Here are some tips for drawing rooms. You may want to print these out.
Before beginning, use an image editing application on the .gif or .jpg of the floor plan to do the following:
Leave some space outside the house for the yard on all sides of the house, so that you can add outdoor lights, sprinklers, gates, fountains, etc. to the project.
Try to make the all the floor areas the same scale.
Draw a perfect square around the outside of each layer. Then, before you begin the Add Rooms process, re-size the overall Design Module window so that the square is square. This will line things up better.
and do not re-size the Design Module. If you re-size the Design Module, the gif or jpg may not line up with the rooms you have already drawn.
Orient the gif or jpg of the floor plan so that north is up. This will make it easier to add devices with names that reference compass headings. Later, for the Browser GUI, you can rotate the image, if you want.
Always start in the upper left corner of the room so that you will know where you started.
Hold down the "Shift" key the whole time you are drawing. This will force a straight line - constrained to 30, 45, 60, 90, etc degrees.
. Click your mouse to create a point of the room and then wait an instant before moving you mouse to make sure the point was accepted. As the line rubber-bands to the next point, make sure the origin is the last point you wanted to create.
Use the small red dots from the previous room you drew as guides for drawing future rooms.
Do not draw a rectangle for the whole room and then add points for the doors and windows later - while it is possible to do it this way, it is painful.
If a line segment ends up in the wrong place, use the "Undo" button immediately. It will delete the last line drawn. You can use it repeatedly to delete additional lines.
Do not draw one room on top of another room. The software can handle it, but you have to deal with it asking which room you really want to work with.
Save your project often so you do not run the risk of losing a lot of work.
Quite often the walls of the room will not line up on horizontal or vertical lines. Often the end points can be added by clicking on some location on the grid, but the doors and windows look crooked. We've found the following technique to work well.
Use the grid on 10 to create the rough outline of the room (some of the lines will be crooked).
Go to the "Edit" layer of the Design Module
Click on a point that you want to move
Uncheck the "Snap to grid" check box. This will allow you to move the point - one pixel at a time.
Move the point with the arrow keys on your keyboard to a location where the line looks straight.(note that with 2 or more adjacent rooms sharing a point, you actually move the point for all of them at the same time - making it much quicker)
Repeat for each point of the room that needs moving .
The room represented by a set of stairs typically appears on multiple floor areas. Draw the room on each floor area. Name them something like "Stairs 2nd floor" and "Stairs 1st floor". Then go to the "Combine Rooms Layer" to combine the two rooms into one - typically, named "Stairs".
To draw a door in the room, stop the previous line segment at the beginning of the door, then draw a straight line segment to the wall on the other side of the door (do not draw the line segment into the room the way it would appear on the blueprint). Later, in the Edit Rooms layer, you can convert the line segment to a door and the door will open slightly into the room the way it would on the blueprint.
To draw windows, stop the previous line segment at the beginning of the window, then draw a line segment on top of the window to the wall on the other side of the window. Later, in the Edit Rooms layer, you can convert the line segment to a window.
As you draw straight lines and curved lines around the outside of the room, you will be drawing "solid walls".
If you have two rooms that do not have a wall or a doorway between them, then draw a line through the open area between the rooms for both rooms just like you would if the wall existed. Later, in the Edit Rooms layer, you can make the line segment invisible.
To draw a solid walls within a room that is connected to one of the outer walls of the room:
Begin drawing the outer wall of the room.
Draw the line of the outer wall - stopping at the point at which the inner wall touches the outer wall.
Draw the line along the inner wall.
Draw the line back over the inner wall to the outer wall.
Continue drawing the rest of walls of the room.
Later, in the Edit Rooms layer, you can make the line segment gray
To draw a wall within a room that is not connected to one of the outer walls do the same thing as if the walls were connected and then make the connecting line segments invisible in the Edit Rooms layer.