Drawing

Press D for a door or N for a window, then click the wall. A door takes a second click to set which way it swings.

Open the floors menu in the top bar and choose "Empty floor" or "Duplicate current walls". The new storey stacks on top and opens straight away.

Open the floors menu in the top bar and choose "Empty floor below". It is added under the bottom floor at a negative level, and the 3D view digs an excavation for it.

Press S, pick a shape, click to place. A U (switchback) can turn on a landing or on winder treads, and the flight width, length and number of steps are set in the panel.

Press H, pick one of nine roof forms, drag a rectangle over the building. Pitch, overhang and the wall plate height are edited afterwards, and overlapping roofs merge into one form.

Press L and draw a zone around the rooms that get a flat ceiling. Anything you leave outside it stays open to the roof slope, which is how a vaulted living room sits beside flat-ceilinged bedrooms.

Press Y, click the corners of the deck, Enter to close. Corners snap to the wall faces, and the level, material, steps and railing are set afterwards in the panel.

The site around the building — the plinth that sets ground level, paved surfaces and lawn (P), fences with gates (J) and pools (B), all drawn to the same millimetre as the building.

Press U and draw the area whose floor sits at a different level. Steps and upstands are generated along the boundary, and the level tags are measured from project zero.

Press O for furnishing and C for structure, pick an item from the thumbnail picker, click to place. Items that habitually back onto a wall align themselves flush when dropped near one.

Place a standing, seated or wheelchair figure from the People category to see how much room a person really has at a counter, a basin or in a passage. The wheelchair carries a dashed 1500 mm turning circle.

Press K for the sketch tools — free lines, arcs, rectangles, circles, triangles and crosses with fills, for everything on a drawing that is not a wall. Combine them with union, subtract, intersect and exclude. They never affect rooms, m² or the plan check.

Drop the image onto the canvas, calibrate its scale against one known distance, then draw over it. Trace mode fades what you have drawn so the image still shows through.

With nothing selected, use Add north arrow in the Site section of the properties panel. Drag its body to move it, the handle at its tip to rotate — and it prints on every sheet.

North, south, east and west elevations are generated from the plan, not drawn. Openings punch their own void and are drawn with real joinery, and heights can be dimensioned on the elevation itself.

Three render modes (Simple, Clay, Shaded), a roof you can hide, floors up to the one you are on, and a first-person walkthrough that opens doors as you reach them.

Press X for the Pattern tool, click a furniture item, then the far end of the run, the opposite corner of the field, the centre of the ring or the points of a path. The copies follow the original and the rule; point the layout at a room or a wall and it belongs to it.

Select a room and click Lighting layout. Pick a downlight, ceiling light or pendant, set the maximum spacing, the edge margin and the mounting height, watch the count update on the canvas, then Create. The room owns the layout from then on.

Press X for the Pattern tool, choose Windows and click a wall. A row of real windows runs along it at the window tool's current preset, evenly spaced; edit the size, spacing and margin in one place, and Also on repeats the row on the storeys above.