> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.synaps.app/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.synaps.app/video-tutorials/sketch-to-cad-tracing.md). # Sketch to CAD: trace, refine and present a floor plan Turn a hand sketch into an editable CAD floor plan in Synaps. Follow tracing, refinement, drawing-sheet export and interior rendering. Watch a sketch become an editable drawing, then follow refinement, asset placement, drawing export, wall and window configuration, and camera rendering. {% embed url="" %} **Presented by:** Melos Azemi · **Published:** 2026-07-21 · **Length:** 19:45 Original video: [From sketch to CAD : automated floor plan tracing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pDOD_xx2kA). ## Sections at a glance
Chapter and summaryAutomatic source captions (verbatim recording; may contain recognition errors)

0:00 Import and trace

Bring a hand sketch into Synaps and reconstruct editable geometry.

Most architects start their projects by sketching up a concept or getting something started from a pencil and a paper. The part which is the most frustrating is that the translation a lot of it is lost or it even takes a lot of time to get it from the paper into something which is digitized. Well, in today's video we're going to go through this whole process how it's fully automated inside synapse.app app, which is a new tool for architecture studios to streamline your workflow and put everything in one place for your architectural presentations and projects. And I'm going to show you how that is going to be automated, how you can create professional floor plans, [music] turn them into 3D visuals which are fully real scale without having to model and a completely new drafty user experience which I absolutely love and would recommend to every architect out there to try it out. Without further ado, let's jump into this hand sketch which I have right here and we're going to put it [music] into Synapse simply by taking a picture of it and importing it on the computer. So, first step is to go to synapse.app app and simply open a free account which you can join into the beta of the Synapse which is currently you can start anything from scratch. And all it takes to actually digitize the floor plan that we just took a photo off is to drag and drop the image onto the canvas right here. And we will be prompted with the option of floor plan detected, trace it into editable walls or keep it as an image. And in this instance, we're going to go ahead and click trace. And once we do that, you will see that it will show us where the floor plan has been detected. In case you have multiple floor plans in an image or even if we import a PDF, it will detect all the floor plan separately. And all we have to do is click trace floor plan. Now, one thing that I also like to emphasize here is that you don't have to have the floor plan taken in a picture which is completely parallel to it. So even if there's some skewed perspective, [music] Synapse will automatically fix it for you. That way it is completely up to scale. So once you click trace floor plan, it [snorts] will take a few seconds for this to load up. And I'm going to show you exactly how we can take this floor plan and continue to

2:19 Refine the drawing

Correct openings, wall thicknesses and room labels.

