In-Depth Floor Plan Tutorial Part 3 [UPDATED 2025]

Welcome back to the final part of this three-part series. This is what we had at the end of part two. So the walls, the windows, the doors, furnishings, and we set up a very easy lighting so that we could see what it looks like. And now we're going to add materials and lighting to make our floor plan look amazing. I'm DudeBlender, and let's jump right in. All right, as before, Shift-Control-S to save as, and let's call this FPTut-C. Remember, we want to have a history of our files in case something goes wrong and we need to go back. All right, let's begin with the floor. Make it visible if it isn't already, and I'm going to go to the material preview shading by pressing Z and pointing towards this one and releasing Z. The shading mode allows us to see the materials without calculating the light bounces, so it's faster than using the render shading. Okay, with the floor selected, let's go to the material properties, scroll down with the mouse wheel or hold the middle mouse button and drag to see the rest of the menus and click on material properties. You can also make this larger. Let's add a material and three more slots by clicking on this plus button. One, two, three. As we did in part two, we're going to be using my starter kit that you can purchase from My Gumroad, but you can really use any materials that you have available. Since we're now using only materials, we can go here to this filter icon, click on it, and uncheck objects so that we only see the materials. We can just drag and drop our material from the asset browser to the material slot where we want to apply that material. The first material that you create on a mesh will be, by default, applied to all of the mesh. I'm actually going to hide the floor plan because we have this Z fighting and I don't like it, so let's just go ahead and hide it here. And now you'll see that the base style's material is applied to the whole mesh. So now to use different materials, we need to assign faces to the corresponding material. So I'm just going to drag and drop all of the four materials that we're going to use in the slots that we just created. So now this object, the floor, has all of these four materials related to it. We now need to tell Blender which faces use which material. So again, with the floor selected, let's go ahead and tab into edit mode and let's press three in the keyword or click on this button right here to activate face select mode. Since in part one we made a face for each room, we can easily select the faces to assign the material that we want. So let's start with the bathroom. Let's just click on that face. It becomes highlighted. Next, here in your materials, select which material you want to apply to that face. In this case, we're going to use the white style. This face is selected so we can assign that material slot to that face by clicking here on the assign button. Then the bedroom, let's go with the wood floor, assign. And then the mudroom, let's go with checkered tiles, assign. We've now got a different material for each room, but I actually don't like how it looks now. It's way too much. So I think that we can use the same floor for the bathroom and the mudroom and the same material for the bedroom and living room kitchen combo. So now we can select this material and click on this button and search for the material that we want. In this case, it's white tile, enter. Now the material in this slot changes to whatever we selected. So all of the faces that had that material assigned to it will automatically update. Let's do the same with the bedroom floor. We select this, change this material from wood floor to beige tiles. And now we have this material assigned here too. But we still have our material slot. Okay, if you're following, you can just go ahead and add any material that you want in your rooms. And once you're happy with how it looks, let's go to the shading workspace. Make sure we have object selected in this menu. This viewport is different and independent from the one that we have on our layout workspace. So it has its own perspective and shading. So let's change that here to material preview. Now if you forget which of these slots are assigned to which of the faces, you can select the slot and click on select so that you see which faces have that material slot assigned. All right, this is the node tree of the beige tiles material. If you don't see anything, it's possible that the tree is hidden somewhere. So you can either just zoom out with the scroll wheel or press the home button so that you can see all of the tree. I've highlighted in orange the node that controls the scale. So we can zoom in here and click and drag left or right to change this number until you get a scale that you like for your tiles. Remember to press shift to have more precision when you're clicking and dragging. I'm just going to go with 0.5. And note that we are changing the actual material. And since the bedroom and the living room and kitchen use the same material, the scale will change for both. If we wanted different scales for each room, then there's actually a few ways to do it. And it depends on how the material is set up. And for these materials, the way to do it is to duplicate the material and edit