In-Depth Floor Plan Tutorial Part 2 [UPDATED 2025]

Welcome back! This is part 2 of a 3 part floor plan series. In this video we'll be adding windows, doors and furnishings to the house that we did in part 1. I'm DudeBlender and let's jump right in. Let's begin with the doors. We'll use a free addon called Archimesh. It comes with Blender so go to Edit, Preferences, Addons and search here for Archimesh. Click here if it's not enabled and close this. Make sure that you're in object mode and press N to show the side panel if it's not visible and you'll see this create tab. If we click on it, you'll see Archimesh here, that's where it lives. If we expand it, you'll see all of the stuff that we can use. What I like to use here are the doors and the rail windows which double as sliding doors. Alright let's add the doors first. I'm going to hide the floor and the background. Now whenever you click on any of the buttons, that object will appear on the 3D cursor. So make sure that it's actually sitting on the ground plane and that it's not too far away from the house so that you won't be needing to zoom out and get the object to bring it in. I'm going to shift right click here to bring the 3D cursor closer to the house and you'll see that it's floating and it's something that we don't want. So we can go here to view. If this is not expanded just click on it, 3D cursor, and we have the information of the cursor here. We can just change the Z to zero. That way we make sure that it's on the ground plane. You could also just move the cursor to the origin by pressing shift S which gives you this menu and all of these four items move the cursor. So we can move the cursor to world origin and you'll see that X, Y and Z are all zero now. Alright let's go back to create, Archimesh and add our first door. Depending on your preference you might want to do this in wireframe mode. So Z to bring up this menu and you can go here to wireframe. Also note that in these menus it's faster if you just press and hold the button, in this case Z. Now move the mouse and highlight whatever option you want and then just release the Z button. That way you don't actually need to click the mouse. It's a tiny thing but we do this hundreds of times so it adds up. And if you don't remember the shortcut Z you always have these buttons visible to change the shading mode. Alright let's click on door and now as mentioned the door appears on the 3D cursor. Also a new panel appears here with the door properties. And note that the properties of the door only appear if you have the frame of the door selected. If you select anything else it disappears. Here you can change the dimensions of the door, the rotation, the open side, right, left or both and the model of the door and the handle. You can also see in the outliner that it actually creates a door group with an empty as the parent. If you expand it you'll see a CTRL baseboard which is useless for us, a CTRL hole which we'll use later on to carve out the hole in the walls for the door to be and the door frame which itself has the handles parented to it. You can actually select the door, I'm gonna go to solid mode and rotate the door with R to open it and this is useful to show in our floor plan the direction to where the door opens. Another thing is that with the door selected if we go to the item tab you'll see that the rotation X and Y are locked so you can only rotate it in Z so you don't need to worry that the door will rotate in a weird way. Ok this door is gonna be our main entrance so I'm gonna go back here, I'll change the model to 5, open both sides and handle to 4. Remember that at any point you can press N to hide or show this panel. Now to actually move the door you need to select its empty, now most of the other parts of the door are locked so you cannot move them but for example the handles you could and you don't want that so to move the whole thing you always have to select the empty. Ok let's go to top view, I'm gonna go back to wireframe, I have the empty selected, now I can grab it with G and just place it here. Now you don't really need to be super precise on the location, I just use the handles as reference and this is the wall, you can barely see the orange line and I just make sure that the handles are outside of the walls a little bit for the door to be kind of on the center of the wall. Ok I'm gonna show you how we'll make the holes in the walls with this one and then for the rest we'll just do them all at the same time. We're gonna use a boolean modifier so select the walls and go to the modifier stack, click on add modifier and start typing boolean, enter, we can collapse the solidify because we don't need to change anything and on our boolean modifier we're gonna change the operand type from object to collection and before we do anything else we're gonna save our work with control S. Boolean operations tend to increase the chance of blender crashing so save often and make sure that your autosave is on in edit, preferences, save and load, autosave. Two minutes should be good enough and if or when blender crashes you'll be able to find temporary save files under your temp folder which you can access by pressing window R and typing %temp% enter. Then you would just search for the name of your file, in this case fpt and then it would open the most recent file. You can also change the folder to where the autosave files are stored in file paths, temporary files. Now back to our modifier, the idea is that any