refine it and improve up on it further. Now you can see that this is almost completely done. We have the walls placed, the windows placed. Now, this is not 100% there in a way, but it's close enough for us and it's much faster than having to draw everything manually because this works the same way as if we had a full on even bigger floor plan of an apartment block or something. Right? In this instance, you can see that uh some parts of the landscape have been detected as walls, which we can delete that. But I mean, other than that, this seems to be pretty close. like this door. Instead of being oriented towards that wall, we can just drag it and put it right here. We're going to click once here and another time to change the orientation to the right side. And you can see the actual bedrooms are pretty much correct. Now, because of the presentation of some of the doors, um, it did not get them exactly as they should, but I will duplicate this and move this to the other side. And now we have and now we have the door of the other bedroom. We are basically making some modifications, but this is still nothing compared to having to do this completely from scratch. Um, this wall here has been added. As you can see, the other part is, for example, here we had three windows. Um, and then here you can see that we have a sliding window. I'm going to show you how we can actually configure all of the doors and window in just a second to be the correct way. But I mean this is a very good bridge to where we had the floor plan as just a hand drawing to something which is digitized. And as we get started here now we can go ahead and clean this up and get this ready for a conceptual representation. Um for example even this window has to be all the way to the wall there. And then other than that I mean all of these other tweaks we can make them as we go. I will just move the picture out of the way for now and let's just get back to this. Now, I just want to set the expectations straight in the sense that this is not something where you just click once and it's fully automating your documentation. This is simply a tracer which allows you to get a conceptual floor plan from a sketch. And now we're going to get on the step of refining this further. First of all, I'm going to select all of the rooms here and the zone labels and I'm going to make the size of them a lot smaller. So, let's just leave it something like this for now because they're just taking a bit too much space for us. Uh, I'm going to try to keep some sort of hierarchy between them so that they're kind of in the same corner of the rooms and they are easy to find. And we Next up, what I will do is that I will make sure that all of the exterior walls are actually thicker with at least 30 cm thickness. And then the interior walls, we're going to keep them at 20 cm just so we have all of that set correctly. So, I'm just going to connect this wall with this right here. We're going to move that window onto that wall. Let's delete this part and make sure that these snap perfectly with one another. Now, every other part of this seems to be fine. Now, I'm going to extend this wall up to here. I will duplicate another vertical wall and simply snap it with the horizontal one and close off this kitchen in this corner. And then we have the same thing on the other side of the kitchen here, which we are going to have to draw manually. And one thing that I would like to add as well is that the results will very much vary in terms of how clear they are to read and detect. Now all of these other interior walls seem to be fine for now. Now these bathrooms will need a different fill. If we go to fill you will see that inside of hatches synapse has a large library from which you can choose from. [snorts] In this instance we are going to scroll downwards. We're going to search for towel. We're going to apply these ones and these should be fine. We can make the scale a bit smaller because that's just a bit too exaggerated. Let's do the same thing for this bathroom as well. I'm going to type in towels. Let's select this. Let's make it a 3x scale.

6:12 Furnish the rooms

Arrange furniture, finishes and room divisions.

And that should be good for now. I'm going to select all of the walls here. And I want to change their appearance to have a completely white fill. I'm going to do the same thing with this one that I forgot to select. Now, this seems a bit lighter on the eyes and easier to look at. Uh we are going to configure the walls later on. I'm going to show you something very cool as well. Let's also make the kitchen cabinets to be completely white. Let's make sure that this island is symmetrical to the kitchen cabinets. Here we have a nice dining room there. And then what we can do is that we can go to the asset library. Now the asset library is where you can find everything in terms of blocks for us ready to import onto the drawing. So I'm going to go to the category of living room. I'm going to scroll down to the living room layout. And I'll choose something like this here because we do have enough room for this type of layout. And in fact, this probably needs to be a bit larger in order to be to the right scale. And then simply by choosing rectangular tool, I can go ahead and draw a rectangle with a fill which can serve as a rug for us. Now I'm going to make sure that the living room layout that we have is in front of it. And on top of that, I think I will just make this a bit softer so that the actual furniture pops out more than the rug itself. Now I can also go back to the labels which I made them smaller earlier just for a sake of not taking too much space. I'm going to leave it at 40 size and then let's name this correctly. I'm going to name this open living, dining, and kitchen. And then, for example, this area right here where it's like a foyer or an entrance. What we can do is I can open this up. And I can use a divider, which is like a room divider. And I click once on the starting point and just basically draw it like a line. And now this is where this area will stop. And then we can go to rooms and add a completely new room right here, which we can name as a foyer. Now this is bedroom one which is named correctly. This is bedroom two. Let's name this guest bathroom. This is bedroom 2 which is correct. I'm going to name this master bathroom one. And then this other one can be master bathroom 2. Now I'm going to move these two just a bit lower. Right here we are going to add a wardrobe. So I'm going to go to assets. I'm going to type in wardrobe. So I'm going to go to assets. I'm going to go to bedroom. I'm going to scroll downwards. I'm going to find this wardrobe, drag and drop it in. And then we can tweak it in size to kind of fill this area correctly. I'm just going to duplicate this on the other side as well. And these fit nice. And then what I will do is that right here it asks us now I will go to the bathroom instead. and I can find a bathtub which would fit [music] right here on this corner of both of the bathrooms. Now, finally, I'm just going to add this background here and I'm going to change the stroke.

