> 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-finished-floor-plan.md). # From a client brief and sketch to a floor plan Follow a client brief and site study through sketching, floor plan tracing, layout refinement, furnishing and dimensions in Synaps. See a design process move from a client brief and site study to a hand sketch, then into an editable conceptual floor plan in Synaps. {% embed url="" %} **Presented by:** Melos Azemi · **Published:** 2026-08-18 · **Length:** 19:11 Original video: [Sketch to Finished Floor Plan : My design process Inside Synaps.app](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-wwx0heBg). ## Sections at a glance
Chapter and summaryAutomatic source captions (verbatim recording; may contain recognition errors)

0:00 Brief, site and sketch

Develop a layout from the client brief, orientation and site.

In this video we will go from a client brief to actually analyzing the site, coming up with sketches and concepts, and actually taking those sketches and digitizing them inside synapse.app. This is the questionnaire that I usually use to send to clients. And if you actually want to get it for absolutely free, so you can use it for your own project, you can do that in the link below. But here you can see that we contain some of the basic information like the project [music] type, who will live in this space, uh which of the options of the lifestyle apply, the special needs, etc. So, we will be starting off here with the site plan. And we will be analyzing first all the sun path. We have the north basically set on a 90° angle. And we will actually have a full-on sun exposure on the south, which makes me think that that's where we should aim to position the living room and the patio, and have everything else to the east. Now, the first initial sketch was just to kind of show that. However, on top of the layers now I'm just drawing some sort of bubble diagram, >> [snorts] >> where we're coming from the left side, where I'm going to add some storage next to the car parking lot or cover, which is going to be covered with the roof. Right next to it, we're going to have the two bedrooms, which are the master bedrooms, which both of them are going to have either some sort of bathroom or even a closet. You're going to have the foyer in the middle with the living room right next to it, and the kitchen and the dining to the north with a patio connecting to the outside. And as you can see, we have the entrance to the car cover, and then a pathway which sends us to the foyer. The foyer automatically connects to the bathroom, which also works and serves as a guest bathroom. And then to the right side we have an open kitchen dining living room, which connects and has an indoor outdoor connection to the patio. Now, there are still some sacrifices that we made here. For example, I always like to have the car cover access in some sort of clear direction and entrance in the home without actually having to walk outside again to enter the foyer. And then maybe the connection to the patio on the east side of the home will make us have most of the windows coming on the east rather than the south, but that almost works well in the climate that this site is in. With that said, I'm just starting to draw and sketch with some thicker lines exactly how I'm envisioning it. So, taking it over from the bubble diagram into a real scale sketch. And this is because the tool that we'll be using to digitize the Synapse actually is fully traceable in the sense that you can just take a picture just like I did here and then turn it into a real scale CAD

3:04 Digitize the sketch

Trace the concept and compare the editable result with the source.

sketch. Um in this instance, the sketch is pretty basic, which almost makes it uh easy to access and easy quality with even for homeowners. And we are basically going to see in just a second the quality output that we will get off a CAD drawing inside Synapse out of this. And we will continue to develop the concept even further. So, right here I am inside synapse.app. This is a fully web-based tool for architecture studios, where you can work with multiple people at the same time. However, this is what I really like about this tool. So, I can just drag and drop the sketch. And once I do that, Synapse will actually detect it. Now, the quality of the output It depends also on the input. This sketch basically was a very basic schematic sketch, something that even a homeowner could do. But the power of this is that most architects actually start their design process, their exploration, and their concepts through a sketch. But there remains a barrier through the physical world and the digital world on the screen, where you have to trace everything manually. However, this is only one part of the features that actually Synapse unlocks, where it makes this a lot more seamless. Even the tracer here is not not supposed to be a final output with one click. In my experience, at least it gets you to about 90% of the tracing process, which you won't have to do manually. And you can just clean things up and or refine and add further from there. And so now you can see the sketch, which is above our walls here, and I can just drag it. And as you can see, this has been clearly traced. And on top of this, what I think is super cool, I mean, yes, you can see, as I told you earlier, that it's not 100% there. Like right here, there should be a door instead of a window. And then for example, this door right here should have a different opening orientation. But the cool part of this is that it's fully editable even after it has been generated. And the other part which I absolutely love, you can see in the sketch how I just basically used a highlighter to just kind of show where I imagined the openings to be, and it has added that for us as well, every single one except the one in the kitchen here, which I can easily just select one of the windows, duplicate it, and then just

5:24 Refine the layout

Adjust openings, room boundaries and circulation.