objects that are in this collection that we will create in a second will be subtracted from the walls geometry, make sure that difference is selected here. Now select the CTRL hole of this door and if I move it you'll see that it's a box shape which is perfect to be used as a boolean cutter, the more complex the geometry of the cutter the higher the chance that we're gonna crash blender. So this is actually the best geometry that we can use. Press M and we're gonna create a new collection, call it cutters. Now select the walls again and in the boolean modifier click on collection and select cutters. And now there's a hole in the walls for the door, we don't need to do this one by one so let's just add the rest of the doors, we need one, two more doors. Let's add a new one, select the empty, move it into place, place it roughly on the center of the opening of the wall on the plan, let's select the frame, we'll change the width to let's say 0.8, we'll just move it a little bit more, there. The open side also looks good. Now let's duplicate this door by double clicking on the door group to select everything that's within this hierarchy. That's a function that they added I think in 4.2, it's relatively new, so if you don't have it you would need to select everything in the outliner. So shift D to duplicate it and we'll place it here, just fine tune the placement. Now let's place this three sliding doors, I'm gonna use rail windows for this. So let's go ahead and place one, I'm gonna change the height to 2.1, let's remove the sill and that looks good. Now one more thing here, these are gonna be the bathroom doors and we might not want them to be transparent. So I'm going to quickly go to the world properties here, change color to sky texture, nishitai is okay, sun elevation I'm gonna change to 0 and I just wanna have a little bit of light. Now Z, let's go to rendered view, I just wanna be able to see how transparent is this material. No respectable person is gonna have a bathroom door that is this transparent. So let's just select it and let's go ahead and go to the shading workspace. We're gonna go here to materials and we can confirm that we actually have the glass material selected. This is the default material that the Archimage add-on is placing on the windows. Let's go to the rendered shading here as well, we're just going to delete all of this, everything except the principled VSDF and the material output. So with everything selected, we press X, most of the shortcuts work everywhere in Blender, so X and it deletes everything and we're just gonna connect this directly to the material output. And now we still want glass, we just don't want it to be so transparent, so we can expand here on transmission and increase the weight to 1. And that's really all we need, we just don't want to be able to recognize what's on the other side of the door. Alright, let's go back to our layout workspace and the wireframe. Again we select the empty and we move the door in place. Now again we select the frame of the window and rotate it by 90 degrees. I like to use this lip here to guide the placement of the door. Place it in the middle, let me select the frame again. Let's increase the width to 1.4, that looks good. And again let's duplicate this thing because it has the exact same dimensions that this other door has. So we just place it there and we've got one more here. So duplicate either of these, shift D and let's place it here, select the frame. We don't need the rotation, so a quick trick that you can use in most places in Blender is that if you want to reset a field to the default value, we can just hover over the field with the mouse and press backspace. Let's grab it and place it here. And this one seems to be a little wider, so 1.5, let's do 1.6. Now all of the doors are in place, I'm gonna go to solid view. And now to make all of the holes at once, go to select, select pattern. The asterisk is a wildcard. And now we want to select every object that has the word hole in its name. So we can just type asterisk, hole, asterisk, enter. And everything is selected. Now one thing that's important here, if before doing that you have already something else selected and then you go select, select pattern and do that, you'll add all of those objects to the previous selection. So make sure that before doing that you have nothing selected. You might move objects that you didn't want to to the cutters collection. And if you don't notice that you did that, it might cause trouble later that you will have no idea why that happened. So what I do is select everything with A, then deselect everything with double A, and then I do the select pattern. Now enter. And the idea is that I only have all of the CTRL holes selected. Now we press M to move to collection, move all of them to cutters at the same time. Okay, you still want to rotate and make sure that everything is looking good before moving to the next step. Remember to save constantly with CTRL S. Okay looks good, but we actually need two more doors for the closets. So to make it simple, I'm just going to duplicate this one, SHIFT D and place it there. Duplicate it again. I place it here. I'm just going to rotate it right here. Okay, select the frame, rotate, nothing, and just place it there. We can actually change this to 1.5. Let's just make sure that everything is in place. Okay, something that might happen, and I'm not really sure why it does, or what I did wrong, but I duplicated this window group to place