Sweet Home 3D Textures

The title says it all really.

I was watching Treehouse Masters, on Animal Planet, and thought what a great idea. I had a 'den' in a tree growing up as a kid (basically a few planks nailed to branches with plastic sheeting for a roof) which me and my friends used to play in back in the day. So the idea of a full house in a tree seemed like a great idea. One problem - my carpentry skills are intermediate at best.

But I could still design one though. A quick search in the Ubuntu repositories came up with Sweet Home 3D.

Sweet Home 3D is an Open Source program that runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac. It is also an easy piece of software to learn and use; but don't take my word for it check out the User Guide on the Sweet Home 3D website.

As an example, the following was created in Sweet Home 3D:

Because I wanted my tree house to look slightly different I went wandering round a Google search for seamless textures that could be used. Sweet Home 3D can import textures and 3d models so the possibilities are endless. Anyway I eventually found the Render911 website which is in English and Russian and contains hundreds, if not thousands, of free seamless textures. The categories I was interested in were: Bark, Floor, Grass, Ground, and Wood.

Here is where the slight problem came in. The Render911 website has all their free textures in high resolution (between 1000 x 1000 to 1500 x 1500) and Sweet Home 3D suggested on the "Textures Import" page to keep texture images to 256 x 256 pixels.

I call it a slight problem because Sweet Home 3D can actually import 1500 x 1500 textures but at the expense of performance and fixing it was just opening the textures in Gimp, resizing from 1500 to 256 ensuring that aspect ratio was locked, and saving the smaller texture, and importing the smaller texture into Sweet Home 3D.

As an example, one of the grass textures I used: