A section is the drawing you get by cutting the building along a line and looking at the cut face: the floors stacked over one another, the wall thicknesses, the height of every sill and head, the stair climbing between the storeys, the roof over it all. In Gridsnap you draw the line on the plan and the section is generated from the same model that draws the elevations and the 3D — nothing to trace, and it follows every edit.
Draw one
- Pick the Section line tool in the toolbar.
- Click the start of the cut, then its end. The line snaps to walls and corners like a wall does; hold Shift for 45° steps, or type a length and press Enter.
- Move the cursor to the side you want to look into — the arrows follow it — and click. The section opens straight away, labelled A–A; the next one is B–B.
Press Escape before the third click to drop the line without creating anything.
What the drawing shows
- Cut through: walls with their door and window openings, floor slabs with the real stairwell, split levels with their upstands and steps, stairs, the roof with its skylights, ceilings, and structural items such as columns and chimneys. Cut fabric is filled and outlined heavily; window frames and door linings show as the small sections they are, and glass as a single line.
- Beyond the cut: everything the viewer would see, drawn lighter, with hidden lines removed — a far wall shows through a doorway, and disappears behind a nearer one.
- Levels: a datum marker for every storey and every split level the cut passes, in metres from project zero, plus the ground line.
Not shown: furniture, terraces, fences, planting and finishes. The section is the construction, not the furnishing.
Adjust it
Select the section (click its marker on the plan, or an empty spot in the section view) and the panel offers:
- View depth — how far beyond the line the drawing looks. It starts at the far side of the building; shorten it to leave out another wing.
- Flip direction — look the other way. The arrows reverse, and the drawing mirrors so it still reads as you would see it.
- Crop along the line — the drawing starts as the span between the two ends you clicked; widen or narrow it here.
- Vertical crop — automatic by default; Set… starts from the fitted extent so you can trim a basement or the roof.
- Duplicate, Delete and Rename (the letter on the marker follows).
On the plan the selected marker shows a dashed rectangle for the volume the section keeps. Drag an end handle to reshape the line, or the line itself to move it; double-click a marker to open its section. The marker prints on every floor’s plan — a section cuts every storey.
Dimensions and notes
In the section view the Dimension tool works as it does on an elevation: two points, then place the line. When a point snaps to a corner of the cut the dimension is anchored to that corner and follows the building — raise the storey and the floor-to-floor figure updates. A dimension whose corner has gone (the cut moved past the wall it measured) turns red rather than jumping to a neighbour; move or delete it yourself. The Text tool adds a note where you click.
Export
Every section with something in it is a page in the PDF page list, at the
sheet’s scale with the title block, and a view in the DWG or DXF —
on its own layers (SECT-A-CUT, SECT-A-PROJECTION, SECT-A-LEVELS, …), with
the dimensions as real dimension entities. The A–A markers land on the plan
sheets and the plan’s SECTIONS layer.