that one. To do that, we select the slot that we want to change. In this case, it's this one, the one that is assigned to the bedroom. Now we're going to go here to this button that says new material, add a new material and click on that. It creates a copy of that material and assigns it to this slot. You'll see that it adds a 0.001 because you cannot have two different materials that have the same name. We can just double click this and change it to beige tiles bedroom, for example. Now this material, even if it's the same here, it's a completely new instance. So if we change this material that is only assigned to this face, it will only have the effect on that face and the other one remains intact. So let's say that I want smaller tiles in the bedroom, I'm just going to go with 0.7. Okay, that looks good. So let's tab out. Let's actually go back to our layout workspace. We're going to add a material to a couple of the walls. Now you might still be in edit mode in the floor mesh. So just check here. If you're in edit mode, just tab out to object mode. We now want to select the walls, save your work again with control S and we're going to go back here to the modifier stack. Now at this point, it's still relatively easy to make changes of the walls. If we wanted to, we would tab into edit mode one to go to vertex select mode and maybe alt Z for x-ray mode so that we can select the vertices beneath. And we could, for example, add a new wall here by extruding these two vertices. And so we can still make changes. We could also change the thickness of the walls if we wanted to. So we still have some flexibility in what we can do to the walls. Now I'm just going to delete that and go back to 0.15. So just make sure that you don't have any changes to the floor plan because after this point, making any changes might be possible, but it would be extremely complex. So we're now committing to this geometry. You'll see if I tab into edit mode that the geometry that's created by the solidify modifier doesn't have vertices. It is being dynamically calculated. But after we commit to the modifier, all of this will become real geometry and there is no way back. All right. Once you're ready, just go ahead and click on this arrow and click apply or hover over the modifier and press control A. The modifier disappears and now if we tab into edit mode and press alt Z to get out of the x-ray mode, you'll see that all of the walls have now real vertices that we can grab and move and edit and do all of those things. And the reason that we need to do this and apply the modifier is that now each face is independent. Before, this wall and this wall were part of the same thing, so we could not give them a different treatment. And if we applied a material to the wall, we would apply the same material on the outside than on the inside. And in this particular case, that's not what we want. So we need to commit the geometry so that we can select any face that we want and modify that specific face and nothing else. So we now have full control over our walls at the cost of flexibility. So if we ever wanted to make the walls thicker now, it would be very complicated to do. We would have to move like specific vertices and do each wall one by one. So that would not be practical. Now with the wall selected, let's go back to our material properties menu and add a new material. Remember, this material is by default applied to all of the walls. Let's just rename this to walls default. So if we ever want to change anything like the color or the texture of the walls that have no material applied to it, we can just do it here. Let's add a new material slot and tab into edit mode, again face select. Let's select this wall right here. Oh, one thing to note, if you're in x-ray mode, which you can toggle with this button or with Alt Z, instead of clicking on the wall, you have to click on the center of the wall, which is this tiny dot. I don't even know if you can see it in YouTube, but if you want to make this bigger, you can go to edit, preferences, themes, 3D viewport, scroll all the way down until you see face dot size. Let's change this to at least three, let me make this smaller, four. Might be a little bit too big, but you get the idea. So if you're in x-ray mode, you need to click on the actual dot. Okay, I don't want that, so let's turn that off and select this face. Now select the material and assign it to that wall. Of course, there's nothing here now. Now let's drag the brick material to that slot. You'll see that it doesn't work immediately and that's because of how the material is set up. So let's go back to the shading workspace, press home so that you see the whole tree, and this is the brick material. So to avoid the need of UV wrapping the walls, which would probably be more complicated, I set the material in a way that we just need to change the orientation. To show you how the mapping works, let me create a mesh plane and move it a little bit in Z, and I'm going to add the brick material to this plane. So this is by default how the material is set up. If I extrude this in Z, you'll see that the texture on this side is just this edge stretched down, and that's not what we want. So what we need to do is rotate this in X by 90 degrees and then rotate it in this