Guide

Everything Arqtect does, in the order you are likely to need it. Nothing here assumes you have used 3D software before.

Try it while you read

The guide makes far more sense with the app open beside it. It starts on a finished house, so there is something to take apart.

Open Arqtect

Free · nothing to install · no account

What you are looking at

Arqtect opens onto a finished house. That is on purpose — an empty grid tells you nothing, and it is easier to take something apart than to start from nothing. Click Start empty in the top corner when you want your own.

The screen has four parts:

• The toolbar, down the left. One tool at a time; the one that is lit is the one that acts when you click.
• The model, in the middle. Right-drag orbits, middle-drag pans, scroll zooms.
• The panels, down the right: storeys, materials, the sun, the selected thing.
• The hint line, under the toolbar. It tells you what the current tool wants you to do. It is worth reading — most of what follows is in there.

Drawing the shell

Every building in Arqtect starts as a shape on the ground. You draw the outline; the walls come up from it with real thickness, and everything after that is measured against them.

R Rectangle

Drag on the ground. The most common way to start. Drag on top of an existing solid instead and the new one sits on it.

P Polygon

Click each corner; Enter or a click back on the first point closes it. For L-shapes, wings, anything not rectangular.

M Room of four walls

Drag a rectangle and get four separate walls with a floor slab, rather than one solid block. Use this when you want the inside to be a space you can stand in.

A Single wall

Drag a line. It squares itself to the walls already there — parallel or at a right angle to them, within a few degrees — so a room comes out square without being fought. Alt draws at any angle you like.

Walls are always drawn on the storey you are on. To build upwards, change storey first, or use Copy storey up.

E Push and pull

Hover a face until it highlights, then drag it. This is how you make a building taller, deeper, or push a bay out of a flat wall — the shape follows, it is not stretched.

Exact sizes

While you are dragging, type a number. It appears in the corner and takes over from the mouse; Enter commits it. 4.2 is 4.2 metres, 420cm and 4200mm are the same thing, and 4 x 3 gives you an exact rectangle. This is how you draw a real building rather than an approximate one.

Snapping

As you draw near something you have already built, the cursor picks up its corners, its midpoints and its centre, and a marker shows which. Corners win over midpoints, midpoints over centres. It only reaches about half a metre, so it helps when you want it and stays out of the way when you do not.

Doors, windows and holes

Openings are cut out of the geometry, not painted on it. Look through a window from inside and you are looking through a hole.

• Door — pick it from Items, then click a wall face. Choose the style and the swing before you place it; double-click any door afterwards to open and shut it.
• Window — the same, and you can set the sill height, so a high clerestory and a full-height opening are the same tool.
• C Cut a hole — drag a rectangle on a wall to remove exactly that piece. For anything the door and window tools do not cover: a serving hatch, an opening between two rooms, a slot. The wall keeps a list of what has been cut out of it, so you can put a piece back.

Openings belong to the wall they are cut into. Move the wall and they travel with it; delete the wall and they go too.

Storeys, stairs and lifts

The Storeys panel is the one to understand early. You are always working on one storey, and what you draw lands on it. PgUp and PgDn move between them.

Each storey has its own height, which you can change after the fact — the storeys above shuffle up to make room rather than overlapping.

Stairs

From Items. Click where the bottom step goes, and it climbs to the storey above and cuts its own stairwell through the floor. You do not size it: it measures the height it has to climb and works out the rest, so the risers come out equal, the goings deep enough and the pitch within the range a building inspector would accept. Change the storey height and the stair redraws.

Lifts

L Click where the shaft goes. It runs from where you put it to the top of the building and opens on every floor it passes, cutting through each one. Four sizes, from a domestic lift to a goods lift; the panel on the right switches between them.

Balconies

From Items. Click a wall face and the balcony cantilevers out at that height, with a railing — glass, bars, or solid.

Roofs

K Click a building and it gets a roof. The roof measures the walls underneath it, so an L-shaped plan gets an L-shaped roof without being redrawn, and the part that has another storey built on it is left out.

