Smart Layouts

On large residential or hospitality projects, the same room type — a hotel bedroom, a studio apartment, a hospital ward — can repeat dozens or hundreds of times. Today, architects either copy-paste layouts and adjust them manually (time-consuming and error-prone) or leave rooms unfurnished until late in the process.

Smart Layouts solves this by making reuse intelligent. You define a room layout once, and the system places and adapts it across as many spaces as you need — preserving design intent, BIM data, and export quality throughout.

Use case: A project with 200+ repeating rooms, such as a hotel floor plate. Rooms that are nominally the same type are almost never geometrically identical — that's exactly where Smart Layouts helps.

1. Architects on large repetitive projects Hotels, residential blocks, hospitals — any project where the same room type repeats across a floor plate.

2. BIM Coordinators managing Revit workflows Teams importing Revit models into Snaptrude who need to enrich spaces with fitted layouts before exporting back.

3. Design teams working under time pressure Anyone who needs to populate a floor plan quickly for a presentation, review, or client sign-off without manual room-by-room layout work.

A layout can either be created directly in Snaptrude or imported from Revit. The only requirement is that it must be grouped.

Step 1 — Import or create your layout Bring a Revit model containing your layout room into Snaptrude, or create one directly. The layout is a grouped set of elements: exterior walls, interior walls, furniture, doors, and windows.

Step 2 — Select your target spaces Choose the spaces you want to apply the layout to. They can be any geometry — square, rectangular, irregular, or arc-based.

Step 3 — Place the layout Select Place Smart Layout from the Object Properties Panel (OPP). Snaptrude adapts and fits the layout to each selected space. Review the results and edit individual rooms as needed.

Layout exterior walls are mapped to the target space walls. Wall types from the layout are preserved on each mapped wall. If the target space is larger or smaller, walls extend or shorten to fit. If the shape changes, walls are split or new walls are added — inheriting the nearest original wall type.

For target spaces with significantly more edges than the layout, wall mapping order may not perfectly match design intent. This is a known current limitation.

Doors and windows are mapped to the corresponding walls in the target space. Each maintains its distance from the nearest wall edge. Door swing direction is always preserved.

If the target space is adjacent to a space labelled corridor, Snaptrude automatically orients the layout so the wall containing the door faces the corridor. No manual rotation needed.

When two layouts are placed in adjacent spaces, their shared boundary walls overlap. Snaptrude automatically resolves these into a single clean shared wall — no duplicate walls, no messy junctions.

This also works between newly-placed layouts and already-placed layouts, and between Smart Layout spaces and Sketch to BIM spaces. This is critical for a clean Revit export.

Interior walls and furniture are placed in V1, but their adaptation is basic: they are positioned at the centroid of the target space. They will appear inside the room, but will not yet intelligently respond to the exact geometry of the target space. Full spatial adaptation is planned for V2.

When a layout is placed, the original space boundary is retained as an underlay beneath the layout. It is hidden by default, and a toast notification will appear letting you know it can be unhidden if needed.

This is particularly useful when a layout contains only furniture (no walls) — the underlying space boundary provides spatial context for the placed elements.

Every placed layout is an independent instance. You can move furniture, adjust wall positions, rotate elements, or add new objects to any individual room without affecting any other room. All standard Snaptrude editing tools work on placed layouts.

Note: Master layout editing — applying changes across all placed instances simultaneously — is not yet available. This will be supported in the upcoming version.