Generate walls from areas with Magic walls

Magic walls is a shortcut: pick one or more areas you've already drawn, click Generate, and every selected area gets its own wall traced around its outline. Reach for it when the facility has already been sketched as rooms and you want to promote those rooms into walled enclosures without drawing every wall by hand.

To open the tool: open the Draw flyout on the left toolbar and pick Magic walls (from areas), or press W on the keyboard. There is no number-row alias.

Example: the offices, meeting rooms and stockrooms of a building are drawn as areas first. Picking them with Magic walls gives every room its own wall, so in 3D the floor reads as separate rooms rather than coloured floor patches.

Screenshot · Walled rooms in the Acme Warehouse in 3D

1. 1
   Draw the areas first

   Magic walls only works with areas (polygons) that already exist. Draw them with the Area tool if you haven't already.

2. 2
   Activate the tool

   The map switches into selection mode for areas — clicking an area on the map adds it to the staging list, clicking a staged area removes it. The side panel counts your selection ("3 areas selected") and lists the staged areas with their colour swatches.

3. 3
   Adjust the wall style

   Below the selection list, the side panel shows the standard Aisle properties — colour, width, dash, border, opacity, elevation, wall height and wall thickness. Whatever you set here is what every generated wall uses. These are the same settings as the Aisle tool, so if you've been drawing 2 m-high walls all afternoon, that's what Magic walls uses too. Wall height starts at 0, which gives flat 2D lines; set it (for example 3 m) before you generate if you want 3D walls.

4. 4
   Click Generate

   The button reads "Generate walls (3 areas)". While it runs, a "Generating walls…" overlay asks you not to move anything. Every selected area gets one closed-ring wall named "Wall". The walls take the Elevation from these settings and go on the toolbar's Default floor plan if one is set, not on the source area's floor, so set both first when you work on an upper floor. The tool then switches to Select with the new walls selected so you can tweak them straight away.

Each selected area produces exactly one wall — a closed ring that traces the area's outline, offset outward by half your wall thickness plus a small visible gap.

• One wall per area — not one wall per edge. The wall is a single aisle shape whose outline closes on itself.
• The wall centreline sits outside the area by half your wall thickness plus 10 cm. That 10 cm gap is what makes a visible strip between the area's fill and the wall's inner face.
• Near-collinear vertices are simplified so drawing jitter doesn't leak into the wall.
• Sharp corners are preserved as-is.

Magic walls never touches existing walls and never links a generated wall back to its source area. Re-running the tool on the same areas just creates another set of walls; deleting or moving one of your source areas doesn't delete its generated wall. Treat every generated wall as a normal Aisle shape from the moment it lands.

While Magic walls is active, clicking an area on the map stages it for the tool — it does NOT open the area's properties or start a bulk selection. That's a deliberate separation: Magic walls has its own staged set so you can freely pick and unpick areas without accidentally editing them.

When you exit the tool (Cancel or after Generate), the staged selection is cleared. Opening the tool also clears any normal selection you had, as switching to any tool other than Select or Marquee select does.

• Set the wall height and thickness BEFORE you click Generate — the current values are what every generated wall uses, and the default height of 0 gives flat lines.
• Generating walls isn't on the undo history. If the result isn't what you wanted, press Delete straight away while the new walls are still selected (that delete can be undone).
• Adjacent rooms each get their own ring — plan for a doubled wall along shared edges.
• The 10 cm gap between the area fill and the wall's inner face is what lets a room read as "walls around a room" rather than "walls stamped on top of a fill". If you want the wall flush against the area, delete and redraw the wall as a normal Aisle.
• Every generated wall is a normal aisle — bulk-select and restyle them like any other. See the Aisle tool guide.