A full design with the automatic features

ILX Drawings. A full design, start to finish, with the automatic features.

What we will build

In this video, we design a complete two-story house, from a blank screen to a full set of permit drawings. Follow along in your own copy of ILX Drawings, and pause the video at any step.

We start with a short questionnaire and get a layout. We adjust the rooms, enter the address, and let Self-design place the doors and windows, the structure, the wall bracing, the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, the furniture and the cabinets.

Then we review the checks and fix what they find, shape the roof, add solar panels, check the energy code, look at the house in 3D, and walk through the sheets. We finish with the calculation packages, the materials and cost estimate, and the exports.

The questionnaire

A new project opens with the questionnaire. It asks the questions an architect would ask at the first meeting.

First, the project name. We call this one Maple Street Residence. It is a single-family house with two stories and a two-car garage.

Next, the program: four bedrooms, two full baths and one half bath. Use the plus and minus buttons, or type a number.

Then tick the rooms you want. The usual rooms are already ticked: a foyer, the living room, the kitchen and dining room, a laundry, a primary suite with a walk-in closet. We add a front porch.

Further down, choose the foundation, the wall type, the roof style, the exterior cladding and the roof covering. You can also give a target size, and mark it as a must.

At the end of the form are two options that do part of the design for you right away: placing the doors and windows, and laying out the framing and the systems. We leave them off here, because Self-design will do all of that later, in one step, with a report.

The line at the bottom keeps a running count. Here it is nineteen rooms across two stories. When it looks right, click Create layout.

The generated layout

A few seconds later, every room is laid out as a colored tile. Rooms that belong together sit together: the garage next to the mudroom, the kitchen open to the dining room, the stairs near the front door. The walls are drawn from the tile edges, with dimensions all around.

The panel on the right adds it all up. This house has 3,600 square feet of living area, with four bedrooms, two and a half baths and two stories.

The story tabs at the top switch between floors. Here is the second floor, with the bedrooms, the baths and the laundry. The stairs line up with the stairs below.

The section marks around the plan show where the building sections are cut. They are placed for you, and they appear on the section sheet later. A story can be added, duplicated or deleted from the same tabs.

Editing rooms

The layout is yours to change. Click a room to select it. The inspector on the right shows its name, its type, its size and its position, along with its ceiling and its finishes.

Drag a tile to move it, pull one of its handles to resize it, or type an exact size. Edges snap to their neighbors, so the walls stay clean. Here we rename the living room to Great Room, and the plan updates at once.

To add a room, pick it from the list on the left, and it drops into the middle of the view. Delete removes the selected room, and R turns it.

Tick Show floor below to see the lower floor faintly under the upper one, so you can line up walls and stairs. Every change can be undone, and the project is saved as you work.

Address and site data

Before the design, open Project setup and enter the project address. The title block uses it on every sheet, and it locates the house for the site data.

Click Look up site data from address. The program finds the location and fills in the design values for the site, such as the wind speed and the seismic values, and it makes a vicinity map for the cover sheet.

The Design criteria tab shows every value the design uses: the code edition, the wind and seismic values, the snow load, the floor and roof loads, the soil bearing and the frost depth. Check them against your local requirements.

Anything you change here applies to this project only. To reuse your firm's settings, fill them in once and click Save as my defaults; every new project starts from them.

Self-design

Now for the heavy lifting. Click Self-design in the top bar.

The list shows every step it will take: doors and windows, access and egress, floor framing with girders, beams, posts and footings, the roof framing, the shear walls and wall bracing, electrical, plumbing and heating and cooling, furniture, cabinets, section cuts and the code details that apply. Untick any step you want to keep for yourself.

Click Run self-design. When it is done, the result lists what was placed for each system, followed by the checks it found.

Items you placed by hand stay as they are; only automatic items are replaced, so you can run it again at any time. Every result is a proposal for you, the designer of record, to review.

A good habit is to run it after every big change to the layout. Move a wall, run Self-design, and the openings, the framing and the systems follow the new plan.

What Self-design placed

Let's look at the result, one step at a time.

In Doors and Windows, every room has its doors, and the windows are placed on the outside walls, with escape windows in the bedrooms.

In Structure, the headers over every opening, the beams and the posts are laid out and sized, each with a tag. The floor joists and the roof framing have their own plans. The foundation plan shows the footings under the walls and the pads under the posts.

The wall bracing plans show the braced wall lines on each floor, with the length of bracing each line needs.

In MEP, the electrical layout has receptacles, switches, lights, smoke alarms and the panel. The plumbing has fixtures in every wet room, routed to the stacks. And the heating and cooling has supply registers, returns and the air handler.

Each trade has its own tab and its own symbol palette, and the other trades are shown faded, so you can add, move or delete a device without losing your place. Auto places a starting layout for one story or for all of them.

Back in Layout, you can see the furniture and the kitchen, bath and laundry cabinets, which also appear on the plans and the interior elevations.

Everything Self-design placed is an ordinary item. Move it, resize it, delete it or replace it, just like an item you placed yourself.

Reviewing the checks

The Checks panel lists everything that still needs your attention. Structural items, plumbing routing, wall bracing and the residential code checks each get a short explanation of what is wrong and why.

