this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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Wtf, does it do some primitive form of ray tracing to figure out how the lights bounce around the floor plan? That’s sick!
Here I am using Apple home like a loser
SweetHome3D does that part.
You export an image for every light, where its the only light on. Everything is black except where the light shines. Make those black parts transparent in Gimp or PS.
now when you layer them you have each light's beams all intersecting and mixing.
There is a background image where all lights are off that they all stack on top of
Its far simpler than you might imagine.
Simple but genius!
Do you set the opacity of a given light layer to the brightness of the real light?
yep! the minimum opacity is set to 40% though, otherwise they look off when dim see my code in another comment reply
This is very similar to how I did my ghetto manual version of this on a picture elements card. Except I did it in 2D, which I actually find to be cleaner and easier for me to interpret at a glance.
But I really like the reactivity of your lights in color and brightness. Does sweethome allow you to make plans in 2D?
my original plan was to make it really bare-bones and minimal LOL
i just kept going and going and ended up with near photo-realism. I couldn't help myself. I even put in my 3d printed wall art by exporting it from fusion as a obj LOL
I think that’s a pretty common theme for home assistant projects. I’ve been known to take things way too far on several occasions.
it's a never ending rabbit hole. my goal now is to never touch a light switch.
already have my office and bathroom turn on via PIR sensors (using ESPHome), gonna buy a ton since they are so cheap
I think what you're after isn't technically 2D vs 3D but 'Perspective View' vs 'Orthographic View' (but tl;dr: no).
Perspective view emulates your vision, but orthographic is what you would use for engineering / architecture drawings. Looking top down like this, for instance, in perspective view you can see both the top of the wall and the bottom of the wall (what's shown), but in orthographic view those would appear as a single line like in architecture drawings.
All that being said, I don't think Sweet Home 3D can do orthographic views, though don't have it in front of me to check.
Yes! That’s exactly what I meant. I simply do not like the 3D look for these purposes.
I look forward to the youtube video detailing how to do this :)
i used the way everyone has done it honestly, would be a redundant video
here is a good one, almost exactly what I did