Floor plan from a photo — or from a walkthrough video
Rules as published in TNCDBR 2019, Rule 35(1)(a) (non-high-rise residential, CMA) · Last reviewed
Yes — photograph or scan an existing floor plan, or shoot a walkthrough video, and Plot2Plan rebuilds it as an editable, rule-checked floor plan you can drag, rearrange in plain words, view in 3D and export, free during the beta. The video never leaves your browser (only a few downscaled frames are sent), and the result is an approximation that lists every assumption it made — it reads shapes and labels, it never measures.
You already have the house: a folded sanctioned plan from 1998, a builder's brochure page, or just the house itself. Plot2Plan turns either into an editable, rule-checked floor plan — one you can drag, rearrange in plain words, walk through in 3D and export. Free during the beta, and the video never leaves your phone.
Two ways in
- Photo or scan of a floor plan. The drawing is read for its rooms and their doors and windows, plus which side the road is on. Deterministic code then turns the drawing so the road side lands on your plot's facing wall and draws the house at the overall size printed on the sheet — cut to your plot, never shrunk to today's setbacks (with no size printed, it is fitted into today's buildable box) — with one shared transform across floors so stacked rooms stay stacked, and hands the result to the validator.
- Walkthrough video or a set of photos. Your browser samples about eight downscaled frames locally. The model is asked only for what it can honestly see — rooms, what opens into what, features like the staircase or utility — never for a coordinate. The normal generator then rebuilds the home from that brief inside your plot's legal envelope.
An import is an approximation, never a measurement. Every guess it made is listed with the result, always — not hidden behind a confidence score. If you know roughly how big each room is, there is an exact way with nothing to upload: split your house into rooms yourself.
No drawing and no video?
You do not need either. Type the house's outside size in feet and split it into rooms one wall at a time, or start from just your plot size and describe the home you want.
Split my house into roomsStart from my plot size
How the room-by-room way works: floor plan of an existing house, without drawing.
What you get back
The same plan object the generator produces, drawn by the same renderer — this is a live render of that output, not a screenshot:
- Drag any room; overlaps light up red as you drag.
- Ask for changes in plain words — “move the kitchen to the south-east”, “add a window in the bedroom” — and the rules are re-checked after every edit.
- A 3D massing view and a first-person walkthrough of the imported house.
- PNG or vector SVG export, and print.
- The building envelope your plot is actually entitled to — setbacks, FSI, height, floor count — cited to TNCDBR 2019, so you can see how an existing house compares with what today's rules allow.
Why bother digitising an old plan?
- Buying a resale house. See whether the built house fits the plot's legal envelope before you pay an advance — deviation is the most expensive surprise in a resale deal.
- Planning an extension or a floor. Start from the house as it stands and ask what the remaining FSI allows.
- Renovating. Try layouts against real geometry instead of a napkin sketch, and see the result in 3D.
- Just having it. A paper plan that only exists as a folded sheet in a drawer becomes a file you can share.
What it will not do
- It does not measure. Nothing here replaces a tape, a surveyor, or a licensed architect's measured drawing.
- It does not certify. An imported plan is not evidence of approval, and it does not tell you an existing house is legal.
- It reads the overall size printed on a sheet, not every room's dimension text — room sizes follow the drawing's proportions. Multi-sheet PDFs and measured capture are on the roadmap.
Import your house
Either button opens the plan page with the uploader already open and the right mode picked (it lives under “Recreate an existing home” in Details). Chennai (CMA residential) is the live, verified zone; check the plot size, road width and facing above the uploader first, so the import lands in the right envelope.
Upload a plan photoUse a video or room photosCheck the plot before you buy
Frequently asked questions
Can I turn a photo of a floor plan into an editable plan?
Yes. Photograph or scan the drawing — a sanctioned plan sheet, a builder's brochure page, a hand sketch — and the importer reads the rooms and their doors and windows out of it, then rebuilds them as an editable plan: drag rooms, ask for changes in plain words, view it in 3D, export it. It reads the drawing's shapes and labels, so a clear, flat, well-lit photo of the whole sheet works far better than a corner shot at an angle.
How do you make a floor plan from a walkthrough video?
Your browser samples about eight small still frames from the video on your own device and sends only those. The model looks at them and lists what it can honestly see — which rooms exist, which rooms open into which, and features like a staircase or a utility area. It is never asked for measurements, because photos cannot be measured. The normal generator then rebuilds a home with that room brief inside your plot's legal envelope.
Does my video get uploaded?
No. The video file itself never leaves your browser — the frame sampling happens locally, and only the handful of downscaled JPEG stills are sent for reading. Photos of a plan sheet are uploaded as images.
How accurate is an imported plan?
It is an approximation, not a measurement — and the import always lists the assumptions it made, so you can see exactly where it guessed. Room proportions and adjacencies come from what was visible. When a plan drawing prints the house's overall size, the house is drawn at that size; when it does not, it is fitted inside your plot's buildable area. Treat it as a fast starting point you then correct by dragging rooms and asking for changes.
What happens if the imported plan breaks a building rule?
The same validator that checks a generated plan checks an imported one: rooms inside the setbacks, no overlaps, coverage and FSI within the limits, one main door on the road-facing wall, staircase aligned across floors, wet rooms stacked, and every room reachable from the front door. A house drawn larger than today's setbacks allow is shown at its own size and marked as breaking them — never quietly shrunk to pass. Other problems the importer can fix, it fixes in one repair round; anything left over is listed on the plan rather than hidden — an existing house often does not comply with today's rules, and that is useful to know.