CadCraft™ v0.7
Use it now
Menu

Tutorials BimCraft help Walkthroughs

Walls from a set of plans (PDF or scan)

Turn the pages of a PDF, or a scanned drawing, into walls, doors and windows, one level for each page, with the page kept under each plan.

Written for BimCraft 0.7.1. The same help is inside the app: press F1.

What you'll do

Start a model from the plans you have on paper: a PDF (drawn as lines, or a scan inside a PDF) or a scan (PNG, JPEG, TIFF with one or many pages). Each page becomes the walls, doors and windows of one level.

Steps

  1. Turn on Draw. Choose Build › From a drawing…, then Choose a drawing… and pick the PDF or the scan.
  2. Pages and levels. Each page is listed with what it is (line work, or a picture (traced)) and the level it goes to: one of the levels you have, a new level above the others, or leave this page out. Pages are matched to your levels in order; change any of them.
  3. Scale. For a PDF, say how it was drawn (1 : 100, 1 : 50…). For anything else, or when you do not know, choose from a distance I know: click the two ends of a dimension or a scale bar on the preview, then type the true distance. All the pages use the one scale.
  4. Choose the wall type and the height of a new level. Leave Keep each page under the plan of its level ticked to see each page as thin lines under its plan.
  5. The line under the choices says how many walls, doors and windows it will make, and on how many levels. Click Make them.

How it reads a page

  • Walls come from pairs of parallel lines up to 600 mm apart (the two faces of a wall); the wall is as thick as the gap. Hatching and lettering are left out.
  • Doors and windows. A gap in a wall (500 to 2600 mm) with a door swing drawn beside it is a door, hinged at one end of the gap and opening to the side of the swing. A gap or a wall with sill lines in it is a window. A gap with neither is a door up to 1300 mm and a window above that.
  • A scan is squared first when it was scanned crooked (the dialog says so), made black and white, cleaned of specks and traced; a PDF page that is a picture is drawn first and then treated the same way. The trace finds the centre of each stroke and fits straight lines and arcs to it, and it uses no network and no trained model.
  • Rooms follow by themselves from the closed loops the walls make.

What you should see

  • The walls, doors, windows and rooms on each level, and any new levels, all as one step: ⌘ZCtrl+Z takes everything back.
  • Each page as thin lines under the plan of its level, listed under Build › From a drawing… with Remove.