Sweet Home 3D Help > Creating photos and videos

|  |  | Creating photos

To create 3D images or photos of your home, choose the 3D view > Create photo... menu item or click on the Create photo tool. Create photo tool This will display the following dialog box showing the size, quality and possibly other settings used during the image creation process, along with the Create button that launches the computing of the image and the Save... button that will let you save the shown image, once computed. If the default size of the image doesn't satisfy you, choose a different width and height. When the Apply proportions check box is selected, the height of the image is automatically updated at each change of the width according to the proportions given by the combo box beside the Apply proportions check box. The Quality slider lets you choose between the four following levels, from worst to best quality, or from the fastest to the slowest rendering engine, depending on your way of thinking

| 1. The lowest quality level matches what you see in the 3D view with the same field of view. |  |  | 3. The third quality level uses a completely different rendering process called Global illumination with shadows computed from the location of the sun and other lights.
| 2. The second quality level is the same as the lowest quality with additional shadows displayed under furniture that lies at ground level, giving a more realistic rendering. |  | 4. The best quality level is similar to the previous level. Details are better rendered and shiny surfaces looks better.

At the two best quality levels, the rendered image depends on the location and the power of lights. By default, the image is computed at midday with additional lights automatically placed at the ceiling of each room. If you want to control better the light sources in your home, possibly uncheck the Add ceiling lights check box, add some objects of the Lights category in the plan and adjust their power either with their power indicator or by editing their attributes. The power of the sun, the color and the direction of its rays depend on the hour of the day and the selected date, but also on the North direction, the geographic location and the time zone, the latter parameters being managed by the compass pane. The global brightness of the image depends also on the level of the light brightness set in the 3D view modification pane. Finally, the Create photo pane lets you choose also among the 4 different following types of lens.
Default lens | Depth of field lens
Fisheye lens | Spherical lens
If you want to compute a group of photos in the same batch, store the points of view you're interested in with the 3D view > Store point of view... menu item then select the 3D view > Create photos at points of view... menu item. It will display a dialog box that will let you choose the size, the image quality and the file format of the computed images, before computing and saving them in the folder of your choice. At the two best quality levels, the date/time and lens used for a given rendered point of view will be the last values you entered in the Create photo pane at the moment you stored or modified that point of view. If you never opened the Create photo pane or changed the date/time in that panel, the date/time will be midday on the day when the edited home was created.

• | The spherical lens computes equirectangular images. These images with a strange look have always a height equal to the half of their width (2/1 proportions) and are useful to generate a panorama with Quicktime VR, Flash or Java applets, with tools like PanoSalado or PTViewer.
• | In the Lights category of the catalog, there are some special lights called Light source and represented by a light bulb icon. These light sources have no physical 3D representation and can be seen in the 3D view only when selected, for feedback purpose. They are used only to enlighten the 3D view at the two best quality levels. Enlarging them will produce softer shadows.
• | At the two best quality levels, the color of the sun rays depends on the elevation of the sun in the sky at day time, and the sun doesn't produce light at night time. If you selected a color for the sky in the 3D view pane or if the current mode is Aerial view, a sky image computed according to the hour of the day is used for the rendering of the sky. If you chose a texture for the sky, that texture will always be used in Virtual visit mode whatever the selected hour.
• | If the computed image is all black, check whether the virtual observer is in a wall or not, and at night time, if there are some visible lights with a power greater than zero or if Add ceiling lights check box is selected. If the hour you entered is an hour of the day, check also if the geographical location and the time zone are consistent. Remember that when it's midday in Central European Time zone, it's still night time in California.
• | In Aerial view mode, the ceilings of the room are not seen. If you want to see them at the best two quality levels, you should use Virtual visit mode and elevate the point of view of the virtual visitor.
• | At a given quality level, you can still improve the image quality by choosing a bigger size for your image, then reducing the size of the computed image in an editor like The Gimp.
• | The Create photo and Create photos at points of view dialog boxes aren't modal. This means that it doesn't block the input in other windows and lets you modify your home or your point of view in the main window, while one of these dialog boxes is opened.
• | While a photo a is computed, changes made in your home won't affect the current rendering.