Very interesting and impressive. User interface looks very clever. Seems Phil Jordan has done an exceptional job. And also started bridging an important gap.
Thanks to eTeks for never having let go of the open source model, which is one of the basic features that makes SH3D special. Especially for those of us who are not great fans of the app-store model in general.
That said, I am happy you came to the solution you did for Renovations 3D, and very much hope the split revenue model will generate lots and lots of income for eTeks. So congratulations, so far.
As an afterthought. I am looking for a new phone (dual sim/long battery life/waterproof) and realised that there are some manufacturers that make alternatives to the run-of-the-mill smart-phones, one with an infrared camera. I already use a protractor/plumb app, a colour analyzer app, a gps log, a compass etc. But cannot measure distances (accurately), for that I would need a laser measure built into the hardware (more useful than the infrared camera). If I were to dream, imagine what could be done with a phone with a laser measure (and possibly the increased accuracy of Galileo) + SH3D and some clever interfacing...
France
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Re: Renovations 3D for Android
Thanks for your comment about Renovations 3D. Phil Jordan has done a very good job by porting Java 3D and adapting Sweet Home 3D code to Android. I was pleased also to discover that drawing with the finger and modifying plan is usable on a tablet and even on a smartphone, with small changes to the computer behavior of Sweet Home 3D. Nevertheless, a tablet or a smartphone + your finger will hardly replace the wider screen of a computer + a mouse, as soon as you want to be productive. But there are surely plenty of situations where this kind of portable device can be useful.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
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Re: Renovations 3D for Android
Ok, thanks for the comments. It’s a pity I had to change the interface so far from the desktop version, it reduces the ease of use having to slide around and press buttons. I’m certainly hoping one day I can get 2D and 3D on a split view, for bigger tablets and TV’s. Emmanuel's excellent quality and open source code is what I owe the most to in getting this app ported across. I really can’t speak highly enough of the architecture of his code, I’m still amazed at it and I’ve been working with it for six months. I agree that Sweet Home 3D being open source is great, I’m a keen supporter of the open source world, and as the maintainer of Java3D I know how much can be gained from contributing to it. (In fact it allowed me to build this app at the least.) I’m hoping to give back to Sweet Home 3D some performance enhancements I’ve had to do, and hopefully Renovations 3D might be a channel for users to find Sweet Home 3D from the mobile world.
A phone with a built in laser measure would be a fantastic way to get a plan started! I like it. Currently I’ve been thinking of doing what some other apps do, which is touching your phone along each wall, and using the sensors to build up an image of the wall, based on the orientation and position of the phone on each hold. Given that I don’t have the hardware of a laser I might have to build that enhancement first. Like this
The first “extra” feature will probably be texture import from camera shots. Then maybe using the gyroscope and compass to view in a VR-like manner (and hopefully soon after a Google cardboard viewer too). Then an Android TV version to allow casting to a TV
But to be honest some of the core functions are missing like importing background images and all Help. I also wonder if render to photo might be very slow on android.
Thanks for taking a look and I really appreciate feedback, if you have any other comment or thoughts at all I’d love to hear them.
Western Europa
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Re: Renovations 3D for Android
A phone with a built in laser measure would be a fantastic way to get a plan started! I like it. Currently I’ve been thinking of doing what some other apps do, which is touching your phone along each wall, and using the sensors to build up an image of the wall, based on the orientation and position of the phone on each hold. Given that I don’t have the hardware of a laser I might have to build that enhancement first. Like this
The first “extra” feature will probably be texture import from camera shots. Phil.
The given link for the video is amazing, but it's only a little part of an existant project and we don't know exactly the average in percent between new and existant.
So, I think that most of them are for new houses and it would be unusable, because all plans have been already made.
But I like your idea about the textures, it will be for all the cases...
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Evil progresses when good people do nothing! --- SH3D 7.1 and nothing else - W11 64b in 4K
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Re: Renovations 3D for Android
Emmanuel's excellent quality and open source code
Even for a non-developer like me, this shines through. Having spec'ed and evaluated quite a few software projects professionally over the years, all I can say is that SH3D could stand up to some very costly and (over)complicated projects.
