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.

A floor appears under the walls as soon as they close a room, and it is a thing you select and edit for its level, thickness and finish. Press Z to draw one where the walls do not make one — a platform, a loft, a floor of its own.

Press S, pick a shape, click to place. Edit the total steps and the size, or open Customize flights for per-flight counts, run lengths, winders and a three-flight U.

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 — or attach the ceiling to the floor above and it hangs flush under it as a lining.

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 ground level and the plinth, a strip, trench or raft foundation under the lowest floor, paved surfaces and lawn (P), fences with gates (J) and pools (B).

Split a floor with an outline (U) or with a line, and each part keeps its own level, thickness and finish. The boundary between them is closed, stepped or open, edge by edge.

The Guarding tool draws a run click by click, the way a fence is drawn. Or let it follow a floor edge, a split level or a stairwell, where it stands only over a real drop and yields to the walls.

Press J and click the fence line point to point. The whole run is one fence with one post at each corner; add gates, set the style and build, flip the boards to the other face and give each part its own finish.

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.

Import the image, set its scale against one distance you know, 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 styles (Diagram, Clay, Realistic) with your finishes textured in Realistic, named saved views you can come back to, an overhead render of a storey as PNG or PDF, a roof you can hide, and a first-person walkthrough that opens doors as you reach them.

Draw a section line across the plan, pick the side to look into, and Gridsnap cuts a vertical section through every storey — walls, slabs, split levels, stairs, roofs and openings — that updates as you edit and exports as a PDF page or a DWG view.

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.

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.