A flat floor plan is a professional's drawing. It asks the person looking at it to hold a mental model of a building they have never seen, from a set of lines that only mean something if you have been taught to read them. Clients can't do it, and they rarely say so.
An isometric render solves that in one image: the roof comes off, the walls are cut at about waist height, and the whole plan is seen at 45 degrees from above. Nobody needs training to read it.
This is how to get one from a plan you already have.
What you'll need
- A floor plan as a JPEG or PNG — exported from CAD, scanned, or photographed.
- An account with at least one credit. New accounts start with two.
- About a minute.
You don't need the original CAD file, a model, or any 3D software.
Step 1: Get the plan into a clean image
The single biggest factor in the quality of the output is the quality of the input. The render is generated from what the image actually shows, so anything ambiguous in the drawing stays ambiguous in the result.
Before uploading, check three things:
- The whole plan is in frame, with a little white space around it. A plan cropped at the edge produces a building cropped at the edge.
- The lines are black on white, not grey on grey. If you are exporting from CAD, export the plan sheet without the title block, grid, or dimension strings — they get read as walls surprisingly often.
- It is one floor. Two plans side by side on the same sheet produce one confused building. Crop them apart and render them separately.
A phone photo of a hand sketch works, but take it square-on in even light. A photo taken at an angle gives a building with a skewed footprint, because the perspective in the photo is the perspective the renderer sees.
Step 2: Upload it and pick the transformation
Open the Studio and drop the image in. Then choose what the image is:
| Transformation | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Floor plan | Plans, survey drawings, sketches — the roofless doll's-house view |
| Room interior | A photo of an existing room, restyled and re-lit |
| Building exterior | An elevation or a photo of a façade |
| Technical drawing | Sections and axonometrics, kept as measured linework |
For a plan, choose Floor plan. It cuts the walls at about 1.2 m so every room stays readable from above, furnishes the rooms at a believable 1:50, and drops the building onto a plain ground with a soft contact shadow — no sky, no site, no people to argue about.
Step 3: Choose a format and a quality
Aspect ratio is worth a moment's thought. Auto follows the shape of your upload, which is usually right for a plan: a long thin house should not be forced into a square. Pick 16:9 if the render is going straight into a slide, or 2:3 if it is going into a portrait document.
Quality is the other half:
- HD — proposals, email, anything that will be looked at on a screen. One credit.
- 2K — presentation boards and printed A3.
- 4K — large-format printing, or when a detail will be cropped out and enlarged.
Start at HD. It is the cheapest way to find out whether the plan reads correctly, and if it does, running the same upload again at 4K costs you nothing but the credits.
Step 4: Generate, then look at it properly
Renders run in the background — you can start a second while the first is going, up to two at a time. When it lands, don't just look at whether it's pretty. Check it against the plan:
- Count the rooms. Are they all there?
- Follow the front door. Does the circulation work the way the plan says?
- Check the openings. Does a window appear where the plan has a solid wall?
That three-point check takes ten seconds and catches nearly everything.
When it comes back wrong
Three failures account for almost all of them, and all three are fixed at the upload, not in the settings.
The building has the wrong footprint. The photo was taken at an angle, or the plan was cropped. Re-shoot it square-on with the whole plan in frame.
Rooms are merged or missing. The line weights were too light for the walls to read as walls. Export at a higher resolution, or darken the drawing before uploading.
Furniture appears in odd places. The renderer is filling space it couldn't interpret. Label the rooms in the drawing if you can — a plan with "KITCHEN" and "BED 1" written on it furnishes far more sensibly than a plan of unlabelled boxes.
A failed render is refunded automatically, so the only cost of trying again is the minute.
When to generate the plan instead
Uploading a plan gets you a render of a drawing. It does not get you a measured building — the geometry is inferred from a picture, so room areas and wall lengths aren't something you should quote from.
If you need the numbers as well as the picture, work the other way around: write a brief and generate the plan itself. Those options come with real dimensions, an area schedule, code checks, and exports to DWG and IFC — and you can render any of them isometrically from there.
The short version
Clean image in, roofless isometric out, about a minute, one credit at HD. Check the room count and the front door before you send it to anyone, and if something reads wrong, fix the upload rather than the settings.