Home Design 3D

Home Design 3D

49 ratings
BASIC TIPS AND REFERENCE NOTES
By DrDerpenstein
The goal of this guide is to provide referential information, assist with some of the lesser known tricks in the program, and provide some basic assets and templates for ease of use. Housing markets are not uniform and vary widely across regions and styles. This guide will assume average single family housing based in the Midwest USA.

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about architecture, building, etc. Consult a professional regarding any 'out of game' topics.
4
   
Award
Favorite
Favorited
Unfavorite
DETAILS VIA ZILLOW
A great way to build a house with reasonable dimensions and expectations while getting ideas for inspiration is to browse Zillow for houses in the desired region. Use filters for price, home type, and similar specs to get a realistic picture of lot size and living space.

When viewing a property (for sale or existing) the number atop the lists the square footage of the house. To obtain the lot size; scroll down to the "Facts and Features" section as pictured below.



Some real estate agents will also provide the floor plans or city zoning breakdowns amongst the images. With this in mind, it's much easier to set realistic expectations for a new house in a similar neighborhood.
HOW TO BUILD A BASEMENT - 2 METHODS
At time of writing; it is impossible to "dig" beneath the map as one would commonly assume necessary for building a basement. Instead, for lack of a simple description, you must build a standard room (which will become the basement) and then "bury" it via 1 of 2 methods:

METHOD 1: Room Crowding
This is the same method demonstrated, confusingly, in this guide[en.homedesign3d.net]. Below are steps which are more simple.
  1. Build a room on the initial ground which will become your basement.
  2. Add a staircase to the basement.
  3. Surround this basement room with other, empty, rooms.
    [3A] If you wish to have basement windows you will need to lower the height of the surrounding rooms to the required level. This can be done in "Aerial" mode.
  4. Go "Up" one level so as to see the ceilings of all rooms. Use the "Textures" tool to paint the tops of the non-basement rooms grass green.





METHOD 2: Land Topping
This method is slightly easier for standard and simple houses but will not support building into hillsides, protruding basement windows and makes porches more difficult. The benefit of this method is the ability to properly size the lot and represent the land space above.
  1. Build a room on the initial ground which will become your basement.
  2. Add a staircase to the basement.
  3. In "2D" view go "Up" one level. This should be the level above the newly formed basement.
  4. Add land to the desired size / cover the entire buildable map.

* It may be necessary to lower the height of the basement walls (done via "Aerial" mode) a small amount for the stairs to blend properly.



HOW TO BUILD A HILLSIDE
This process is similar to the "Room Crowding" method described in the "How To Build A Basement" section of this guide. The general idea is to build a room on the default ground and surround it with empty rooms which descend away.

To demonstrate an exposed basement observe the images of this "Hobbit Hole" style house below:


Each of the empty rooms has a height descending at a rate of 3" per room.

This is a tedious process but does imitate a hillside. Although this demo has single-row hills per step, you can can have each column with multiple rows to represent uneven and dynamic hills.
COMMON ROOM DIMENSIONS
Reminder: These dimensions are based on US standards in the approximate Midwest region. 'Living Space' assumes the 2020 Census[www.census.gov] average single-family house size.

AREA
SQUARE FEET
DIMENSIONS (Ft)
City Lot
8,600
n/a
Living Space
2,261
n/a
Garage - 1 Car
308
14x22
Garage - 2 Car
483
22x22
Municipal Road (width)
n/a
24±
City Sidewalk (width)
n/a
4
Residential Walkway (width)
n/a
3
Kitchen
174
n/a
Pantry
25
n/a
Den
224
14x16
Bathroom (Shower/Tub)
110
n/a
Washroom (Toilet Only)
40
n/a
Bedroom - Master
224
14x16
Bedroom - Common
144
12x12
Closets
48
6x8
TEXTURES
HD3D allows custom images to be imported into the game via the Textures > Imported textures menu. There are a number of common household goods which do not have a proper in-game model. Such items may include various plants, safes, and utilities. Many of these models can be supplemented via texture images.

  • HD3D supports transparent .png images.
  • Standard image size is 512x512 px.

Images greater than 512x512 will become distorted or cropped. Images significantly smaller may wrap improperly.

Below is a small assortment of usable images:
6 Comments
SgtMama 12 Jun @ 12:01pm 
I am trying to use the geometric shapes and add my images of our gaming computers, it either puts it on all sides of the cube OR if I use a thin panel, size it down to fit onto the cube it duplicates it in a 2x2 grid. I'm so confused!
nick 7 Sep, 2023 @ 5:59pm 
Hi, I am having trouble getting the room names to respect the room boundaries, I end up with wall segments and that seems to allow leakage of the room. Thx Nick
samlq 1 Sep, 2022 @ 2:36pm 
thanks for the time and effort in putting out this guide
professorconundrum 18 May, 2022 @ 4:32pm 
Thanks!
DrDerpenstein  [author] 17 May, 2022 @ 1:11pm 
@professorconundrum:
I didn't want to bloat the guide with too many images but I do have more in my GitHub (link below). There's also a file titled "NeighborhoodTemplate.hd3d" which is a template for standard US city lots. One side of the street represents driveway housing and the other represents alley way garages. Each property has a 1 car and a 2 car garage, delete the irrelevant one on a per-build basis. There's a general store on the corner where I've kept commonly copied assets for quick reference. Enjoy as you will!

https://github.com/MorningCoffeeZombie/SourceGameScripts/tree/master/HomeDesign3D
professorconundrum 17 May, 2022 @ 10:05am 
great textures. share more!