direction, which you would think it's the Z direction, but it's actually the local Y direction of the plane. See, before I rotated it the first time, the Y plane is this one. So we rotate it in X, 90, and then rotate it in Y, but in the local Y, 90 degrees. And then we have the right orientation. That's the exact same that we need to do. So we're going to rotate it in X and Y by 90 degrees. You can just click and drag to select both fields at the same time, 90, enter. And then we have the correct orientation. So let's say that we want to change the texture on this wall, and we want a wavy texture. So same thing, we select the wall, add a new material, assign that material to the wall. We can drag here to create a new panel and select the asset browser, select our starter kit library. I can just filter out again so that we only see the materials. And let's say we want the textured wall 3. We can just drag it here, drop it, and now it's being applied to that wall. You'll see that this one doesn't need remapping. And the reason is that, if I press home here, this is made with a voronoi texture. And in fact, all of the textured walls, textured wall 2, work without the need of remapping because they use either a noise texture or a voronoi texture. And now we have this wall with the wavy material, this wall with the brick texture, and the rest of the walls with the default material that we could also change. And let's actually go ahead and change that to a, I don't know, beige color, I think looks okay, or this sort of warm gray, or, you know, any color that you like. I'm actually just going to leave it in white. But you could change it here. Now, if you wanted, you could also change, for example, the door material. There are actually a couple of ways to do it. You could just, say, select this side of the door, select the door material, and here we could just select any other material that exists in the scene. This is a cool trick because once we've added some of the furniture, we have access to these wood materials, so we could use the same thing. We just go ahead and click, search for wood, and use any of the materials that we have. Let's just go with wood 2. And it changes the material. Then we could do the same thing with the rest of the parts. Now, there's another thing that we could do. We could just actually copy the material, the nodes, and then go here to door material, delete all of this, and paste the material that we copied, and we can just connect this here. And now, since we changed the material, everything that uses that material will also be changed. We could do the same thing with the windows, for example. We could select this part, and window material. So let's just delete this, and we could just connect that here, and make something, I don't know, metallic, maybe a little darker. We could also change the glass if we wanted to, I'm not going to do that. And now for the closet doors, since we probably don't want these to be glass, we could just copy the material, and change the transmission weight to 0, and maybe change the color if we want to. Something like that, maybe, works. And we can change the name to closet doors. We could of course add a wood material if we wanted to. So we can use any of the techniques that we've learned so far. Now one final trick, if we want to change all of these at the same time, so we click to select all of these, shift to select all of them, and we select the one that we want to copy the materials from last. So shift click. Now all of these objects are selected, but this is the active object. So we press control L for the link transfer data menu, link, materials, and now we've got that. I just figured out that this door is the other way around, so let's just go ahead and go to create, ArchiMesh, and let's rotate this 180. And remember that anytime we change something, we need to place our cutter back on the cutters collection. We also need to relink the materials, so select these two, and then either of these, control L, link materials. Done. I'm going to leave it at that. If you want to continue to experiment changing different materials for different walls or different floors, or even the furniture, just go ahead and do so, knock yourself out, have fun, and once you're done, we can move on to the lighting. Alright, let's save our work, go back to our layout workspace. So in part two, we created a very simple global lighting with our Nishita sky texture. If we go to rendered mode, we can see what that is. That's kind of like a sunset, and there's global illumination. The thing is that for a realistic render, this is not good. So I want to show you how to use an HDRI here, and then after that, the way that I actually light scenes. So I think we don't need this anymore, let's make it smaller. And now first you need an HDRI. So you can go here to Polyhaven, and here you have a bunch of free stuff. So an HDRI is basically a 360 degrees photograph that you can use for lighting the scenes. You want to use indoor lighting, because that will give you the more realistic look of the things that are inside the house. If you want to, for example, make a render that looks through the window, you might want to use something like urban, and find an HDRI that has things that would be interesting to look