9:18 Compose and export

Place the plan on a drawing sheet and prepare an export.

Then, what I will do, I will just select everything and then I will go to the walls and I will make the stroke of the walls thicker. Okay. So, basically, if you just wanted to turn your sketch into something more polished, this could kind of be it. And I'm going to show you how we can make this into more of a documentation drawing when we go to configuration of walls, windows, doors, and how we can turn this floor plan into real scale visualization in just a second. But if this was all that you needed, you can basically just export this by going right here to the paper. You can select it. You can see that it automatically snaps to uh certain formats of paper. So, for example, let's say we would put this inside of an A4 paper or even larger, let's go for A3. I can just drag and drop the floor plan right inside of the paper. I whatever add the title blocks or let me also add quickly just some sort of background here and a boundary. And then I'm just going to try to place this um in the center. I can click to the paper. I can click export and I can just export it as PDS. Choose a location, click save. I can also, by the way, share this with other people and invite teammates. And right here, you can see that we have the whole floor plan exported as a PDF, which is quite clean and ready to share. And just like that, we can turn this into a PDF or PNG or whatever format. Now the cool part if you actually want to go ahead and create documentation out

10:49 Add technical detail

Configure wall layers, windows and dimensions.

of this you can select the wall and you can add layers to the walls. So in this instance we can add a layer to the right we can add another layer to the right and now we can choose these layers individually. So for example the layer which is completely outside I can make the thickness of it 15. And let's say this other one can be an insulation layer let's make it 12. And since this is going to be an insulation layer, we can input a certain type of hatch inside of it. So I'm going to type in insulation. I'm going to make the stroke of the insulation black. I'm going to make I'm also going to add a completely white background to it. I'm going to lower the scale. And I'm going to rotate it by 90°. And then I will go to the next layer. And then this layer can be a brick layer. For example, I can make a completely white background out of this. I can also lower the scale of this hatch. And now we have this multi-layer wall. On top of that, I can select the core layer of the wall. I can go to fill and I can select a concrete hatch. In this instance, this one. I will go to a completely white background. And then a darker background right here. And then I can also lower the scale to this to like 1.5. And this is pretty much about it. As you can see, now we have multiple layers in these walls. And now what I will do is I can select all of the other exterior walls. I can click on the eyropper tool and I can say apply these apply the same layers as this wall on all of the others which were selected. Now you can see that some of them are not oriented correctly and that's because it depends on the alignment [music] in terms of how the wall was drawn. But we can simply just drag and drop these [music] to reorder. And I can do the same thing with this other one as well. And now we have them set up as we need them. And then just for extra style points, I will go ahead and select the interior walls. And I'm going to apply the same concrete hatch to these as well. Add a 1.5 scale. Let's make the background completely white. And let's make give it uh same kind of darker gray stroke. And now we have something which looks more congruent and consistent overall. One thing that I will do is that I will add a completely white background. So a completely white fill. I will send this backward right in front of our background. And now this looks much better than having that part transparent. Now the other part of configuration when it comes to drawing documentation for architecture studios is the way that the windows work and the doors as well, which I absolutely love and I think it's very unique to what Synapse has to offer. So if I go to configuration, I can just click once to add another leaf here at the window. I can also add a transom if I wanted to. I can remove it if I click once again. And then I can also change the mechanism in terms of how this opens. So this can open on this side. And then this can open on this side as well. I can also change the construction in each of these windows. [music] And this is a window and not a door. So, I'm going to make sure that both of these have the right type selected there. And then I can also click that this does not look like it's opened. So, we can just leave it like that. And now we have this window configured. And [snorts] then, for example, for this other one, if you want the same thing, I can just delete it. I can duplicate this and then drag it right onto this wall. And I will make sure that these are aligned and symmetrical in the floor plan. I can do the same thing with the door. So, I'm going to select the door right here. I will also click once. I will add another leaf. I'm going to move this around. Now, we can also individually change the width of each of these. And now you can see that we have added also a window sash onto our door. And then obviously if you want to add dimensions, we can go to dimensions right here. We can make sure that we have the align dimension orientation and that these are chained and locked. So we can click once on the starting point and another time where we want to take the measurement and then we can continue the same way with the rest. Pretty simply and fast. So this is kind of how we would be able to create some sort of documentation floor plan. And once again just from a simple sketch that we had here. However, now we're going to move on to the next step where I'm going to show you how we can create realistic visualization out of this. And in order to do that, I'm going to go here at the polish mode, which is where you can enhance your floor plans graphically, and it can