it here, right? So this door, or window, is this group. Now, for some reason, it is possible, and it's happened to me a couple of times, that I'm going to expand this and this. You'll see that this window group, the new one that I duplicated, has its CTRL hold. But this one, the one I duplicated, doesn't, and I'm really not sure where it went, or why it disappeared. So what I do here is just select it by double clicking on it, deleting the whole thing, and then just duplicating a new one. And now you'll see that it has the CTRL hold. Now we can just select the cutters manually. This one, and shift, click on this one, and move those to the cutters collection. And that looks good. Okay, windows is a similar thing, but we want to create them at some height, not on the floor, so open the side panel, go to view, and change the 3D cursor location, Z, to whatever height you want. I'm just going to type 1 meter. That's where the new windows will be placed. Now let's go back here to Archimesh, and click on rail window. Now you also have panel windows, I don't like them, so I always use rail windows. Alright, top view, wireframe, select this, select the empty. Now sometimes, because the floor plan is underneath, it's difficult to select the empties. You need to be very precise on your click. So this is a nice trick that you can use. We can make any object unselectable. And that way, you won't be able to select it in the 3D viewport, but you will be able to select it in the outliner. Now to do that, we need to show that function. You go here to the filters, and enable this, which is the selectable. Now you'll see it here. So whatever object we want to make unselectable, like our floor plan, we just click on the icon. And now we cannot select the floor plan. So it will be easier to select the empties. Alright, we have it selected, G, let's move it here. Now the windows, I'm going to move it here so that you can see it better. They also have this lip, and that's what I use to align it to the walls. This lip should go on the inside of the wall. So let's select the frame again, rotate 180, then I'll just select the empty, and just move it into place. Select the frame, we're going to change this to 1, I think, looks good. Let's go ahead and duplicate that, constrain the movement to X. This looks like a 2 meter window, excellent. Duplicate that again, shift D. Now note that the Archimage tool does not allow us to input negative numbers here in the rotation. So if we want to rotate it in a way that this side is on the inside, we just type 270. And now this little lip is on the inside of the house. And the only reason why the windows have an inside and an outside, is that the inside has these handles, and the outside doesn't. So we select that, move it here, change the size to something like 0.6 maybe, perfect. Duplicate Y, into place, there we go, duplicate that Y, and we just continue placing all of our windows. One more in the bathroom, okay, there we go. One final note that is kind of important, whenever you place objects on your scene, they are placed in the active collection. If you look at the outliner, you'll see that there's a scene collection, and inside it there is this collection that is just called collection. And then we have the collection of the cutters that we created. Now if you by accident, or for some reason selected the scene collection, and then we place a new window, you probably won't notice, because you're working here, moving it into place, and all that stuff, and you probably won't notice that it's actually outside of this collection, where we have everything else. Now this is not a huge deal, and you can say, well, I'm just gonna drag and drop it to the correct collection. And then you'll see that this happens, because the children are not moved by default with the parent. So then you say, okay, I'm gonna select these two, and then move them to the right collection. But then this happens again, because you have to move the children again. And then that happens. So whenever you move it, just make sure that you have everything selected. You can just double click it on the outliner in Blender 4.2 or 3, I think, and then drag and drop it to the right collection. The biggest problem would be if you select the cutters collection, and then add stuff here, because everything that's inside here, remember, is being used by the boolean modifier of the walls. So keep that in mind, because in some circumstances it can cause a little bit of trouble. Let's delete that. So again, make sure that you have nothing selected. Select pattern and move those two cutters. And now let's make sure that all of our windows and doors are working properly. Okay, I think it looks good. Control S, remember to always save. Now if at this point there's something that's not working, there are a few things that might have happened. But the two most common are some cutter got lost. So make sure that every door and every window has a cutter. If that is the case, then the next thing that you might want to check is expand the cutters collection and make sure that everything inside this collection is a control hole. If there's anything else in this collection, move it out. Now let's furnish the house, which is actually quite fun. So we need to get the furniture models, which you have a few ways to get. Of course, you can model them yourself, which I definitely don't recommend, it will take you a while. The second one is getting individual assets from blender kit, fab, turbo