Build a building

Use Build on the World tab to draw a building on the map. With nothing selected, Build is a picture catalog of pieces. Draw the plan on the map. The pieces snap together, and the 3D view shows the building as you drag. Select a building, its walls, or its floor tiles, and Build becomes the page of the selection. The Figs tab’s Scene list and Everything in this scene list the whole thing as one Building.

The catalog

With nothing selected, Build shows the catalog. The tiles are in short rows by intent. Tap a tile to arm it. Tap it again to turn it off. A one-line helper under the row says what to do next. One stroke is one undo step, and the status line says what was added (6 walls, or A room · 14 walls · 12 floor tiles).

Draw with is the catalog’s first row. It holds four wells: Outside, Inside, Floor, and Roof. Set them before you draw. Every wall and floor tile you draw next takes the first three, in the same undo step as the stroke. The next roof you add takes Roof. A roof that is already built does not change.

The wall style is set on the tiles. Arm Room, Wall, Half wall, or Fence and a second row appears under the tiles, with the caption Wall style. It shows every wall style as a picture tile: Plain, Baseboard, Baseboard + crown, Chair rail, Wainscot, Panelled, Brick ledge, Battlements, Crown, Picture rail, Dado + crown, Board and batten, Shiplap, Log cabin, Timber frame, and Pilasters. Tap one and what you draw next is built in that style.

Every row of picture tiles in the catalog is one line that scrolls sideways. So are the Wall style row and the Roof kind row. Drag a row with a finger or the mouse to scroll it. An arrow (‹ or ›) shows at an end of the row when there are more tiles in that direction. Tap it to page the row.

To clear the four wells and the wall style, tap Return to plain. To change a building that is already built, select it and use its Look group: see A building’s page below.

Rooms & walls

• Room: drag a rectangle on the map. Four walls, a floor, and the corner posts are added as one undo step. Tap inside afterwards for a ceiling. A fig that stands where the room is drawn is set on the new floor, and a fig under a new wall moves to the wall’s open side.
• Wall: drag on the map, full height. Bends become corners, and the posts are added automatically.
• Half wall: drag it like a wall (a counter).
• Fence: drag it like a wall (a railing). A fence takes no trim and no door or window.
• Archway: a wall you can walk through. It is a smooth low arch on two slim legs. It is as tall as its floor’s walls. It takes the wall’s Outside and Inside: a color or a pattern. A pattern is applied to the archway’s faces with the arch cut out of it. An archway drawn into a wall takes that wall’s height, colors, and patterns.
• Pillar: tap, or drag along a line. Pillars snap to the grid corners. Rows of pillars with no walls are a separate building: see A deck of pillars below.

A half wall or a fence takes patterns like any wall and shows the bottom of the picture. A corner post is as tall as the tallest wall it joins.

Doors: Door, Panelled, Glass, Double, Sliding, Shutter, and Garage door. Press a wall on the map or in 3D, slide the preview along the wall, and lift your finger to place it. Each wall piece holds one opening. Garage door is two walls wide: tap a wall with a neighbor in its line. Shutter is a one-wall roll-up.

Windows: Window, Arched, Round, Bay, Window wall, and Skylight. They are placed the same way as doors. Arched and Round windows are smooth: the wall itself is cut to the curve, so the wall’s color or pattern extends to the curve, and the frame and the pane follow it. Window wall turns the whole face of a wall to glass (a shopfront). For Skylight, tap a flat roof or a ceiling.

Floors & ceilings: Floor, Ceiling, and Foundation. Tap inside walls and Floor or Ceiling fills the room. Drag to place tile by tile. With Foundation armed, tap a building to raise it onto a foundation. Set its height with Steps on the building’s page.

Roofs: Roof, Roof line, Roof tiles, Chimney, and Dormer. Arm the Roof tile and a second row opens under the Roofs row, with the caption Roof kind. It shows all twelve kinds as picture tiles: Peaked, Hip, Barn, Mansard, Slanted, Pagoda, Flat, A-frame, Saltbox, Round, Clerestory, and Steeple. Tap one to set the kind of the next roof you add. If a building is selected and has a roof, the tap changes that roof too. The same twelve are on a selected building’s page under Shape. With Roof armed, tap a building: one roof covers the whole footprint, and pillars alone get a flat canopy. Two rows of pillars up to four squares apart take one canopy from a tap between them. A tap on nothing says Nothing to roof here: tap inside a building, or between two rows of pillars. Drag Roof line along a wall top: a pitched roof spans the walls under it (one line per wing of an L-shaped house), and a line dragged corner to corner makes a clean ridge with no stray pieces. Drag Roof tiles to place sloped tiles square by square. With Chimney armed, tap a roof. The chimney passes through the slope. With Dormer armed, tap a sloped roof.