place it there. And then it kind of got the idea that this is supposed to be thinner. But all of these will refine in just a second because I'm just going to drag the home and actually put it right on top of the site. I'm going to select the site plan. I will send it to back, and I will also lock it that way it does not move. >> [snorts] >> And over here in the side plan you can see that we already have the line where we have the actual setback line. And now I can just drag this and position it in a way that does not disrupt that. And at the moment to just not any more confusion while we are refining the floor plan, I will just go here and turn off the side completely. So first of all, I'll just delete that extra door, remove these windows completely, and then I'll just also face this door alignment for the storage area. We'll also have to add some sort of fill right here for the car driveway, or we might even actually connect it to the whole landscape. But for now, I will continue to align these two doors. And then maybe we could even move these a bit to the right because this needs some extra width and some breathing room. Now the entrance door, I would want it to be 1,100 mm. And by the way, you can notice as well while we're working at this. The tracer also puts everything in the correct scale. And also if you take the picture in a not a perfect perspective or not perfectly perpendicular, it will automatically fix the skewing and the perspective of the image. Now there are also some other design decisions I think that have to be taken here. Like one of them is I'm wondering whether we actually close this off and add a sliding door here, which I think actually would serve well as some sort of division from quieter areas to the public areas. And I think we can do that quite easily. If I just go to the door option here in the toolbar, I can place it right here. And then I can configure the door however I want. So I can select it. I can make this wider, let's say 1,100 mm. And if you by any chance work with the imperial system, you can follow along completely. Or you can actually change the units right here. If you go to window configuration, I can actually choose a sliding window, and then I can make it a pocket door, and then also change the handle. So, if you just see what I did there, you can see that the actual door configuration inside Synapse helps a lot to maintain control over your design, your drawings, and everything else. So, now in the floor plan, we also have the pocket door drawn perfectly. Now, what I will do next is that I I will draw a rectangle that comes up about here. So, this will be placed right on the side of the wall. It will be .6 m, and then I can double-click on the rectangle, and I can add another point over here, another one right here as well. And then I can then extend this to be a fully L-shaped kitchen, and this will snap perfectly. I really, really like the feeling of precision that Synapse gives you when you're actually drafting. As you can see, even the AI features are meant to only give you the ability to save time and remove the manual work, rather than take the steering wheel off of you, because you still have all the customizability inside of this. I will make this the same width as the assets, and I'm basically going to remove all of the fills at first, because now I can just go to rooms. I can add one room over here. I can add another one for this bedroom. This can be some sort of corridor. Uh this will be the foyer, and basically I'm just clicking on the room and applying it to each enclosed area, and I'll do the same for this area here. And what I can do now is that I'm just going to make sure that these are a bit better aligned. That way, the drawing has some hierarchy. So, now you can see that I've actually named all of the areas. And then we also have this living area, which actually is much larger than only the living area. And what we can do here, right where I click the rooms, I can open this actual menu drop down, and I can just draw a divider from this area up to here. And now it will make the living area smaller, and I can do the same thing for this area here. And I can place the room again, and I can just type in living room. I can just add another area towards laundry, and then I can do this again over here. I can name this kitchen and dining. What I will do next is that I will actually add the wall, which will handle the fireplace. So, this can be similar to a U-shaped wall, which inside of it we will have the actual fireplace, and then this will be just a supportive wall on the other corner here. Now, for this car parking area, I can select the rectangle, I can go to fill, and add hatch by selecting the hatch menu. I can just choose this diagrammatic hatch, which can have a scale of four, or a scale of six,

10:48 Furnish and finish

Add assets, hatches and window configurations.

or even 10. Um and then give it a white background. Also, I will apply the same diagrammatic hatch for the patio here. I'll make it the scale of 10, and then we have this as follows. Now, this floor plan actually needs a bit more furnishing, and for that we can go to the asset library here. And then you can see that we have all the different libraries. I can click on living room. I'm going to delete the existing ones, and I'm going to scroll to find something which fits. Now, one heads-up is that when I'm hovering over this library elements, you You see that there is a small orange camera icon on the top right, which means that this is linked to a 3D model, which will show up in the camera renders that we're going to do in one of the future episodes of this series. So, I want to make sure that whatever asset I'm choosing actually has a 3D model. So, I will drag and drop this armchair, and then I will scroll to find a sofa or a couch. Um I can actually also use this coffee table, and maybe even increase it in size a bit. And then I'm also going to place the sofa right here. Now, I can use the rectangular tool by using the R key shortcut, and then dragging and drop it at in a diagonal. I can go to hatch, and then find another diagrammatic fill, which could be this one. I will add a completely white background, and then I'll increase the scale by five. I will send this to back completely first, and then I can just drag it over to what we have here. I will lower its stroke, because otherwise it seems like it is on top of the elements. And just like that, I will continue to furnish the rest of the rooms, and just basically making the floor plan look like spaces which are more livable actual than empty. So, right here at the bathroom, I'm actually going to add double sinks, and then I will add a very slim wall. That way this is usable in case someone just wants to wash their hands quickly, even if someone is using the bathroom on the other side. So, what I mean by this is that I'm actually going to add a pocket door right here. I'm going to go to the configuration. I'm going going it a sliding door, make it a pocket door, change the handle to vertical, and then I'll also change the alignment [music] to where this opens. So, now as you can see, this looks much better and more like a livable space. Now, a lot of the things here are a little bit too are a bit too illustrated for like a real construction plan. However, since we are still in conceptual phase, I think these actually add a lot of character to the actual floor plan. These people, the car, and actually um the rooms look a lot more furnished. There is still more that I want to do. So, even these windows over here, I will make them sliding windows, so I can select the window. I can go to window configuration, and I can make that And the cool part about the window configuration is that I can click plus to add as many leaves or remove as many leaves as I want. I can add a transom, remove a transom. I will leave it a double-leaf window, and then I will make this a sliding window as well. I'll make the handle vertical, and I'll click apply. And now you can see that this is applicable even on the 2D and soon enough in the 3D once we actually get to that point in this project. And then for this one, I'll just add another leaf, and the same on the other side here.