squid, blend swap, CG trader, or any other marketplace, or polygon, which sells proprietary assets that are extremely high quality, which you would expect from a company owned by Andrew Price, the blender guru. In all of these sites, there are free and paid assets, well, except blend swap, because everything is free. And if you have the cash, you'll find literally anything that you need. And if you don't have the cash, you'll still mostly find what you need, although you might not get the commercial license, so you cannot make money with them. Also, some of these libraries have add-ons that allow you to open the library and download directly in blender, which is a huge time saver. I use both blender kit and polygon add-ons. Now keep one thing in mind, most of these options are usually heavy assets, high poly count and high resolution textures, which might slow down your computer and increase the render times substantially. You also need to be connected to the internet and wait for them to download. That is a problem. So to fix it, I actually made a starter kit with 50 assets, and I add new stuff every year, that you can get on my gumroad. Now the idea with these is that everything is modeled with very few polygons to keep the working files super responsive. And all of the materials are procedural, so no external heavy texture files, it all works out of the box. And they also reuse the same materials in a way that they look good with each other, so you don't need to spend time finding models that have styles that work together. These all look good with each other. It's also a very light 9 megabyte download, so you can use them offline, and as long as you don't resell the assets or give them away, which would not be cool, you can pretty much do whatever you want, even commercial projects with them, so you don't need to worry about the license. It's 15 bucks, so you're getting each asset for 30 cents, and lifetime access to download any new models that I might add to the bundle in the future. The link is in the description. So that's what I'm going to be using to furnish the plan, but I'll also show you the Blender Kit add-on. Alright, so if you do download my Starter Kit, first of all, thank you, you just need to save the Blender file that you will download in your hard drive. Then you go to Edit, Preferences, File Paths, and Asset Libraries. I have it here, so I'm just going to show you how you would do it. You click on the Add Asset Library button, and then you just select the folder where the file is. So mine is here in Starter Kit, Add Asset Library. By default, it takes the name of the folder, but you can just rename it to whatever you want. I'm going to leave it as Starter Kit. So there's the path, and you can change the default import method. If you're starting, or if you're like me and forget to change settings when you need to, you should leave this in Append, and we'll see why in a little bit. You can close this, and I'm going to change the timeline to an asset browser. Now let's make this bigger. Here, you can select which library of the ones you have created you're going to use. So I'm going to click here, and select Starter Kit, the one I just created a while ago. And you'll find all of the assets right here. So that's all the setup that you need. The icon on the bottom left corner of the thumbnail indicates if it's a model or a material. To use them, you just drag and drop them into your scene. And remember what I mentioned before, whenever you drag it, it's going to go into the Active Collection, so let's see where it is. So in this case, it added it to the Cutters Collection, so that's actually the worst case scenario. Let me just drag it out, and place it in the right collection. Now to keep everything tidy, we could actually add a new collection, and call it Furniture. And then we can just make this collection the active one, and now whatever objects we put into the scene will go to the Furniture Collection. Now if we zoom into the toilet, you'll see that it's floating, and that's because we left the 3D cursor here. So we can just go ahead and Shift-S, Cursor to World Origin, and for the toilet I'm just going to open the side panel, Item, Location, and Z to 0. Now I'm going to turn on the statistics overlay, so that we can see the amount of geometry that this has. And we can see that this toilet has less than 500 faces, and the reason for that is that it uses a subdivision modifier. So in the viewport you don't have the subdivisions, you'll only have them in the render, so the idea is that the file that you work with uses as little geometry as possible so that you can work faster, and once you render it will look good. So the modifier on this model is turned off by default. Let's turn it on here, I'm going to increase this to 3, so that you can see how it will look in the render. So in the render it looks good, but now we can see that the number of faces is very high. That's why we turn it off in the viewport, because we don't need this level of detail. Now let me enable Blender Kit. The good preference is, Add-ons, Blender Kit, Online Asset Library. Okay we enable that, and close it. You'll see that we have it here. In the same way we can search for, let's say, toilet, and we've got a bunch of models. The ones that have a lock are for the paid version. You need to subscribe to be able to use them, and the subscription I think is like 5 bucks a month, it's not expensive. But you can filter here, free first. And now