Stairs & ramps: Stairs, Ramp, and Bridge. Drag Stairs from the bottom to the top: they rise one floor and the floor above opens up. Ramp rises one floor over two squares. Drag Bridge across water: planks are placed square by square, with rails on the sides that face open water. A fig walking a route crosses on the deck.

Sets: the looks Plain, Cottage, Brick house, Farmhouse, Cabin, Stone keep, and Workshop. Each tile shows a picture of a small house drawn with that set: its walls, door, window, floor, and roof. Tap a look and it fills the Outside, Inside, Floor, and Roof wells of the Draw with row, and the wall style. Every set has a roof: a kind and a covering. Cottage is a hip roof in thatch. Brick house is peaked in slate. Farmhouse is a barn roof in tin. Cabin is an A-frame in shingle. Stone keep is flat in stone. Workshop is slanted in corrugated. Plain is peaked and plain. The tap sets the kind of the next roof you add. It does not change a roof that is already built. It places nothing by itself. A set you saved yourself has a tile in the same row. Tap it and the set’s pieces are added to the catalog as a row under the set’s name. More ▸ opens the sets dialog. Figs saved in the walls, floors, or roofs categories show as Your wall parts, Your floor parts, and Your roof parts rows.

Paint brush and Mural are tools, not tiles. They are two buttons in the Build page’s header, beside the red Erase. Each is an icon and a word. Tap one to arm it (it lights). Tap it again to turn it off.

• Paint brush recolors what is already built. With it armed, the first thing on the page is its Brush well. Choose a color or a pattern there. One line under the well reads Tap a wall or floor tile to apply paint. Drag to continuously paint. The side of the wall you tap is the side that changes. For a see-through pattern (bars), tap outside, then inside.
• Mural opens the murals picker. Select one of your murals, then tap a wall. The picture is placed there at its own size. Tap Mural again to turn it off.

A tap that cannot place a piece says why: Doors and windows want a full wall, A garage door wants two walls in a row, Skylights want a flat roof or a ceiling, Dormers want a sloped roof, Location already occupied.

The Ground row (Carve | On top) is under the catalog. It sets how the next building you draw stands on raised land. A building that is already built keeps the footing it was drawn with. See Building on hills .

Select what to edit

The top group of the Select bar follows the open page. On Build it has two settings. Set them before you tap.

What sets the family: Building, Walls, or Floors. Only the armed family responds to a tap or a box.

• Building selects the whole building, with one tap or a box.
• Walls selects wall pieces. A door, a window, and an archway are wall pieces: select the wall piece that holds them. Pillars are walls.
• Floors selects floor tiles. Stairs and ramps are floors.

How much shows for Walls and Floors:

• Walls: Piece, Length (the whole wall length), All alike (on a window piece, every window; on a fence, every fence), or All walls.
• Floors: Tile, Room, All alike (every tile with the same flooring), or All floors.

All walls and All floors mean the floor the map shows. The floor tabs on the map set it. For another floor, switch the tab and select again.

With something selected, press another How much step and the app selects again around the part you last tapped. A piece extends to its length this way, and a tile to its room.

Arming a catalog tile turns What off. Pressing What turns the tile off. Tap · Add · Box, All · None, and Undo work as they do on every page.

On the map, a building selected whole has one outline. Selected parts are highlighted in their own shape: a wall is a bar, and a tile is a tinted square.

A building’s page

Set What to Building and tap a building on the map, or box it. Its outline lights up and Build becomes the building’s page. ‹ Catalogue returns to the catalog. The page has three groups: Look, Shape, and This building.

The page stays open when the building adds pieces itself: turning Roof on, Add a floor, and Foundation all keep the building selected. Clear the selection and Build returns to the catalog.