Click any item to see it on the plan. Many items come with a Fix button. Here, a glazed door needs safety glass. One click applies the suggested fix, and the item drops off the list. Each fix is one undo step.

Other items need a decision from you, such as moving a wall or adding a window. Make the change, and the checks update as you work.

The path test shows the way out from any room. Select a bedroom, tick Show path to exits, and the plan draws the route to the exits.

If a room cannot be reached, Fix access adds the missing doors or cased openings in one step. Keep working down the list until only the items you have reviewed and accepted are left.

Roof styles and dormers

In Structure, the roof plan shows the roof that the program builds from the outline of every story. Lower roofs die into the upper walls, and every plane is labeled with its pitch.

Change the style for the whole house in one place. Here is a gable roof, and here is a Dutch hip. We go back to a hip roof.

Click any roof plane to change its pitch, its overhang or its end. To add a dormer, click Dormer, pick its type, and click a roof plane. The dormer is framed, flashed and drawn on the plans, the elevations and in 3D.

Solar panels

In the same roof plan, tick Roof solar PV. Then click Auto-fill. The program fills the best roof planes with modules, keeping the required clear paths along the ridge and the edges.

The panel lists the system size and an estimate of the yearly production. You can add, move, rotate or delete modules by hand, and mark vents and skylights as obstructions. Solar adds its own plan, details and schedule sheets to the set, and the panels show up in 3D.

Energy code

Open Project setup and the Energy tab. The program checks the building envelope against the energy code for your climate zone, using the walls, the ceilings, the windows and the doors in the model.

The line at the top shows the result for this house. Change the window product or the insulation, and the check updates.

You can also set the U-factor and the solar heat gain of each window or door, in Doors and Windows mode, when you know the actual product. When you need it, File, Export REScheck entry gives you the data in the order of the REScheck form, so you can fill it in quickly.

The house in 3D

Click 3D. The model is built from the same data as the plans: walls, windows, doors, floors, the roof, the porch and the furniture.

Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, and click any item to select it and edit it. Explode the stories to look inside each floor.

Switch the mode to Render for a photo-style view with shadows and materials, ready for the cover sheet or a client meeting.

The plan cut and the section cut slice the model, so you can look into a floor or along one of the building sections. Save image keeps the current view as a picture.

And click Walk to walk through the house at eye level, with the arrow keys or W, A, S and D. Drag the mouse to look around. Here we are inside, with the furniture and the windows in place. Press Escape to leave.

The drawing set

Click Sheets. The whole drawing set is built live from the model, so every sheet is always up to date.

The cover sheet has the sheet index, the design criteria, the project data, a code summary, the notes and a rendering of the house.

The architectural sheets follow: the floor plans with door and window tags and the room schedule, the exterior elevations with the materials called out, and the building sections through the stairs and the main rooms.

The structural sheets show the foundation plan and the framing plans, with the beams and headers marked.

The mechanical, electrical and plumbing sheets have their own plans for each floor.

Then come the details, chosen for this project, and the door, window and room finish schedules. The structural notes sheet holds the design data, the header schedule and the joist schedule.

On the left, pick the sheet size and the plan scale for the whole set, and which disciplines to include. On the right, you can change the number and the title of any sheet, or hide it from the set. The title block is filled in from Project setup on every sheet.

Editing sheet text

You can edit any text on a sheet. The toolbar above the sheet has Edit text, Add text and Add multi-line note.

Click a text, choose Edit text, and type. Here we add Option A to the plan title. Your edits are kept when the sheet is rebuilt, and the Edited text counter shows 1 edit on this sheet. Click it to review your edits or reset them.

The general notes are edited the same way, per discipline, from the panel on the right. Tick the sections that apply to this project, click a title to edit its text, or add a custom section of your own. Restore standard text puts the original wording back.

Calculation packages

From the File menu, open Calculation packages. Each discipline gets its own standalone document, with its own cover, engineer of record, seal, contents and page numbers.

Pick the disciplines, enter the engineer of record for each one, or leave it blank to use the project's, and click Build PDFs.

The same results appear on the schedule sheets: the heating and cooling loads and equipment, the electrical load and panel schedules, and the plumbing fixture units and riser.

Each package shows the inputs, the steps and the results, so a reviewer can follow every number by hand.

Materials and estimate

The File menu also has Materials and estimate. It lists every material from the model by trade, with quantities, by story and by room.

The lumber tab gives a cut list and a buy list, so you know how many pieces of each size to order. The summary adds it up by division. The unit costs are placeholders: enter your own prices for your market, and save them for this project or as your defaults.

The quantities are estimates from the model. Use them for budgeting and early pricing, and verify them before you order.

Export

When the set is ready, export it. In Sheets, PDF exports the whole set at true paper size and scale, and DXF exports each sheet for your CAD software.

File, Export 3D model gives you an IFC file for Revit, Archicad and other BIM programs. The same list has formats for rendering programs, for augmented reality on a phone, and for 3D printing.

You can also download the whole project as a file, to keep a copy or to send it to a colleague.

Before you send anything out, open Project setup once more and fill in the title block: your firm, your seal and the issue status. Every sheet picks it up.

That is a complete design, from a questionnaire to a full permit set. You remain the designer of record: review every sheet before you sign and submit it.

Start your free 30-day trial at ilxdrawings.com. Questions? Write to us at services@ilxstudio.com.