Room Layout Tool

Placing things

Pick an item from the Library, or use Custom object to type width × depth × height plus the space you need around it.
A table entered as 150 × 75 with 10 cm behind it occupies 150 × 85 cm of floor — the tool keeps both numbers separate and draws the extra space as a hatched zone.
Drag to move. Objects snap to walls, to each other, and to each other's clearance edges.
R rotates 15° (Alt+R the other way), Shift+R turns 90°, Shift+drag or click adds to the selection.
Ctrl+G groups what you have selected, so it moves, turns and mirrors as one piece. Double-click a member to pick it out on its own; Ctrl+Shift+G ungroups.
M mirrors left to right, Shift+M front to back — about the selection's own centre, swapping each item's left and right clearance. Duplicate first if you want to keep the original.
Labels in the toolbar (or L) hides every name tag at once. To silence just one, use the A button on its row in the list, or Name tags in its panel — a whole group at a time from the group's row.
A name tag shows the name only; sizes live in the list, the panel and the dimension lines (Dims).
Settings → Show lengths in switches the whole tool between centimetres and millimetres. Lengths are stored in centimetres either way.

Paths & openings

Add path then click along the floor to trace a walkway; Enter finishes, Esc cancels, Backspace removes the last point.
Anything standing in a path — or in another object's clearance — is listed under Issues and outlined in the viewport.
Something that is meant to stand inside another thing — a trolley that lives under a bench — can be ticked Does not get in the way, and clashes with other objects stop being reported for it — so does standing on a walkway. Door swings and the room's own walls still count.
Doors & windows are placed on a wall by distance along that wall; a door's swing is treated as space that must stay free.
A path can be one width at the start and another at the end — an aisle that opens out.
Paths fork and join: points land on a 5 cm grid with square corners (switchable to free angles), and walkways whose centre lines cross anywhere are grouped as one network — double-click picks one back out, and that one alone can be set to free angles.
The walkway you are working on is lifted above the others, so it is the one the pointer finds.
Drag a path point to move it, drag the line and that stretch slides sideways staying parallel, Shift-drag moves the whole walkway. Crossings are painted as one layer and are never reported as a problem.
A path can be told that chairs pushed into it are fine — a walkway past a row of desks — while still reporting everything else in the way.

Finding things

The left rail has four tabs: Add (one of each standard part), Custom (parts you have saved, setups and pictures), Room (size, paths, doors, settings and the list of everything in it) and Parts (what the room is made of, counted).
The library carries one of each thing. Place it and change it; save a version you want again with ✎ · Copy as new item and it appears under Custom.
In Parts, click a row to select every one of them, or ✎ to edit the library item behind them.
Folder… keeps your layouts in one folder: the dropdown beside it switches between the .json files in it, Save writes back into the open one and Save as… makes another. Chrome and Edge only; elsewhere Save and Open fall back to one file at a time.
Saved files are in whole centimetres and whole degrees — what is on screen is left alone.
Objects and Paths in the topbar (O and P) hide everything in the room, leaving the walls, the floor and the plan laid on it. Nothing hidden can be clicked by mistake.
Things may stand outside the room — nothing is reported for it. The floor carries on past the walls, a floor plan underlay can cover the whole floor, and Fit frames the lot.
Draw walls (Room tab, Walls & rooms) draws more of the building: click the corners along the middle of the wall; click the first corner again to close a new room with its own floor, or press Enter to leave it open as a partition. Corners snap onto the walls already there — the room's own included — so a new room builds onto the old one. Select a wall for its thickness, height, colours, and to add doors and windows to any side of it. Drag a corner, a side or the whole wall to reshape it; its doors and windows go with it.
The Walls button (W) steps round three ways of drawing them: auto, where the wall you would be looking through steps aside; solid, where every wall stays up so you can see the room from outside while laying out the floor around it; and off.
A wall is one colour all the way round an opening — the piece over a door and the piece under a window are the same wall, so only the door or window itself is drawn differently.
Select several things and Save as a setup to keep the arrangement in the library under Setups; placing it stamps the whole thing back in as a group.
A copy keeps the name of what it was copied from; ids tell them apart. Something placed fresh is numbered instead.
Mirroring a bench flips what stands on it — the mouse changes hands, the rack and shelf swap ends — but writing on the top is not read backwards.

Types & the library

Placing something from the Library links it to that library item. Edit the item with ✎ — size, clearance and colour — and everything already placed from it changes to match.
Editing a linked object does the same thing, from the other end. Unlink this one if you want to change just the one.
Custom object can save what you build as a library item, which makes it a type of its own.