• Gable, hip, mono-pitch and flat use the building's bounding box.
• Follows plan traces the actual walls, valleys and all.

Pitch and overhang are in the panel. Select particular walls first and the roof covers exactly those; ⇧-click a single wall for a lean-to over one part.

Furniture, planting and everything else

I Items is one window with everything you can place in it, each drawn rather than described, so you can see what you are picking. Choose something, click Done, then click where it goes.

• Openings — doors and windows in several styles.
• Stairs, lifts, balconies and railings.
• Furniture — beds, seating, tables, storage, kitchen units, bathroom fittings. Kitchen runs are drawn as a line rather than placed one at a time.
• Lighting — pendants, spots, wall lights, lamps. Click any surface to mount one; double-click to switch it on and off.
• Garden — pools, fences, decking, play equipment, courts. Fences and hedges are drawn as a line.
• Planting — trees, bushes, beds. Trees come in several shapes, and the fruit ones carry fruit.
• Paving — paths and drives in several materials.
• Vehicles — in whatever colour, to give the drawing scale.

X Your own pictures

Upload a photo and place it in the model — as a flat panel, standing up, or lying on the ground. A PNG with a transparent background becomes a proper cutout, which is the usual way to get a person or a specific plant into a view.

Bringing in a plan or a survey

If an architect has already drawn your plan, you do not have to redraw it. Import plan, next to Export, reads a DXF from CAD and stands the walls up.

It works by looking for what a wall actually is on a plan: two parallel lines a wall's thickness apart, running alongside each other for at least half a metre. Everything that does not match — furniture, door swings, hatching, text, dimension lines — is left out rather than guessed at.

1. Choose the file. Arqtect shows how many walls it found and how many lines it could not account for.
2. Check the units. Plans are drawn in millimetres and models are in metres. If the file says which, that is used; if not, the size of the drawing decides, and the guess is shown in words so you can overrule it. This is the one thing worth being careful about — a plan brought in at the wrong scale looks completely normal until you measure something.
3. Turn off the layers you do not want. They are listed busiest first, which usually puts the wall layer at the top.
4. Set the wall height and place them. They arrive selected, so you can move the lot at once if they need to sit somewhere else.

A survey, and the ground it describes

The same button takes a land survey. Arqtect can tell the two apart by itself: a survey has heights on its points, a plan does not. Instead of walls you get the actual ground — the spot levels and contours interpolated into a surface, with the plot boundary drawn on it.

Heights are read as levels above sea, and the lowest surveyed point becomes zero in the model, so a plot at 220 m does not put your building 220 m in the air. The panel tells you how far the plot falls before you place anything.

DWG is AutoCAD's own format and cannot be read directly; ask for a DXF, or convert it — most CAD software exports one, and the free ODA File Converter does it in a minute. A PDF or a photo of a plan has no line data in it at all.

The site, the sun and the sky

The Site panel sets what the building sits on: the size of the plot, the ground material, and whether there is a meadow, a lawn or bare earth around it. The plot is guaranteed flat where the building is.

Sun & sky is a real sun position, worked out from the date, the time and the latitude — not a light you drag around. So the shadows at 9am on a December morning are the shadows you would get. Move the time slider to see how a room fills and empties over a day.

Rooms, dimensions and what it might cost

H Naming a room

Click inside an enclosed space. Arqtect finds the walls around the point you clicked and works out the floor area itself — you never type a number. The name and the area appear in the model, in the Areas panel, and on the plans when you export a drawing sheet.

If it says the space is not enclosed, there is a gap in the walls. Door and window openings are fine; a missing wall is not.

Q Dimensions

Drag from one point to another. The measurement stays attached and stays readable whichever way you turn the model.

O Notes

Click anywhere to leave a note to yourself or to whoever you send the model to. Click an existing note to retype it.

Areas and rough cost

The Areas panel adds up each storey as you build. Rough cost multiplies the total by a rate you set — put in your own local figure per square metre and it adds a percentage for the things a rate per square metre never covers. It is a sanity check, not a quote, and the panel says so.