15:25 Render and edit

Set camera views, generate images and refine selected objects.

serve more as a sort of Photoshop and illustrator inside one canvas. And on top of that, we have visualization built in. In this instance, I can go here at the camera tool. I can click once for the starting point and another time to set the direction. I can also tweak the actual width of and focal length. And one thing that I can add as well is that you can see that all of this is real scale in the preview. And then if I also go inside this window and I add another leaf like this. And let's say I make this a sliding door. I can click apply. And then I can also make the sill to zero. I can go back here and then I could also make the cell zero. This can be a fixed window. And if I go back to the polish mode, I can click on the camera. I can tweak anything. Just for example, a little bit of the rotation. And now you can see that the cell has changed. And now I will just set the correct height of these windows at 2,200 mm. And the same thing on this one, 2,200 mm. I can click on the camera once again, and then I can make the correct rotation here. So I've p pasted this prompt here. I've chosen no style because we do not need a cell here. I've set up the camera for the bedroom as well. And for the living room render, we're going to see it looking just like this. And I think this looks pretty pretty good. What we can do now is that we can edit this further. I will keep this selected. I will go edit with prompt. And I can say make this if it was a luxurious villa in South Africa, spring season, daytime. Add a beautiful landscape outside. no palm trees. Let's just click apply. And this will be applied to our render [music] here. Now, while this renders, we can go back to the bedroom view. I'm going to apply another font. I'm going to click apply to this. And this is what we have for the bedroom here. I mean, this looks absolutely stunning. It has preserved the scale just like we wanted to. It has stylized it further. It has made it like a very clean door to the master bedroom. And this is just awesome. And this is what we have here for the living room as well. I [music] mean, this is just absolutely stunning in my opinion. And I think this is just stunning. It does not get better than this to visualize and work on your projects. Now, we can take this even one step further. And the way that we do that is if I select this render, I can click segment. And what the segmenting will do is that it will make each object, each surface and everything else in its separate layer so that we can so that we can tweak them separately. So once this is segmented, we'll see a bunch of options show up for each one of the objects that we have inside of the image here. And once it says image has been segmented, you can see that now I can select the painting and it can and it says right here change art. So we can upload something to change that. We can select the wall. We can select the ceiling. Add or change a wallpaper. Change the paint. We can select the bed to change [music] there that uh the windows. We can change that as an element. The lamp we can turn it on or off which is very [music] cool. But what I will do is that I will select the chair here. I will click replace element. [music] And I will upload and I will upload this image of this armchair which is not even [music] that clean. And I will just click replace element. And this will detect armchair. And it will automatically replace it in the same spot and make it fit nicely with the mood, the lighting and everything which the image has in existing and with everything which is in the existing state of the image. Now you can see that it has replaced the armchair there. I think this workflow is awesome and I really cannot think of a better evolution for the workflow of architecture studios because once again we went from this hand sketch to a documentation of a floor plan and then also the visualizations which are real scale and you still maintain control even if the these use some AI in them. Now, if you want to try Synapse for absolutely free, you can do that in the first link below. [music]
## Related guides * [Trace a floor plan](/ai-and-automation/trace-a-floor-plan.md) * [Browse and place assets](/assets/browse-and-place-assets.md) * [Export your drawing](/import-and-export/export-your-drawing.md) * [Create an interior render](/ai-and-automation/create-an-interior-render.md)