3D
Generate a navigable 3-D model from your plan, then light, texture and furnish it.
The 3D engine builds a real-time model from your 2-D drawing. See the feature overview; this is the how-to.
Open the engine
Add the 3D engine to a drawing. The scene builds itself from your walls - free-standing partition walls included - plus doors, windows, plain openings, floors, ceilings, furniture, lights and radiators, no modelling required. A valid, closed plan gives the best result, so clear any Drawing health issues first.
The model is a live view of the drawing: everything you change here (finishes, colours, door styles) is saved with the 3D engine, and the plan itself is untouched. To move a wall or resize a room, take Edit source drawing from the ⋯ menu - the model rebuilds from the new geometry when you come back.
Navigate
The model opens in an orbit view, a doll’s-house camera you can spin, pan and zoom:
- Drag to orbit around the model; pinch or scroll to zoom in and out.
- Pan to translate: a two-finger drag (or Option-drag on Mac) slides the model sideways instead of orbiting, handy for re-centring without losing your angle.
- The camera menu carries Reset / Fit view and Save view, so you can bookmark a favourite angle and glide back to it later.
- The first time you open the 3D engine, a one-time gesture coachmark orients you to orbit, zoom, pan, tap-to-select and where Reset / Fit view lives.
Select & focus
Tap anything in the scene to select it. The inspector follows with a breadcrumb - project, room, then the element - so the context stays visible. Tap a floor and the room view reports the room’s floor area and ceiling height, plus a tappable list of its walls and its doors, windows and openings. Walls are named by compass point (“North wall”), and a North offset under Graphics & viewer settings → Compass calibration aligns the labels (and the Day-mode sun) with the building’s real orientation.
- Selecting a door, window, opening, light, radiator or piece of furniture spotlights it: the camera glides onto it and the rest of the scene fades to a dark silhouette, while the selection itself brightens. The red ✕ Exit focus button brings the whole scene back.
- Focus room in the toolbar hides every other room while you work in one; Stop focus restores them.
- On a keyboard, Esc backs out one level at a time - deselect, exit focus, back to the overview (keyboard shortcuts).
Walk-around mode
Tap the walk button to drop into the model at eye level and explore it in first person:
- Mac, move with W A S D and an on-screen joystick (bottom-left), and look with the mouse: the pointer is captured for full first-person mouse-look, so just move the mouse to turn. Click to interact with whatever’s under the crosshair (a door, say); press Esc to free the pointer while staying in walk, and click again to recapture it.
- iPad / iPhone, the on-screen joystick (bottom-left) moves you; drag elsewhere to look. iPad also takes WASD when a keyboard is attached.
- Tap a door to open it and walk through into the next room. Closed doors block the way, and you can’t walk through walls, you slide along them instead. Open archways and doorway openings are walk-through too - as long as the sill is near floor level; an opening cut high in the wall stays solid, since you couldn’t physically step through it.
- A door leading outside opens (it’s lovely to watch the front door swing) but won’t let you leave.
A top panel carries a lights toggle and Walk settings - the lighting mode and time of day, plus the walk feel: Head height, Move speed, Look and Move sensitivity, and invert-look toggles. Exit glides you back to the orbit view; Esc does the same on a keyboard.
Materials & finishes
Selections write straight onto the model, and every change renders live:
- Walls - Paint or Tiles with a colour per wall face; tiled walls take a tile size and a pattern (Stack Bond, Running Bond or Herringbone). Each room paints its own side of a shared wall independently.
- Outside faces - an exterior wall’s outdoor face takes a cladding: Brick, Render, Pebbledash, Timber cladding, Board cladding, Stone or Painted masonry, plus a colour.
- Floors - per room: Vinyl Sheet, Vinyl Tile, Laminate, Hardwood, Carpet or Tile, with a colour.
- Ceilings - Plaster, Paint, Wood Panel, Suspended Tile or Exposed Beam.
- Trim - procedural skirting, cornice and architraves run around rooms and openings automatically; switch each family on or off under Graphics & viewer settings.
Realistic wood-grain, brick and tile textures are on by default - the PBR texture maps toggle in Graphics & viewer settings swaps to faster flat colours. Walls meet at seamless mitred corners, and polished floors (glazed tile, lacquered timber, laminate) carry a soft sheen that catches the light as you orbit.
Doors, windows & openings
Every opening in the plan is cut cleanly through the wall and is tap-editable:
- Doors - choose from 20 door types (hinged, double, sliding, bifold, pocket, barn and more), a colour, a fabrication material (painted or stained woods, uPVC, aluminium, composite …), the handle style, a panel layout (flush, 4-panel, 6-panel, glazed, louvre), the swing and how far the door stands open. A fresh door starts as a classic panelled leaf, so it reads as real joinery rather than a flat slab.
- Windows - 24 window types (casement, sash, bay, bow, skylight, round-top …) with glazing bars, frame colour and material, frame thickness and sill depth, glass tint and opacity, and an opening fraction. Both panels include a Hardware section - hinges, locks, letterplates, knockers, stays, restrictors and friends.
- Plain openings - doorless archways and pass-throughs appear as real cut-outs with finished reveals, selectable like any other element and listed in the room’s Doors, windows & openings card.
The width, height and height-from-floor you give a door, window or opening in the drawing shape the model - sills sit where you set them, and a high pass-through reads as a void up the wall (doors, windows & openings). Free-standing partition walls carry openings just like boundary walls, cut through both faces.
Lighting modes
Switch between three modes in the toolbar:
- Standard, a clean, evenly lit studio look for inspecting geometry.
- Day, sunlight through the windows - a time-of-day slider (06:00–18:00) moves the sun from a warm sunrise to noon and down again, following the compass calibration. The sun casts shadows: furniture and walls drop soft shadows that shift as the time of day changes, and in walk-around mode daylight pours in through windows and doorways as real shafts.
- Night, moonlight plus your placed lights: each lamp casts its own pool in its own colour, and a room with no lights stays genuinely dark.
A lights toggle turns the interior lamps on or off in Day and Night. Lighting changes never disturb the camera.
Furniture
Furniture from your plan appears in 3-D as procedurally built pieces, chairs, beds, sofas and units. Tap one to recolour it part by part - upholstery, frame, hardware, each with wood, fabric, metal, paint and more - and adjust its Size (3D view) slider. Lights and radiators recolour the same way, with a single finish for the shade or panel. Position and rotation stay with the 2-D plan, so use Edit source drawing to rearrange a room.
Material list
The ⋯ menu’s Material list (BOM) turns your finishes into a shopping list - paint litres by colour, tile counts and boxes, plasterboard sheets, skirting and architrave lengths, and floor areas - for the whole project or any single room via its scope picker. Calculation settings holds the assumptions behind the totals: paint coats and coverage, plasterboard sheet size, trim stock lengths and waste percentages.
Snapshots
The toolbar’s snapshot button captures the current view - camera angle, lighting and effects included - as a PNG ready to share or save. On the free tier, the snapshot carries a small app icon and “Kaleidoscope” badge in the bottom-right corner. It does not cover the view. Full access gives you a clean, badge-free image.
Tips
- Set per-room ceiling heights before exploring, they shape the model.
- Add lights to the drawing before trying Night mode - unlit rooms stay dark on purpose.
- Graphics & viewer settings offers a one-tap Use recommended for this device quality tier, and whatever you pick steps down automatically under thermal load or Low Power Mode so the scene stays smooth.
- The same sheet has an Effects section with sliders for exposure, bloom, a warm vintage grade, vignette, film grain and chromatic aberration, so you can dial the look from clean and neutral to cinematic. Reset effects to defaults puts them all back.