Download Live Home 3D Pro for Mac

In the edit

Architects, interior designers, and anyone planning a home renovation reach for Live Home 3D Pro when they need to see a space before it is built. The Pro edition handles everything from a single room to a multi-storey house with a garden, all from one Mac app. Here are the features that do the real work.

• Unlimited floors and custom roofs – design a house with as many storeys as you need, then top it off with the Custom Roof tool for pitched, flat, or complex rooflines.
• Natural lighting simulation – the app uses your project’s geolocation, the time of day, and cloud cover to cast realistic daylight and shadows inside rooms. A shadow map technique keeps those shadows soft rather than harsh.
• Over 2,000 furniture and fixture models – fill a floor plan from a library that includes everything from sofas to sinks. The plan view automatically shows each item as an outline, which keeps drawings clean.
• Import from Trimble 3D Warehouse – bring in models from the largest collection of 3D content on the web, so you are not limited to the built-in catalogue.
• Corner windows and complex openings – not every room has a standard window wall. This tool lets you cut openings at any angle, including corner windows that wrap around a room.
• Elevation View and terrain editing – see the building from the outside with accurate elevations, and sculpt the ground with advanced terrain tools for landscaping projects.

Live Home 3D Pro runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, so it works on any modern Mac without a performance penalty. The in-app help assistant is there when you get stuck, but the interface is straightforward enough that most people will be placing furniture within minutes.

A typical weekend with a small interior job

A friend of mine runs a one-person interior design studio from a flat in Clerkenwell. Her typical project is a two-bedroom Victorian terrace conversion where the client wants to see the finished space before any plaster comes off. She used to hand-sketch options and then build a separate 3D model in a different app, which meant two versions of every room that never quite matched.

With Live Home 3D Pro she draws the floor plan once, adds the walls and the existing chimney breast, then drops in furniture from the library. The 2D plan and the 3D view update together, so there is no second model to maintain. When the client asks what the room looks like with the kitchen moved to the other wall, she moves the kitchen in the plan and the 3D view changes straight away. That immediacy saves her a full day of rework on most jobs.

Starting a landscape and house project from scratch

Here is a workflow that covers the basics from an empty canvas to a rendered walkthrough. It assumes you have the app open and you are starting a new project.

1. Set the measurement units and geolocation – before you draw anything, choose metres or feet from the project settings. Enter the property address so the app can calculate natural lighting based on real sun positions.
2. Draw the outer walls – use the wall tool to trace the footprint of the house. The automatic dimension lines appear as you draw, so you can see the length of each wall without measuring afterwards. Curved walls are available if the design calls for a rounded bay or an angled extension.
3. Add floors and a roof – add a second storey and use the roof creation assistant to pick one of the twelve templates. The Custom Roof tool lets you adjust the pitch and overhang until the roof matches the reference photos you have collected.
4. Place doors and windows – drag standard windows onto the walls, or use the complex openings tool for a corner window that follows the angle of the room. The floor plan shows every opening in outline, so the drawing stays readable.
5. Furnish the rooms – browse the library of more than 2,000 models and drop furniture into the 2D plan. The 3D view updates in real time, so you can see whether that sofa fits the proportions of the living room.
6. Adjust materials and lighting – select any surface and apply a material from the library of more than 2,100 options, or drag an image from Finder to use as a custom texture. The material editor lets you tweak reflectivity and roughness. Switch to the 3D view and move the sun slider to see how the room looks at different times of day.
7. Set up a virtual walk – place multiple cameras around the property, adjust the field of view and the projection type, then render a walkthrough video in Ultra HD resolution. The export options include JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and BMP for stills.

A tip from experience: use the level-of-detail control while you are still editing the structure. It simplifies the 3D model so the viewport stays responsive, and you can switch to full detail when you are ready for the final render.

Licensing fix for multi-Mac sharing

The current release, version 5.0.4, fixes a licensing issue that affected the standalone Pro app. If you share a copy of Live Home 3D Pro between multiple Macs on the same Apple ID, the app now recognises the licence correctly and does not prompt for reactivation. That is the only change in this update, but it matters for anyone who works on a desktop Mac in the studio and a laptop on site.

How Live Home 3D Pro compares to Chief Architect Premier

There are several Mac apps that let you design interiors and exteriors. Here is how Live Home 3D Pro sits alongside three of them.

Chief Architect Premier is a heavy-duty tool for professional residential design. Live Home 3D Pro covers much of the same ground for a home planner or a small studio, without requiring a week of training to draw a simple wall.

Home Designer Suite is a consumer-level app that shares some DNA with Chief Architect. It is capable for basic floor plans, but the 3D view and the material library feel limited compared to the Pro edition’s 2,100 surfaces and real-time rendering. Live Home 3D Pro also supports curved walls and unlimited floors, which the entry-level Home Designer products restrict.

SketchUp Pro is a general-purpose 3D modelling tool that architects have adopted for its flexibility. It can do everything Live Home 3D Pro can do, but it requires you to build or source every material and every light source yourself. Live Home 3D Pro includes a ready-to-use catalogue of furniture, materials, and roof templates, so you spend less time modelling a chair and more time arranging the room.

Each app has its own strengths, but for a designer who wants a floor plan and a 3D view that stay in sync without extra steps, Live Home 3D Pro hits a practical middle ground between a consumer tool and a full architectural CAD package.

New this release

A maintenance refresh for Live Home 3D Pro has landed — version 5.1.1 keeps things steady on current macOS releases without changing the toolset you already know.

Mac it needs

• macOS 12 or later
• Works on both Apple Silicon and Intel 64-bit Macs