You can also adjust the placement of individual walls. Click on a wall and you’ll see two types of growth handles appear.
The handle with an up and down or right to left arrow will allow you to move your wall inward or outward vertically or horizontally.
The handle at the corners where walls meet will help you adjust your wall diagonally by letting you move the placement of the corner.
Grab any other part of the walls to move the entire room, including all of the room’s contents.
Adjust wall placement
Add a New Wall Segment
You can add a new corner or alcove to a room outline using the right-click menu. Click on the spot on an existing wall where you want to add a new segment and select Add Wall Segment from the menu.
SmartDraw will automatically add two new wall segments at right angles from the spot clicked to create a new corner going outward from the existing outline unless space doesn’t permit it, in which case the corner will added going inwards.
The size of the initial “kick out” or “indentation” will be determined by your scale and room in your drawing. On the standard 1:4 scale used in our floor plan templates, the indentation will be one major scale unit or 4 feet.
Once a corner is added, you can fine tune its size and indentation using the wall adjustment tools. Just click on the arrows to drag the walls inward or outward as desired.
Add wall segment
Adjust Wall Angles
You can also adjust the angle of the walls for any room just by typing in a desired degree.
First, make the existing angles visible in your floor plan. You can do this by going to the Design tab, clicking on Dimensions and selecting Line Angles under the Options section.
Turn on line angles
To change any angle, click to select it and model in the new value. Any connected walls will adjust accordingly.
Adjust angles
Step 4. Add Wall Openings
Once you’re happy with your outline, you can move onto adding openings, doors, windows, and furnishings.
You can quickly add a standard wall opening using the Add Wall Opening button on the Adjust Wall palette of the SmartPanel. Click the button and place the opening anywhere along your wall. You’ll see an anchor symbol and black dot to indicate where the opening will be created. SmartDraw will also show you the distance from the corners to the wall opening for easier placement.
Add wall opening
Adjust the Distance Between Openings and Corners
Sometimes you need to adjust positioning after the fact. When you select an opening, you’ll see its distance from the nearest corner. To adjust that distance, select the wall segment in question and model the desired length right into the dimension measurements. It’s that simple.
Adjust the placement of your wall opening
Step 5. Add Doors and Windows
Add doors and windows by simply dragging and dropping them. When you see your cursor change from a stamp to an anchor, you’ll know it will attach to the wall at that spot. Once attached, you can resize the opening and move it around on the wall until it’s positioned where you want. The distance guides will help you position things accurately.
Drag and drop doors and windows
Step 6. Search for Symbols and Add Them to Your Floor Plan
To search for additional symbols, just model any words in the Search for symbols box. The search results will be grouped by the libraries they were found in. Click on the and sign next to any group of results and you can either choose Add result or Add library for future use. Add result only adds the symbols that matched your query. Add library will add the entire library the symbols were found in.
Search for symbols
Guides help you place items on your floor plan more precisely. As you drag a symbol to your floor plan, you’ll see exactly where your object will be in relation to the walls and other objects in your plan. The blue guidelines will show the distance to the nearest wall or nearest object to help you position it.
Using guides
You can resize, rotate or move objects around as you need to.
You can easily resize any object just by typing in its dimensions or dragging on the black growth handles to make the object bigger or smaller as needed.
You can also rotate objects by clicking and holding the rotate button and then moving your mouse around in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. When you get it into the proper orientation, release the button.
If you move the room around, everything within it stays in place and moves with the room.
Rotate and resize symbols
Step 7. Change the Scale
You don’t have to pick and stick to a scale with SmartDraw. You can change the scale for your entire drawing at any time.
In the
Document Setup
palette section of the SmartPanel, click on
Units & Scale
. You can choose from several standard Architectural, Metric and Engineering options. You can also specify your own custom scale.
Set a floor plan scale
Step 8. Add an Annotation Layer
You can also add a scale-independent Annotation Layer using the Document Setup palette in the SmartPanel. Add the scale, author and other data about the diagram just like you would in the “page view”” in a traditional CAD program. This annotation layer automatically adjusts its size and position as the drawing daerah or paper size changes. Just click Remove Annotation Layer to get rid of it.
Add an annotation layer
Step 9. Working with Dimensions
The dimensions of your objects and walls are shown by default. You can hide these by clicking off the Show Dimensions option in the Dimensions & Area palette of the SmartPanel.
The Measure Distance and Measure Area tools let you make measurements simply by clicking and dragging. As you make these measurements, the outlines stay there for you to use as a reference in your layout. Just select them and hit delete if you want to remove them.
Measure dimensions
Step 10. Add Shape Data
Any floor plan symbol can have shape data associated with it. Data is basically a set of fields and associated values. These show in the data panel and in a tool tip on the shape itself.
To add data to your floor plan, you’ll first want to switch the SmartPanel to display data data instead of the Tool palettes. You can do this by clicking the database icon in the Left Bar.
Open the Data tab
Under Actions, you can choose to add a table by either creating a new data table or importing already existing data.