at from the window. So for example, other buildings, a park, or in general, any urban scene. If you do that, I'm just going to go with this Buick Slotter, what? I'm just going to go with this one. And if you want to be able to look outside, you want to get assets that have good definition. So at least 8K, better if you have 16K, and if your computer can handle it, 24K. Let me see how big this file is. Oh man, 3GB. I'm just going to go with the 16. That's way too much! Okay, I'm going to use the 8K texture, but you would probably want to use a higher resolution. I just don't want to wait for it to download. So download the file, now once you've downloaded the file, I actually recommend you have a folder where to store your HDRIs, because it's something that you use a lot. So I think that this is the default folder, where Blender has the HDRIs that it comes with, and it's actually kind of difficult to find. So it's probably better if you just make a folder in your computer that you know where it is, and that you can access easily. I've downloaded my file, and copied it to this folder. It's right here. Close this and go back to Blender. Now to use an HDRI, there are actually a couple of ways to do it. One is here in the world properties, we change the color, we press here in the yellow circle, to environment texture, and we open the HDRI file. So since it's very difficult to find, I have it here in my bookmarks world, and I have all my HDRIs here. Whenever you're in a folder, you can click on the plus button to bookmark it and have it here for quick access. So let's select our Wig Slaughter Mirror Plane, double click that, and you'll see that it's now here. So that's kind of the faster way to do it. I use it in the shading workspace, where you can see your materials. You can also change this from object to world. I'm going to zoom in, and you have it here. I'm going to go to rendered view, and you'll see that it applies the material all around and even below. And the image works as the source of light. So in this case, it's a cloudy day, and then it's going to have a very diffuse light. But it does look like you're outside. Let me go back to layout, I'm going to create a new panel here, I'm going to add a camera. You don't need to do this. I'm just showing you what you might want to do. So I add a camera, move it up a little bit, and let's place it wherever there's a window. So let's say here, in the bedroom. And here, I actually want to move the camera here, and I'm going to go to the camera view on the one on the left, so press zero. And I'm just going to make the camera very wide, so something like, I don't know, 16. Okay, I don't want, let's say that in my render, I don't want people to know that we have no roof. Okay, so I just noticed that I actually changed the material of the bathroom doors. So let's use actually this one, and link that. Link materials, alright. And these are wrong as well. So we select these two, this one, and link those. Okay, now one thing that happened here is that when I made the bathroom doors, I actually changed the glass material. Now my windows, the ones that actually should be completely transparent, are not. So we're going to add a new glass material. I'm just going to change the name to glass material bathroom. And then select this, this, this, this one last, control L, link material. So now all of our doors have the glass material bathroom. And now I can just, oops, now I can just select any object that has the glass material, and I can actually change this to glass. So we can change the principal BSDF to, scroll up, glass, roughness, let's do 0.1, or just do 0.05. Okay, now if I render this, then you have your room with something to look at through the window. Now in general I don't use the floor plans like that. I will usually just have renders that go from the top view, or with a little bit of perspective, but I usually don't do renders inside the house, which you could do, but keep in mind that these assets are not designed to be photorealistic. Okay so that's one way to do it, HDRIs. The second way, and it's the one that I actually use, is just by using a light. So shift A, light, area, move this in Z a little bit, go to top view, move it close to the center, scale it up. We can go to shading, and delete this, go back to layout, and we can just turn the strength to 0, because we don't want any global lighting to affect our scene. Now we go to rendered, select light, and with the light selected, go here to data, or the light properties, and change this to something like 1500. I'm just gonna make the lamp a little bigger, and that is actually the lighting that I would use. I don't think we need that much more. However, we do have a couple of tricks. The first one is getting the right exposure. The way we do this is, we go to render properties, scroll all the way down to color management, expand that, and change the view transform from AGX, or whatever you have selected, to false color. You can now see a sort of exposure heat map that you can use to get the right exposure for your scene. So red is overexposed, or it's just going to look white on the render, which is not necessarily bad. You might want to have some red part. Blue is either underexposed, or it's something that's just black, and