Drawing health
Find and fix geometry problems before you export - the checks, the on-canvas cues, and the Drawing health panel with its one-tap repairs.
Before you export or hand a drawing to an engine, it’s worth checking the geometry is sound. The app validates your drawing continuously and reports anything it finds through Drawing health - one surface that says what’s wrong, where it is, and how to fix it, usually in one tap. You can also run it on demand and get an explicit all-clear.
What it checks
Each room is checked for:
| Check | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Degenerate walls | Zero-length walls (start and end coincide). |
| Floating walls | A wall with an endpoint not shared by any other wall. (Free-standing partitions are exempt.) |
| Disconnected components | Detached islands of walls within one room. |
| Simple closed loop | Every corner has exactly two walls, the room actually encloses. |
| Polygon match | The stored boundary matches the walls. |
| Orphaned references | Doors, windows, lights or radiators pointing at a missing wall. |
Checks also run across the whole drawing:
- Broken wall connections - a room outline that doubles back over itself (a zero-width spike that quietly blocks connections nearby), and the same boundary traced twice by two walls that were never connected, stacked on top of each other or only a hair apart (up to about 3 cm).
- Possible connections - wall pairs roughly 3–15 cm apart that look like one boundary but might be a deliberate cavity or double-skin wall. These are suggestions, never repaired automatically (see Clean up drawing).
- Misaligned shared walls - a connected shared wall whose two sides have drifted out of line.
- Overlapping rooms - two rooms whose floor areas intersect.
- Duplicate openings - two doors, windows or plain openings stacked on the same stretch of wall - and openings that hang past the end of their wall.
- Empty rooms - rooms with no walls drawn yet.
On-canvas cues
Two complementary cues appear when something needs attention:
- A dashed amber outline around an invalid room, it shows where the problem is.
- A bottom-centre pill that says what: orange for most issues, turning red only when a shared-wall connection is structurally damaged. A single kind of problem reads plainly - “Issue with Kitchen”, “Wall connection needs attention”, “Two rooms overlap” - and a mix of kinds shows a categorised count, “5 issues · 2 rooms · 2 connections · 1 other”. Tap the pill to open Drawing health.
Both cues are suppressed mid-drag so a deliberate edit doesn’t flash warnings at you every frame, and a room you’ve only just started (a single wall so far) isn’t nagged. While the Connections view is open the pill steps aside too - the legend there carries the live counts (see Multi-room & floors).
Run a check any time
You don’t have to wait for the pill. With the Pointer active, open the right-side menu and tap Drawing health. If everything is sound it answers explicitly: “No issues found - this drawing is healthy.”
The Drawing health panel
Drawing health opens beside the canvas on iPad and Mac, and as a sheet on iPhone. It updates live as you fix things, with a section per kind of issue:
- Wall connections comes first - these are root causes that break other things nearby. Each row names the problem in plain English (“Room outline doubles back on itself”, “Same boundary drawn twice”) with Show - the camera glides to the issue - and Fix, which repairs just that one. The section also offers View on canvas, which jumps you into the Room tool’s Connections view, and Clean up drawing (below).
- Damaged wall connections - a shared wall whose connection data is broken (it lost its anchor wall, or has conflicting ones). Disconnect group clears the broken connection so you can re-connect the rooms cleanly.
- Misaligned shared walls - each drifted connection leads with Realign, which pulls the two sides back into line (and changes nothing if it can’t), with Disconnect group as the fallback, plus Show.
- Overlapping rooms - no auto-repair here, because which room gives way is your call: Select a room to focus it, then move it.
- Possible connections - the maybe-one-boundary pairs: Connect joins them; Keep separate records that the gap is intentional.
- Duplicate openings - a one-tap Merge duplicates.
- Openings past their wall - a one-tap Clamp to wall.
- Empty rooms - a one-tap Delete empty room.
- Per-room issues - a tappable room header that jumps to the affected geometry, a Delete button for each floating wall, and a Try to solve action per room.
- Ignored connections - every Keep separate decision stays listed here; Reconsider brings it back as a suggestion.
Every repair is undoable, and rows fall away live as you work, ending on the all-clear.
Clean up drawing
Clean up drawing runs every automatic repair in one tap - doubled-back walls, duplicate boundaries, misaligned shared walls and safe connects - as a single undo step. Suggestions under Possible connections are never included; those always wait for your explicit Connect. The summary it shows is honest, and anything still listed afterwards is exactly what couldn’t be fixed automatically. (The same action appears as Clean up on the Connections view’s legend.)
Try to solve
“Try to solve” applies the safe automatic fixes to one room:
- Snaps near-coincident endpoints together so the loop closes.
- Drops zero-length walls.
- Recovers the boundary from the wall cycle.
Detached islands and self-crossing loops can’t be solved automatically, fix those by hand by editing the walls. For connection problems between rooms, the Connections view gives you the same repairs with a picture - see Multi-room & floors.
Repairs when a drawing opens
A few safe repairs run automatically when a drawing opens, and a one-time notice tells you what was done:
- Duplicated internal references are repaired.
- Shared-wall connections whose two sides drifted apart on disk are adjusted.
- Tiny sliver fragments left over from earlier wall edits are healed back into their neighbour.
- Shared-wall seams that had come apart - two rooms tracing exactly the same wall without being connected - are reconnected.
Opening a drawing never creates a connection you didn’t make; the seam repair only re-joins walls that match exactly. Doubled boundaries that sit a few centimetres apart are left for you to repair from Drawing health or the Connections view, where you can watch the result.
Why it matters
Several features assume valid, closed rooms:
- Area, perimeter and volume
- The 3D engine, which extrudes rooms into solids
- Room-aware engine features like zone assignment and room-aware labelling
Empty rooms (no walls yet) are allowed and won’t block saving, they’re flagged so you remember to draw into them or delete them.