A phone with a built in laser measure would be a fantastic way to get a plan started! I like it. Currently I’ve been thinking of doing what some other apps do, which is touching your phone along each wall...
Quite amazing. I was not aware of the walk-around-wall-touching technology that seems to exist for both Android and Apple. Love the approach and I surprised with the apparent accuracy.
Still, after a couple of home projects with SH3D, the main challenge is actually getting the measurements right. And nothing can beat a laser measure for accuracy. Now that some of the major manufacturers offer wireless (Bluetooth) data transfer from laser measures, maybe one would be interested in SH3D+Renovations3D as a back-end for data collection? Press an approximate wall location in the app and get exact measurements from the laser? It would increase the value of the laser-tool enormously, so maybe they could contribute to the development cost?
The first "extra" feature will probably be texture import from camera shots.
Impressive if you can get that right. Getting (small 256×256 seamless) textures to look good also takes quite a while. Also, do not forget the various colour-analyzer apps. While not perfect, some of them are really quite good. Automatically getting an approximate colour would also be an interesting feature...
.. wonder if render to photo might be very slow on android.
Possibly, but to some that would not matter. While I think it is super-nice to be able to sketch and edit SH3D files on a hand-held, I agree with Puybaret that "smartphone + your finger will hardly replace the wider screen of a computer + a mouse". Which means you will need to go back to the desktop with the file to edit and render.
I am using too many words here, but the long and short of it is that SH3D really has proved to be a very advanced tool for my projects, and tools that can help with the data collation (e.g. thread 6162) are very interesting. The emphasis for me being data-collation / field tool - not for a limited-screen-hand-held to offer all refined features.
Again, congratulations to eTeks and you. A very interesting development indeed. Wish you the best of luck.
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Re: Renovations 3D for Android
I see that bluetooth laser measures aren't too expensive, so that route might in fact be easier to build than the tap the wall version. Perhaps once Renovations 3D has a reasonable install base I'll buy one and see what the interfaces are like, thanks for the idea.
Photo quality is always an issue, and using a photo as a texture even more so, but as a fast way to get an approximate texture/color into a plan I think it'll be ok. There are so many of those color and paint apps, that is is a very crowded part of the home design app space now, I guess that means there's lots of options and someone might have built one with a nice interface to deliver a color back to Renovations 3D with a few clicks.
France
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Re: Renovations 3D for Android
Thanks Phil for proposing this feature in Renovations 3D I computed an image based on the example 11 of the gallery, and the rendering on a Samsung Galaxy Tab A6 1.6 GHz was 10 times slower than on an iMac 4 GHz, even if processors on both machines have 8 cores. But the good thing is that the rendering process didn't consume too much power on the tablet battery and the computed images are the same.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
At present, Bosch has an IOs and Android App that allows you to collect output from the laser measure directly. There is also a 3rd party app called MagicPlan that also supports it. Neither interfaces well with SW3d. I reached out to Bosch as I was interested having them help make the output available as a HID for Windows/MacOS.
so I reached out to Bosch with the idea, and they came back that they have a toolkit for developers to freely put into their IOs or Android app (they also said they would look at the feasibility of a PC HID interface.
It would be great if it were incorporated into the Sweethome3d/Renovation 3d, as all of my files are already in SW3D. I am just a home user who used Sw3d for an apartment remodel, and now am helping my parents with some accessibility renovations. The challenge is that their plans were scanned in the 1990s, hence they need to be put in again.
Maybe you could both look into how laser could be supported. Now that something like the Bosch is around 100$, it could be a very attractive option to be able to adjust measurements in realtime. I believe that it would make your software the holy grail for home renovation.
the software essentially enables HID functionality, where you start the program, and pair your laser measure. Once the connection is established, whatever text box the cursor is sitting in can be populated from the laser measure.
I am hoping that it will let me collect the measurements in SW3d.
That said, one of the items that I have not been able to figure out, is how to adjust a dimensioning line, based on an input. It would be nice to be able to adjust dimensioning line properties like a wall, where you could set the length. In this way, using the laser, the input would change the length, and then you could move it to get the wall to the right lengths.
