AI recreating a floor-plan screenshot in AutoCAD - feedback welcome

[Andrea Rocco Matta]

Hi everyone, I'm Andrea, an architect and co-founder of Ideatura. We've been working on letting AI create and edit geometry directly inside AutoCAD, and I'd like some honest feedback from people who use it every day.

 

For this example, I gave it a floor-plan screenshot, told it to assume a 5 m spacing between two grids and scale the rest proportionally, and asked it to work in stages so I could review each step.

 

It created walls and columns, then doors, windows, stairs and grids, followed by furniture, fittings and room labels. The result is editable AutoCAD geometry: polylines, arcs, blocks and text. This run was in AutoCAD 2027 on Windows.

 

The video is sped up, especially during processing. This is an approximate reconstruction from an image and an assumed scale. It still needs checking, and one unclear perimeter edge was left open for clarification.

 

Would checking and correcting a first pass like this save you time compared with drawing it yourself? What would you inspect first: accuracy, wall joins, blocks, layers, or something else?

 

Feel free to pick apart the result. I'm interested in what would make this useful in an actual drafting workflow.

 

 

[BIGAL]

This was created using a pdf as the base and Cadarc architectural program over the top, internal doors to be added.

 

[VicoWang]

In the AEC field, the key issue is not that AI drawing has improved drafting efficiency (though this is what many AI drawing tools advertise), but rather that it conflicts with the precision required in engineering drawings. For example, a few lines might represent an expensive wall or a full-length load-bearing column. Given that AI generates outputs probabilistically (AI hallucinations), the real question is whether engineers dare to delegate drafting responsibilities to AI. On the other hand, in a comprehensive AEC project, drafting may account for only 20% of the time and workload; even if it were reduced to zero, the overall efficiency gain for the entire project would still be limited.

Edited 11 hours ago by VicoWang

[Steven P]

Intriguing to use AI to draw it all for you - certainly could speed up things - I'd need to thoroughly check a few times to gain confidence in the process.

 

My approach is slightly different generally. Recent PDFs done with CAD allow you to convert to lines, arc, and so on but the accuracy might be off. I'll scale the PDF, convert and then snap entities to a grid again - often 1.25 or 2.5mm - and that usually gets the right result... on a PDF that can be converted. A mix of both, yours and mine could get good results.

 

 

Our biggest problem is historic records - scanned paper copies originally drawn in pen and ink - now that would be a good work out for AI !

[SLW210]

Hard to compare without seeing the original.

 

I have redone PDFs a good bit in the past, some go very quickly (vector and some raster) others are a mess from the start, different scales, fat lines, blurry lines and Text etc.

 

What can AI do when you hand it a scribbled on wet napkin?

[Steven P]

You laugh.... had a colleague years ago handed me a rubber glove "Draw this up" - scribbles on his hand on site - so I did. 2nd pass I took off the glove shape...

[SLW210]

In the past lots of napkins, drawn on hands, cardboard (both drawn on and cut to some weird shape), no rubber gloves, but work gloves.

 

Not for CAD, but, I have hade to build things to hammer handles, coworkers hand size, etc. when somehow nobody had a tape measure.

 

And NO, I wasn't laughing, I am serious, AI has it's uses, but some things it will never get a grasp of IMO.

 

Though I only have tried the free stuff, maybe paid for is better, I did like some of the images to video I did on TikTok and the special effects on some of the grandkids sports videos.