Pieces worth knowing

Trolley — a movable table: two levels, one just above the castors and one at the height you set. Width, depth, height and colour are all it needs.
Shelving takes a shelf count, switches between closed shelves and wire grid shelves under Style, and can stand on castors to become a rack you push about.
Press — a bench press on a three-legged base, with the three-armed handle on the side of the head. It stands on anything with a top: a bench, a closet, drawers, a rack. So do the glove box and the label printer.
Drawers — a chest with a grid of drawer fronts. Bag stand — a frame with a bin bag in it.
Most furniture takes castors. Almost anything can be made to say something: a bench carries the writing laid flat on the top, a cabinet or rack carries it on a plate on the front — readable even through a wire rack — with a text size in centimetres (0 fits it) and an option to wrap it over lines.
Bin trolley — a base frame, two uprights joined over the top, and cross-beams carrying open bins to one side (or a full tray each). Set how high the lowest beam sits, click a beam to swap its bins for a plank, and add a plate across the base.
A floor area can mark a walkway all round it, of the width you set.
Parts trolley — a wheeled cabinet of small compartments: set how many across and up, and the drawer grid fills the width of the trolley without matching its depth.
Office chair on a five-star base, and a garderobe open at the front with a hanging rail.
⚙ Settings in the toolbar (S) — editing or only looking, units, how big the writing in the drawing is, which way up the plan is drawn, and shadows. Shadows is in the toolbar too (H), alongside the other things the drawing shows, and works while you are only looking.
A hose reel's reach is painted on the floor up to the walls and no further: the circle is cut off at the room rather than carrying on across the ground outside it.
Measure — Distance is two ends; an area is either a Rectangle, clicked as two opposite corners, or a Polygon, clicked round. Every leg carries its length and the run, or the square metres, sits in the middle. A tape held against the drawing: nothing is saved. Backspace takes a point back, Esc lets go.
Arrows (under Measure) — click where one starts, then where it points. An end clicked on something holds to its centre and follows it; anywhere else is a point on the floor (Alt for an exact one). Height, thickness and colour per arrow, and a new one takes the last used. Arrows are saved with the layout, and are the one thing a reader can add while only looking. Click one to pick it; Del removes it.
⟳ in the toolbar (T) turns the plan a quarter. Settings sets which way it comes up.
Only looking is where the tool starts, and ⚙ Settings is the only way out of it — there is no switch in the toolbar to catch by accident. Nothing in the room can be made, changed or moved, the right-hand rail is gone and the left one carries three things: how far each floor plan shows through, the tape, and arrows — the one thing a reader adds, and it is saved. Ctrl+Z takes back only what was done while looking. The views, the wall modes and the grid all still work, and measuring holds to a fixed 5 cm.
Floor plans — lay down as many as the site needs, each with its own scale, place and opacity. Move it on the plan lets you drag one into position instead of typing offsets. A plan lies on the floor, under everything painted on it: the floor first, then the plans in the order listed, then the walkways as one layer, then the floor areas, then the shadows the room casts, then everything standing in it. So a plan can never break a walkway up, and opacity is what keeps both readable.
Setting out (Room tab, plan view) — make one corner of the room nought, then Mark across or Mark up and point at an edge, a wall, or the gap between two things. The middle of a gap is a mark of its own, so halfway between two benches is one click. Each mark is a line across the plan with its distance from the corner on it, and it follows what it was taken from.
Object flow room — closed on three sides with a roller shutter on the fourth. Point at it and scroll to run the shutter up and down; it stops 10 cm below the top.
A closet takes hinged doors, a cabinet top, or sliding doors under Style: two shutters that roll sideways and meet in the middle, and roll back round the sides to open. Point at it and scroll to work them — they need no room to swing.
Bubble wrap frame — a worktop with the roll over the back of it, always the frame width less 10 cm and flush with the frame's back, at the height above the top you set; the cutter runs the full width along the front edge. The roll has its own diameter and colour.
Box frame — an open frame holding a grid of boxes, so many across and so many levels up, the boxes coloured apart from the frame. Hanging box floats clear of the floor at the height you give it under Position.
Tilted rack — a picking rack: wire shelves sloping down towards you, each carrying a row of open black bins, so what is in them presents itself and nothing has to be pulled out to be seen. Set the shelf tilt, how deep the bins are and their colour; the bins are as many as fit at about 30 cm across, and one never grows through the shelf above it.