Look

Every color in Build is a well, one square showing the current color. Tap it to open a popup with two shelves, Colors and Patterns. The Foundation and Trim wells take colors only. The Look wells apply to the whole building, every floor:

• Outside and Inside: every wall’s outside face, and every wall’s inside face. Posts and pillars follow Outside. A wall with no room behind it is outside on both sides. The Patterns shelf starts with WALL PATTERNS: your wall textures and the starters Clapboard, Stone, Stucco, Planks, Corrugated, and Plaster. A deck of pillars shows one Pillars well instead.
• Pattern size (Small | Medium | Large | Huge) appears once a wall has a pattern. A wall-shaped texture covers the face and ignores it.
• Wall style: a row of picture tiles. Plain, Baseboard, Baseboard + crown, Chair rail, Wainscot, Panelled, Brick ledge, Battlements, Crown, Picture rail, Dado + crown, Board and batten, Shiplap, Log cabin, Timber frame, and Pilasters. A style is strips raised slightly from the face, on both faces, in the Trim well’s color, so the pattern shows under them. A wall with a door or window keeps the strips that fit around it. Archways stay plain.
• Floors: every floor of the building.
• Roof, with a roof on: a color, or a pattern from the ROOF PATTERNS shelf: Tin roof, Standing seam, Clay tiles, Shingles, Slate, and Thatch. Roof pattern size (Small | Medium | Large) appears once the roof has one.
• Foundation colors the slab, with a foundation on.
• Trim colors the coping and the style’s strips, with trim on or a wall style selected.

Shape

• Roof (On | Off). With a roof on, a row of twelve picture tiles sets the kind: Peaked, Hip, Barn, Mansard, Slanted, Pagoda, Flat, A-frame, Saltbox, Round (a barrel vault), Clerestory, or Steeple (a tall hip). The kind applies to the selected building alone, so a scene can hold several roof kinds. In a building made of joined parts (a hall and a tower that share a corner), Roof and the roof kind act on the part you tapped. The other parts keep their roofs, or stay without one. The catalog’s Roof tile covers the whole joined building with one roof.
• Eaves (Narrow | Wide) sets the overhang.
• Rotate the roof turns the roof to its next position. Slanted, Saltbox, and Clerestory have four positions, one for each side. The other kinds have two. A Flat roof has neither Eaves nor Rotate the roof.
• Add a floor (has N) copies the top floor’s walls, posts, and pillars up one storey and arms the new floor. A door is copied as a plain wall. The door stays on the floor below. With two or more floors the map shows floor tabs on its edge, one spare above the top, and pieces below the armed floor fade.
• Draw on is a dropdown (Floor 1, Floor 2, and so on, then New floor) that sets the floor the next walls, pillars, and tiles are placed on. Its note reads Walls, pillars and tiles you draw next are placed on this floor. The tabs on the map pick it too.
• Ground floor (On | Off) fills or clears the ground floor’s tiles.
• Ceiling (On | Off) fills or clears the ceiling.
• Foundation (On | Off) raises the whole building onto a slab with a porch step. A fig placed on the raised floor stands on it, in Overlap and in Stack.
• Steps (1 step | 2 steps | 3 steps), with a foundation on, sets how high it is off the ground.
• Trim (On | Off) adds a coping along every bare wall top.

A floor’s wall height is not on this page. It is the Height row on Walls · All walls: see A wall’s page below.

This building

• Turn rotates it 90°.
• Copy places a whole copy beside it, one clear cell over, past anything already there, selected and ready to drag.
• Peek sets Whole, Roof off, Front, Follow or See inside. See See inside .
• Floors, with two or more floors, sets All floors or Up to floor N.
• Remove building removes the whole building.

A deck of pillars

Rows of pillars with no walls are a building too (a car port, a parking garage). With What on Building, tap between the rows to select the deck. Its page shapes it: Roof and the roof kind cover it, Add a floor stacks the pillars and raises the canopy, Ground floor tiles every deck, Ceiling covers the upper one, Foundation adds a slab under it, and Trim caps the pillars. Its Look group shows one Pillars well in place of Outside and Inside, and no Wall style row. The floor tabs count pillar levels, so a Half wall or a Ramp draws on the upper deck. A single pillar is not a building.