it's not reflecting any light. So the TV, the screen is always gonna look blue. Now we do have a lot of red here, so let's select the light again, and go to the properties, and we can just turn this down, let's say to 1000. We probably have too much blue here, here, on this wall, so let's increase this to 1250. I think that looks good. It doesn't really matter that much that this part, the top part of the walls, is overexposed, because we know that the light is very close. Maybe I can even go a little bit less, I wanna go 1150, 1100. Okay I think this is good, there's, this is red, there's a little bit of orange, and there is a little bit of blue. So I'm actually just gonna leave it in 1150. So, we can then just go back here, to render properties, scroll all the way down, change this from false color, back to AGX, and look at your scene. And then here you can just fine tune again, maybe you do want to go 1200. But that's a good way to figure out a good starting point for your lighting. The second trick is changing the color of the light, and of course here you can select any color, but it's very likely that you will not get natural results, like this. So, a way to do that is, by clicking on use nodes, here in color we're gonna click again on the yellow circle, and we're gonna select here from the converters, black body. So this is the natural scale of light. You go from warmer, with the color of light that's emitted by, for example fire, and then all the way to the right to cooler lighting, which would be like a morning light. So the smaller the number, the warmer the light. You'll see that around 5000, 6000 is a neutral white light. It defaults to 1500 Kelvin, which is way too hot unless you're making a dungeon, or something that actually uses fire to light the scene. We don't want that, so let's begin with something like 5000. And it looks way too blue, and the reason is, not because this is too cold, but because we still have this color. Even if we have the black body, this will still influence that color. So let's reset this back to white, so that we can actually see this color. Most of the time you'll want to be between 5000 and 6000. I'm probably gonna go with 5400. I do like how the warmer colors look, I'm just going to leave it at that. This door has the wrong material, so I'm just gonna change it to glass material bathroom, and this one too. Alright, let me add a camera, ctrl alt 0 to set the camera to that perspective, and let's just move the camera a little bit, give it a quick render with f12, and this is looking good. The bricks are a little bit small, I'm just gonna go here, shading, change this to object, select brick, let me go to material preview, and let's change this to something like 0.6. That looks good, let's go back to layout, and we're basically done, but I'm gonna show you one more trick. This is completely optional, but it's a good tool to know. It's called freestyle, and we're gonna use it to render strokes on the walls. The reason you might wanna do this is, one, because you might like how it looks, but the second one is, sometimes there is not enough contrast between, say, a wall, and the wall that's behind it, or even the background, maybe here even on the refrigerator, so, in order to make it easier to know where the wall edges are, you might wanna have those strokes. So, let's go ahead and do that. We're gonna go here to render properties, scroll down until you find freestyle, and check that. If we expand this, we'll see a few options, but we don't need to change that here. Once we enable this, if we go to the view layer properties, and scroll down, we'll see that there's a whole new freestyle section, with a bunch of panels. Find freestyle line set, and expand that. Let's scroll down, and check collection. So the idea is that we wanna tell Blender over what objects to render the strokes. In this case, we only want to do that on the walls. So we're gonna make a collection, add the walls to that collection, and then select that collection here. So, with the walls selected, M, new collection, let's call this freestyle. Now here we select freestyle. Make sure that negation inclusive is selected. Next, go to freestyle thickness, and change the base thickness to 1.5. You can change this number later if you want to. Alright, let's give it a render and see what we get. Note that rendering the freestyle takes a while. It increased my render time to 36 seconds, almost 37, from less than 10 seconds that the previous render took. Now to get the perfect camera angle, press 0 on the numbers pad to go to the camera view, and click on this icon to lock the camera view. Now you can navigate normally, but you're still looking through the camera. Yeah, just navigate to get the perfect angle that you want, and once you have it, you can zoom in and zoom out. And once you have it, don't forget to unlock this, because if not, you'll continue to navigate and lose the angle that you already had. So get your angle, and unlock the camera, so that you can now navigate without moving the camera. If you made it this far, great job! There were some relatively advanced concepts in this series, so congratulations! I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. That's it for this series, I'm JuiceBlender, Happy Blending!