14:42 Dimension and review

Add dimensions and weigh the design’s spatial trade-offs.

Then I'll use a dimensions tool. I'll make sure that they are chained and locked, and then I will go ahead and click on the starting point, uh leave it a distance of about a meter, and then continue with the rest [music] of the wall exactly where it needs to have a dimension. So, anytime there is some sort of opening or a change in the wall, I'll actually make sure that we document it with a dimension. So, just like this. Now, even for the dimensions on all of the other sides of the wall, I want to make sure that the distance between the dimension of the wall actually stays 1 m. That way there is consistency in the drafting. So, now we have some sort of conceptual plan with the dimensions as well. Now, looking from a design point of view, there are a few flaws that I'd like to point [music] out. But, anyway, I kind of chose to make the sacrifices and [music] put them on a scale, which one I prefer. Now, firstly, the actual living room doesn't get as much light from the south. And actually, while I'm talking about this, I'm going to turn on the side plan. The actual living room doesn't get as much light from the south, so it's very minimal. And it actually gets more light coming in from the east. And even that very late on during the day because [music] here this going to be covered by a roof. And it'll actually be shaded most of the time. However, why I made that choice is because of the connection that it gets to the outside. And I think this connection with a patio over here actually helps a lot both the dining room and the patio. Thinking about this project, it actually sits in [music] a more um I would say tropical climate or where it's summer most of the year. And for that reason, it might have worked better in terms of energy efficiency and for heating and cooling better off in this area. Now, what actually works right in terms of orientation is the kitchen sits in the north where it's actually good for work zones. It gets a lot of neutral light. This bedroom actually works well because it is optimized to have a cooler temperature uh rather than this one which sits at the south orientation during the whole day, which might be a lot warmer to sleep in during the night. But, we have good visibility from the living room in terms of the entrance, so that can be easily visible. We have a very good transition from the foyer to the rest of the room, so it's very slow transition. You get some like um area where it stops all of the noise, the pollution, and everything else coming in from the outside or even immediately um smelling all the smells from the kitchen here. And by the way, another option is, and this is totally based on preference, that this kitchen could also work as closed or semi-closed. That way, the noise, the smelling, and everything else doesn't continue to the rest of the home. And the other part, which is not my favorite, is that after someone parks the car, they actually have to get back here and walk towards the entrance to actually enter the home. Um I mean, this is not the biggest deal. Usually, I like to also have some sort of connection from the parking lot of the car directly into the inside of the home. However, for now, I think this will work fine. And this is going to be a conceptual plan that we're going to continue to work on during the series and actually fix. And this is a floor plan that we're actually going to to refine further on in terms of the drafting and maybe even more construction details like the layers of the walls, the grid system, and everything else. With that said, I think this is a pretty good starting point from this video. We went from a brief and a site plan to actually getting a bubble diagram, getting some sort of sketching going on just so we have our more fluid by hand, and then turning that sketch [music] into a conceptual floor plan inside synap.app. Now, next up, you are also going to create some concept Next up, we're also going to create some conceptual 3D renders based on this floor plan without any 3D modeling, and they're going to be in real scale. And if you actually want to see the video how I'm able to create realistic renders from a 2D floor plan, you can go ahead and watch the video right here.
## Related guides * [Turn a scan into an editable drawing](/ai-workflows/scan-to-editable-drawing.md) * [Trace a floor plan](/ai-and-automation/trace-a-floor-plan.md) * [Browse and place assets](/assets/browse-and-place-assets.md) * [Measure distance and area](/drafting/measure-distance-and-area.md)