BeLight > Feeling at home
with Live Interior 3D

Issue 35, Fall-Winter, 2007

By: Ric Getter

There are some talented people who can look at an empty room and immediately visualize the prefect interior design. There are a lot of people who mistakenly believe they have this ability. And then, there are the rest of us who spend endless weekend afternoons moving furniture and repainting walls under the uncertain guidance of the latter. The scenario has provided ample material to TV sitcom writers and marriage counselors. BeLight's new Live Interior 3D offers a far better alternative.

The idea behind Live Interior 3D is not particularly new or unique. There is a competitor or two on the Mac platform and a whole host of them for Windows. What piqued our interest in BeLight's offering is that it selected the most useful set of features and served them up with a nicely designed interface supported by some very good documentation.

The best way to get familiar with Live Interior 3D is to start off with one of the 50 room templates that are included with the program. By default, what appears when you load a floor plan is a 2D diagram drawn to scale in the main window. The panel on the left lets you select furnishings from the extensive library that comes with the program or go to shopping online for something else. If the 1,000+ 3D objects included in the program aren't quite enough, you can use the built-in Google 3D Warehouse model search engine or go directly to many of the major manufacturers' Web sites to download 3D image files of their products.

Property Manager

The inspector panel on the right of the screen is where you go to tweak the details, adjusting the color, size and proportions of the object you've selected and choosing from a huge collection of materials to apply to its surface. If the library doesn't include quite the look you want, you can import an image and add it to the library as a surface.

The real magic starts happening when you click the icon, switch into full 3D mode and see your design come to life. The lighting and rendering effects are truly spectacular. These features can consume a lot of horsepower, but fortunately BeLight provides several rendering options to accommodate your system's performance. In one 3D mode, you can walk through your virtual design or choose a camera view to fly around your room. Even though it's not quite as quick and easy as when you're working with the 2D floor plan, the 3D model lets your reposition objects. To preserve your work for posterity, you can take a snapshot of the 3D view or make a professional-looking printout of your floor plan.

Simple, But Not Always Easy

Even though the program is focused on interior design, it's still a very capable and surprisingly sophisticate 3D application. BeLight's designers have done an excellent job if simplifying the interface, but there is still a learning curve to work through. And. of course, you'll need to make sure your original measurements are accurate in order to avoid some nasty surprises when your new furniture arrives. Like pro 3D programs, Live Interior provides a "tree" that simplifies selected and even locking specific objects in your design. Also, the floor plans and objects are automatically scaled to real-world measurements so you can resize objects numerically, so you don't have to depend on your mousing skills.

Live Interior 3D's forté is interior design, specializing in rooms, suites and offices; generally single-story structure. This focus makes the program much simpler to manage than applications that try to provide full home design features. It also helps keep the price reasonable. BeLight's Live Interior is unquestionably the best 3D design application that $79.95 will buy. But being able to argue about a remodeling project in front of a computer screen rather than in a room full of construction debris makes it a bargain at virtually any price.

See other reviews...