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← Tutorials

Sketch a building with walls and a roof

start here

On the structures band, draw a footprint, give it a wall height and pick a roof — a house, sauna, shed or retaining wall in a minute.

6 min · build and plant

A building in Lan3D is a footprint, a height and a roof. It is a sketch of the volume for looking at — enough to see how a sauna sits on the slope, not a construction drawing.

Draw the footprint

  1. Select the Structures tab in the sidebar.
  2. Draw the footprint with the rectangle or polygon — the pencil is not offered here; structures are set out, not sketched. An L-shaped house is one polygon.
  3. In 3D it already stands as a box.

Wall height

With the footprint selected, Height in the sidebar is how tall the walls stand above the ground under the footprint — 2.5 for a single storey. Move the ground later and the building moves with it.

Put a roof on

Under Roof in the sidebar:

  • FormFlat, One slope, Two slopes (a ridge), Four slopes (hipped) or Pyramid.
  • Rise — how far the ridge or peak stands above the walls.
  • Runs — the way a single slope falls, or the line the ridge runs along, in degrees. Turn it until the ridge runs the long way.
  • Eaves — how far the roof reaches beyond the walls.

The roof is set out on the rectangle the footprint fits in, so a plain rectangle comes out exact and an L-shape roughly.

Retaining walls and blocks

A wall is a thin rectangle with a height and a flat roof — 0.3 m wide, 1.2 m high, along the top of a bank. A run of blocks is a polyline. Well rings are circles. They all belong on this band because they stand on the terrain rather than shaping it.

Colour and texture

The fill and texture chips work here as anywhere: Wood walls, Brick, Stone for a wall. The plan shows the colour; 3D and the render show the texture.

Next

Place objects from the library — benches, boulders, trees.

Try it on your own site

Open a blank site and follow along — it takes about 6 minutes.