS version is published by “AI Photo Editor Lab SRL”

Does anyone have other recommendations?

15 comments

I only ever used it for 3D printing but FreeCAD apparantly also has a floor plan functionality. I found this video that might give you some insights on how it looks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMk7pdnEnXM
When using FreeCAD for 3D printing, you don't necessarily have to add measures/constraints to everything, so I'd assume it's similar here.

I've used illustrator but ink scape (free) would also work. I just use basic shapes and just ignore the unit. Meaning that I consider a mm in the software to be an inch IRL. That way I can get everything into proportion in relation to each other. I use the text tool for labelling furniture and stuff, grouping, and align tools too. It's helped me tremendously.
- I have used inkscape for this purpose and it can be effective. The display units can be changed in the preferences (inch, cm, etc) and basic shape dimensions input directly. You can input absolute position for shapes and nodes, but I didn't notice an easy way for relative position. They also have a path effect called "Measure Segments" for that functionality. FWIW, I later preferred blender, but I might try a dedicated tool like LibreCAD mentioned in another comment. They seem to have decent documentation and a wiki.
  
  Interesting. Maybe someday I'll try blender and/or librecad

I always use gimp. Just define one pixel equals one millimeter, and then make all the furnitures as separate layers so you can move them around separately. Works great!

I tried draw.io for a similar task and, while it worked alright, I agree that it's a bit too much work to set up nicely
There are also some CAD tools that are FOSS. Maybe some of those can help?
- Thats a great idea. Theres lots of Foss cad tools, and Im sure they have plenty of flexibility even when contrained to 2d.

What's wrong with adding constraint dimensions?
- Are you referring to the measurement objects I mentioned in the draw.io portion?
  It’s extra work that I find unnecessary if the walls already are set to the correct dimensions. I would like to be able to just turn on/off the visibility. And also not have to edit 2 objects for the same measurement if anything changes.
  
  I'm not sure how you expect a program to know the dimensions you want without assigning values. Its a core principle of parametric cad.

if you use sweethome and only look at the top view its as good as a 2d application.
I feel like youre just being fussy here man

15 comments