Crane — a black counterweight on big swivel castors, sloped in at 75° at the back, with two steel L-shaped forks off the front and an aluminium-sided mast carrying a three-part arm and a hook. Set the block, the gap between the forks and how far they reach, and the mast's section and height; the footprint follows from them.
Q-Tool — a T-slot frame open at the front: nothing across the bottom or the middle there, only a bar over the top. The left, back and right each have a bar part way up, the back one a little higher, and the top has one more across its middle. The bars are aluminium at the corners with the slots black; set the profile for their size.
Assy-Cart — a steel scissor lift table on castors, the closed platform taped yellow and black round its edge, with a U-shaped handle hinged at its foot and the black control rod between its arms. The height is folded; set the number of crosses and the handle arms, and point at it and scroll to raise and lower it.
TMP unit — a dark grey unit on wheels, fixed ones at the back and small swivel castors at the front, a tenth narrower at the front. A beam runs down each side from the top at the back to the bottom at the front, with a warm light grey cover filling the triangle behind its middle; the top and the U-shaped handle leaning up out of the front are warm light grey too. The width is at the back; the depth includes the handle.
Pillar — a structural column, as wide, deep and tall as you set it, square or round. A mirror or a hose reel can hang on its faces.
A pillar can be joined to a room wall: it stands against it, slides along it and becomes part of it — a click goes through it, a double-click selects it. Its thickness sinks it into the wall: 0 just stands it against the wall, its depth plus the wall leaves the outside flat with the pillar in it, and more makes it stand out on the other side. A door or window in the wall where the pillar stands goes through the pillar — Add a window through it puts one there.
Import a 3D model… (Add tab) brings in a model from CAD as STL, OBJ or GLB — export the STEP file as one of those. It stands at its real size: STL and OBJ are read as millimetres with Z up, GLB as metres with Y up; correct the file units or which way is up on the model if the file is drawn otherwise. It keeps its proportions when resized, a GLB keeps its colours, and a very detailed model is simplified so the layout stays small enough to keep.
Air hose reel — compressed air from the wall: a spring drum of line in a housing that is round bar the mouth it feeds out of. The roll stands out from the wall on a bracket hinged square to it, rather than lying flat against it. It hangs on a face, the way a mirror does; the more hose on it, the fatter the coil. It paints a circle on the floor for how far the nozzle gets — the drop from where it hangs comes out of the length first, so a hose high up reaches less floor.
I-beam — a steel profile lying on the floor. Its width is how long it is, its depth the flange across it.
Select a bench and Add a wall behind it — the wall starts at bench height and stands just past the space the bench needs behind it. Select that wall to add a tool rack or a shelf to it.
A bench wall can be an open frame rather than a board — two uprights and a rail top and bottom. A rack or a shelf on a frame hangs on bars across the frame, upright to upright, whatever its own width.
The assembly travels with the bench, and dragging a rack drags the bench. Only bench walls take fittings; the room's own walls are not objects.
A rack and a shelf take opposite ends of the wall and share its width — widen one and the other gives way. A rack is stocked like a shadow board — a row per kind, sizes running across it — and keeps its full height; a shelf is let into the wall, single or double.
A mirror or an air hose reel is hung on a face rather than placed: pick it out of the library, then click the face of a bench wall, closet, locker, garderobe, shelving or the room's own wall. It lands centred on the spot you clicked; Esc calls it off.
A hung mirror takes its start height from the floor, slides along its face when you drag it, and can be moved round to the front, back, left or right of the same thing — it always looks out of the face it is on.
Add screens or Add oscilloscope from the bench: they stand on the top, the same distance in from the back edge, sliding along and turning a little. Add keyboard and Add mouse sit at the front edge instead.
An oscilloscope can also stand on a shelf — select the shelf and add it there.
A table or trolley can carry writing on the top — laid on the surface, sized to fill it, readable from across the room.
A floor area marks out a coloured bay — rectangular or round — with its name written large across it. It is paint, not furniture: things stand in it, it is painted over the walkways that cross it, and it never counts as a clash or as floor used up.

Pictures

From a picture… makes an object out of a photo. Cut-out stands the photo up at true size, front/top/all wrap it onto the box.
Floor plan underlay puts an existing plan on the floor so you can trace over it — set its scale in cm.

Keys

1/2 3D / plan view
F fit · G grid · C clearance · L labels · D dims · A areas · W walls · H shadows
R rotate 15° · Shift+R rotate 90° · M mirror · Ctrl+D duplicate · Del delete (only looking: a picked arrow)
Ctrl+G group · Ctrl+Shift+G ungroup
Arrows nudge (Shift = ×10) · Alt while dragging = ignore snapping
Ctrl+Z undo · Ctrl+Shift+Z redo · Esc deselect
S settings — where editing and only looking is set