Review: BeLight Software Live Interior 3D Standard 2.0

• Article 63 of 89
• MacFormat, February 2009

Traditionally, the nearest Brits ever got to interior design was deciding at which angle to position the plaster ducks on the wall and where to put the black leather three-piece suite. But a decade of TV programmes like House Doctor and Property Ladder has changed all that. Now BeLight's Live Interior 3D let you redesign the interior of your house without having to get a single tool out other than your Mac. You can view and edit in either 2D or 3D, perform realistic virtual walkthroughs inside the interior, shoot movies, make screenshots and generate panoramic views of the interior and share it with others. Better still, you don't have to spend all your time drawing your furniture, since the program comes with hundreds of objects and materials. While version 1.0 was pretty good, it had a number of flaws, many of which have been fixed in version 2.0. You can now model two storeys of your house, including the stairs; a Wall Designer lets you create panels, niches and openings in the walls; you can use reflective materials, which will render in real-time during walkthroughs; there's over 300 new materials and over 200 new objects; and the user-interface has had something of a redesign itself. If you're in a sharing mood, you can also export your design to Google's 3D Warehouse in SketchUp format. The interface isn't totally intuitive yet, with double-clicking of objects never doing what you'd hope it do, you can't design your own furniture within the program and some of the features available in the far more expensive Professional version ($129.95 v $49.95 for the Standard version), such as the ability to create multiple light sources and handle more than two storeys, would have made the Standard version irresistible. But even as it stands, you'd be hard pushed to find a better interior design tool at even twice the price.