Getting around the model

Inside

The Inside switch puts you in the building at eye level. Click a spot on the floor to stand there, then W A S D or the arrow keys to walk, and drag to look around. Esc steps back out. The roof hides itself and the storey you are on is the one you see.

Cutting through it

Seeing inside gives you a section plane you can slide through the building, and switches for hiding the roof or the storeys above. Useful for showing someone how the inside works without walking them through it.

Saving, sharing and undoing

Saving

Arqtect model (.arch) is the file to keep — the whole model, openable again later. In a browser it goes to your downloads folder; in the desktop app you get a normal Save dialog and can double-click the file to reopen it.

Autosave

Your work is saved in the browser every few seconds. If the tab closes or the machine dies, you are offered it back when you return, and told how old it is. It is a safety net rather than a filing system — save the file as well.

Sharing a link

Copy a share link puts the whole model inside the link itself. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; the model is compressed into the address. Anyone who opens it sees exactly what you had. Pictures are left out, because they would not fit.

History

The History panel lists what you have done, in order, and you can click any step to go back to it — like the history in Photoshop. You can also delete a single step out of the middle: if you moved something five steps ago and wish you had not, remove that step and keep everything after it.

Cmd/Ctrl Z undoes, and ⇧ with it redoes, as everywhere else.

Getting drawings out

Everything leaves through the blue Export button. Nothing there changes your model.

The drawing sheet

This is the one worth knowing about. It builds a proper sheet from whatever model is open: a plan of each storey, two elevations, the area schedule and a title block, and it picks the scale that fits and states it. Nothing to set up — it reads the model each time.

1. Name your rooms first (H) so they appear on the plans.
2. Save the file, so the title block has a name rather than "Untitled".
3. Export → Drawing sheet.
4. Open the file and print it at 100% scale — not "fit to page", which is what makes a stated scale a lie. Save as PDF from the same dialog to email it.

Into other software

.glb is the one to send: it carries the materials and opens in Blender, SketchUp, Twinmotion and most things. .obj is older and plainer, and is read by almost everything, including software that will not touch glTF.

Every tool

The toolbar, top to bottom. A few only appear in Outside mode, where they make sense.

Tools with a key but no button

These live in the Items window now, but the old keys still work and are quicker once you know them.

Every shortcut

Tools

Editing

Drawing

Looking

When something is not working

My click does nothing

You are holding a tool that wants something else — a wall face rather than the ground, or the ground rather than a wall. Read the hint line under the toolbar, or press V to get back to plain select.

It says the room is not enclosed

There is a gap in the walls around where you clicked. Doors and windows do not count as gaps; a missing wall does. Look at the storey in top view and the hole is usually obvious.

I cannot see the thing I just placed

Check which storey you are on — it may be on the one below. F fits everything on screen, which usually finds it.

The stair is the wrong height

Stairs are not sized by hand: they climb to the storey above. Change the storey height in the Storeys panel and the stair redraws to match.

My drawing sheet came out at 1:200

The building is too big to fit the paper at 1:100. Export at A2 instead, or accept the smaller scale — the sheet always states which one it used.

The share link will not open

Very large models make links too long for some mail programs, which cut them in half. Send the .arch file instead.

What this is, and what it is not

Arqtect is for the early part of a project — working out the shape of a building, how big the rooms are, where the light falls, what it looks like from the street. It is deliberately quick to learn.

It is not a CAD package and does not pretend to be. There is no construction detail, no schedules of anything but area, no structural anything, and the drawing sheet says not for construction on it because it is not. If you need those things, this is the tool you use before you open that one.

It is free, there is no account, and nothing you make is uploaded anywhere — the models live on your own machine. Tell me what is missing.

That is all of it

Everything above is in the app now. The fastest way to learn the rest is to draw a rectangle and start pushing faces around.

Open Arqtect

Free · nothing to install · no account

Still stuck?

Write to me — I would rather fix the thing that confused you than have you give up on it.