Live Interior 3D

April, 2007

By: Tim Danaher

COMPANY: Belight Software
RATING:
PRICE: $79.95 (approx £40) + Boxed version $89.95 (approx £45)
ISSUE: 23 9 DATE: Apr 07

Verdict: Needs PowerPC G4, G5 or Intel processor + 1GB Ram + OpenGL Graphics card with 32MB VRam

This is the first release of Live Interior from Ukranian software house BeLight. Its premise is simple: to allow you to design the interior spaces of your home or office. To this end, it incorporates a 2D drafting environment, a 3D viewer that uses OpenGL to visualise the scenes, and a Browser where you can select from many bundled items of 3D furniture and building elements. However, Live Interior also offers full integration with Google's 3D warehouse, the online repository of free models uploaded by user's of Google's SketchUp.

On first opening the program, you're presented with an assistant that allows you to select from a number of readymade scenes - bedroom, living room or office. This is a good place to start if you just want to familiarise yourself with the Live Interior interface. There are also example floor layouts (with walls and windows) for flats, cottages and studios. Missing from the list of readymades, however, are any bathroom and kitchen examples, although it's possible to build these from scratch using the supplied drawing tools and components.

Drawing your walls in 2D is easy enough, although in common with a lot of programs, Live Interior 3D takes its measurement from the wall centre line. Most people, however, will be working with the internal dimensions - wall surface to wall surface - so if you're not aware of this, you could mis-measure room dimensions by a whole wall thickness.

Walls 'heal' - that is, they join and resolve their corners automatically, and there are inference lines that let you know when you're drawing relative to other elements. This helps keep rooms square. And apart from the 45° chamfers allowed, square is what they'll stay - there are no curve-wall drawing tools in Live Interior 3D as yet. You also have the option of dragging out snappable horizontal and vertical guides from the rulers, la Photoshop. Drawing isn't 'modeless' - that is, you can't switch to the Zoom or Pan tools to concentrate on a part of your plan while you're drawing the walls, and then resume drawing.

As you draw out walls, dimension lines guide you and the square meterage of completed volumes is displayed. There are also sets of dimensioning tools and Text tools for annotating plans. Finally, there's a set of tools for capping the room with walls and floors. Openings such as windows and doors can be dragged off the Library palette onto walls, where they cut the correct-size openings in walls.

The Library pane is where you access all your objects and drag them into your plan. These can then be positioned in plan and will show up in the 3D view. This can be open at the same time so the changes made in one are reflected on the fly in the other. We did, however, have problems with the Google 3D warehouse capability: it simply took us straight to the 3D warehouse page in Safari, rather than displaying a set of draggable thumbnails as stated in the manual. Models could be saved from the Google Warehouse page and then imported into Live Interior 3D, though. BeLight told us that an update to fix this would be available by time the time you read this.

The 3D View itself is rendered in OpenGL and has the option of displaying both lights and shadows. The quality of lights and shadows was fairly accurate and helped to give a good impression of the spaces created, especially considering the rendering is 'live'. Live Interior 3D also supports per-pixel OpenGL shading for more accurate light and shadow spill, but your video card must support it. You can also set the model's latitude in the Preferences to give more geographically accurate shadows. The final renders can then be captured as a screenshot.

Live Interior 3D is a neat little solution to visualising interior space - the supplied libraries give a fair bit of scope for designing and the ability to use SketchUp .skp files and .3ds (3D Studio Max) opens up a huge reservoir of content for would-be designers - and certainly its low price can't be faulted. It's still only a 1.0 release, so some teething troubles are to be expected, and we hope BeLight addresses the problems of modeless drafting in a subsequent release.

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