Draw rooms and zones with the Area tool

An area is a filled polygon defined by a chain of vertices. Reach for it when the thing you're drawing isn't a rectangle grid (that's a Rack) or a circle (that's a Circle). Anything else — a room, a tenant footprint, a hazardous zone, a picking area, a car-park bay, a mezzanine outline — is an area.

Areas fill by default, they extrude into 3D prisms if you set a height, and they can carry a per-facility role (Room, Office, Zone, and so on) that says what the area represents. Areas never block indoor wayfinding: a route crosses them freely, and only walls, racks and doors decide where it can go.

Draw each room as its own area and a data link can tint it from a table, for example a Room status link that colours every room by whether it is available, in use, being cleaned or out of service.

To open the tool: click the Draw button on the left toolbar and pick Add area, or press P on the keyboard. 6 also opens it. Saved areas are listed under Areas in the side panel; the toolbar's Layers menu calls the same layer Polygons.

The Area tool is click-by-click. You add one vertex per click; a live preview draws the edge from the last vertex to the cursor as you move; you finish by double-clicking or pressing Enter. You need at least three vertices for it to save.

1. 1
   Click to drop the first vertex

   A dot appears at the click point. The side panel's Placement section shows the drawing hints and a running vertex count ("1 vertex").

2. 2
   Keep clicking to add more vertices

   Each click extends the chain. Move the mouse to see where the next edge would land — the preview line always trails from the last vertex to your cursor.

3. 3
   Close the shape

   Once you have three or more vertices, double-click the map or press Enter to commit. The area saves with a default name of "Area" and is auto-selected, so the side panel switches to that area's settings. The tool stays active: keep clicking to draw the next area. To leave it, press Esc with no vertices placed, or pick Pan. (The "Stop drawing" button sits in the Placement section, which only shows while nothing is selected.)

Every facility carries its own role vocabulary. New facilities start with Floor area, Area, Zone, Room, Office, Surface and Place, and you can rename, remove or add roles in the facility settings. When you select an area, the top section of the side panel is a Role dropdown that assigns one of those roles to the area, for example Room for a meeting room or Zone for a picking zone. The role shows next to the area's name in the Areas list and the panel header; it does not recolour the area.

• Role is optional — leaving it as "— None —" is fine.
• Roles are per-facility. Edit the list from the facility's settings.
• The role's colour appears as a small swatch next to the dropdown so you know what you picked.
• When the lowest visible floor plan is raised, extruded areas on it with the "Floor area" role set the footprint of the building base drawn underneath.

Areas have three transform modes. Move and Rotate are one-and-done gestures — the moment you release, the change is saved and the mode exits. Edit vertices is sticky: it stays active so you can drag as many vertices as you like without re-entering the mode. Leave it by pressing Esc or clicking Edit vertices again.

When one area is selected, the side panel shows these sections, top to bottom.

With the Select tool, Shift-click (or ⌘/Ctrl-click) areas on the map, or drag a rectangle with Marquee select (Q), to build a bulk selection. The side panel switches to "N areas selected" with sections for the bulk actions, Appearance, 3D & Altitude, and Labels. Fields where the selected areas disagree show a "Mixed" badge. See Multi-select and bulk editing for selections that mix kinds.

Once you have a set of areas drawn — a hallway of offices, a row of retail units, a whole floor of rooms — the Magic walls tool (W) takes the areas you click and generates one wall around each in a single pass. Each area gets its own closed-ring wall traced just outside its outline, so adjacent areas end up with two walls along their shared edge.

See the Magic walls tool guide for the full workflow.