we've got a bunch of toilets, so let me just drag and drop any toilet, and you'll see that it downloads it here. Close this, and now if I select this toilet, you'll see that it has a huge number of faces, and that's only this part of the toilet, the lid has a bunch more faces, and again it has an empty, so you need to grab the empty to be able to move the toilet. I want to delete this, I don't need it for now. So let's do this to show you how fast it is, using this kit. So let's begin with the bedroom. We can click on this search box, and just type bed, got it here, drag it, drop it, and place it. Then, let's add a couple of nightstands, that's it, drag it here, and drag it here. Okay, and that looks good, and now you'll see here, this is actually another reason why I prefer mine. I deleted the toilet that I got from Blender Kit, but I didn't delete the collection, so just make sure that when you delete something, you delete everything. And I placed the bed and the nightstands inside that collection, so yeah, make sure that you don't leave stuff behind. I can just delete the collection. And you should note that deleting the collection doesn't delete the objects that are inside that collection. Okay, so now we have the active collection, so let's continue. Now, well, the closet's built in, so we don't need to add one. Let's go to the bathroom, or let's furnish the bathroom, toilet, move that in here, move it there, let's add a tub, there you go, rotate, 90. And note that the models that are on the starter kit have real life dimensions, so for example, toilet, you might not want to scale it down, because then that will not be realistic, but tubs have different sizes, so this one you can, no problem, scale it up a little bit or down, and that's okay. Sink, let's try and drop that here. Rotate 180, and now another cool thing about using assets that are low poly, for example in this case, where we need to fill this space, we can edit these models very easily. So if we tap into edit mode, I'm going to select the faucet with L, the actual sink, and this part. I'm going to hide it with H, go to top view, X-ray mode, I want to select vertices, so one, I'm going to grab all of these, G-X, all of these, G-X, all of those, G-Y, like there, that G-Y there, we unhide with Alt-H, and we select this, and we just place it, you know, wherever we want, maybe just there, tab, and there we have it. So the idea is, you want to be as fast and productive as possible when doing this. Let's add dryer, bring it in, and washing machine, let's bring that in too, okay, we're going to rotate, 90, minus, place it here, same thing, and there you go, all right, fridge, if you search for refrigerator, you won't find it, I named it fridge, okay, in, okay, place it here, stove, in, and sink, we have kitchen sink L for large and S for small, this one is large, so that, and we rotate it, yep, looking good, and now we need these cabinets. So I mentioned before that you can use a different import method. Here you can change it, you can leave it in follow preferences, and then it will just do what you told it to, but you can overwrite it here, append, or append reuse data. So link you, you pretty much never want to use, you'll see that if I import it, it doesn't allow me to place it wherever I want, and the idea is that it just gets the object from the position that it is on the original file, so that really doesn't make any sense here. If you use append, look at the faces, so this number, 1380, are the faces of this object, and this bigger number are the faces of the whole scene, so we've got 385087 faces. If I add a chair, that number increases, slightly, because, again, these are low-poly models. If I add another chair, it increases again, because it's adding a new model with its own data, but if I change this to append reuse data, and then I add, for example, a coffee table here, we are in 386203, if now I add a second table, you'll see that it doesn't add more faces, and in fact, I have this one selected, and here we have zero faces, and I can add another coffee table again, and it doesn't add data, we're just reusing the data of the first model that we added. Let's say I wanted to modify this chair, I do that, alright, we have a different chair, if I do this with the table, you'll see that all of the tables are modified, that's because we're using the same data. So for example, I modified this sink, if I were using the reuse data, then every other sink that I added would have these dimensions, and that's not necessarily what you want, you want to be flexible and be able to edit stuff, so that's why, in general, we use append. Alright, so, cabinets, so for example, I'm gonna have to modify this, but then I'm gonna add it again, and I'm gonna modify it again, so yeah, in this case, it's better to append. I'm gonna use this one, 180, modify this again, and one more, so we have the island. And finally, the living room, I named the sofas couches, so let's add this, I'm going to add probably an individual one, something like that, maybe that's enough, maybe a coffee table here, and let's add a console, place it here, and a TV on top of the console, ok, looking good. Save your work, and we're done with this part, so let me give it a quick render, do you see how it looks? It's looking great! We are well on our way, we just need to add the floor and wall materials, and light the scene to make our final render, and we're gonna do that in the next and final part. I'll see you there!