A platform

A patch of floor tiles with no walls and no pillars is a platform (a patio, a stage). With What on Building, tap the patch to select it. Its page reads Platform in place of Building. Its Shape group holds Foundation and Steps only. Foundation raises the patch as one raised floor, and Steps sets how high. A platform takes no roof, no second floor, no ceiling, and no trim. Tiles placed against a house, outside its rooms, count separately from the house: tap them, and Foundation raises the patio and leaves the house on the ground. A fig placed on a raised platform stands on it.

A wall’s page

Set What to Walls, choose a How much step, and tap a wall on the map. Build becomes the page of the selected walls, with ‹ Catalogue to return. Its wells, size, and style apply to the selected pieces alone, so one building can have different walls.

Look

• Outside and Inside wells apply to the selected pieces.
• Size (S · M · L · XL) sets the pattern size for the selection. It shows when the selection has a pattern.
• Style is a row of tiles that sets a wall style for the selection.
• A wall piece that holds a door or a window also shows the opening’s own style row, labelled Door or Window. It swaps the opening in place: Door, Panelled, Glass, Double, Sliding, or Shutter for a door; Window, Arched, Round, Bay, or Window wall for a window. Swapping an existing window to Arched or Round re-cuts its wall to the curve. The wall’s Outside and Inside wells are on the same page, so the wall and its opening are set together.
• A wall piece with a door or a window holds its own Inside color. Inside on a length or on the whole building applies to that piece too.

A wall between two rooms has no outside. Its wells read Side A and Side B, and the map labels the two sides with letters on the piece you tapped.

Shape

• Turn into: Wall, Half wall, Fence, Window, Door, or Archway. The current kind is lit. Each selected piece changes on its own, so nine selected pieces become nine windows. To remove a door or a window and keep the wall, tap Wall. Turn into › Archway keeps the wall’s colors, patterns, and height, and Turn into › Wall on an archway restores them.
• Height, with − and +, shows from Length up, never on one piece. It sets the height of the selected walls.
• On All walls, Height is the whole floor’s height, from 1 to 3 cells in quarter steps (a floor starts at 1.5). That floor’s walls, posts, doors, windows and stairs grow or shrink together, and every floor above moves up or down with them. The ceiling, the trim and the roof move to the new top. Each floor keeps its own number, so a tall ground floor can have a low attic above it. To set another floor, switch the floor tab on the map and select All walls again.

This piece (it reads This pick with more than one piece)

• Copy look loads the Paint brush with the selection’s look.
• Remove removes the selection and repairs the joints. With more than one piece selected it reads Remove all N.

A floor tile’s page

Set What to Floors, choose a How much step, and tap a tile. The page is short: Look holds one Floor well, and This pick holds Remove. With Room, one tap selects every tile of the room.

Erase

Erase is a red button at the right end of the page’s header, in the same spot on Land, Build, and Scenery. It is the same red as Remove. Paint brush and Mural are in the same row, the same size as Erase. They stay in one row with the title. When the window is narrow, each button becomes a small square with its icon over its word. On Build, tap it and drag over walls and floors to erase them. Tap it again to turn it off. To remove exactly one wall length or one room’s floor, select it with the Select bar and tap Remove on its page. Cut walls are repaired, joints re-cap, and a building split in two becomes two buildings. Press and hold a piece on the 3D stage to remove it from the building.

Away from Build

Away from Build, a building tapped on another page shows a short card with an Edit building › button. The button opens World › Build with the building selected. The building’s page in the Figs window has the same button.

The building’s page

The building’s row under BUILDINGS in the Figs tab’s Scene list opens its page.

• PEEK INSIDE holds Peek (Whole, Roof off, Front, Follow, See inside) and, with two or more floors, the Floors dropdown (All floors, Up to floor N).
• SAVE IT holds Glue it into one fig, Box it as a set (a set holds 2 to 8 parts), and Take apart. See Sets . Gluing saves every pattern into the fig. The doors are kept: a door’s swing and a garage door’s roll-up stay, each leaf its own part of the glued fig, and a tap opens it.
• ROBLOX holds Ground under it (Off | On) and Send it to Roblox.
• Remove building is at the end.

Some design challenges open inside a finished house or shop. It is its own stage. Draw a wall inside one and the app says so: This set is finished: walls you draw stay on its ground floor. Build in a fresh scene, or beside the set.