What’s the fastest way to create a floor plan?

Roopinder Tara posted 2024-03-08

If you are using a tape measure, a sketch and AutoCAD to create a floor plan, you are working too hard.

The fastest and easiest way to create a floor plan is to pull out your iPhone and scan the interior using one of many apps available for this purpose. To demonstrate, I took out my iPhone 12 Max with Polycam installed and scanned a 600-ft2 interior of a hallway outside my office. It took less than five minutes. I literally pushed a button, and voila, I had a floor plan.

It’s that simple.

This floor plan took less than five minutes using an iPhone and the Polycam app. It would have taken half a day with a tape measure and AutoCAD.
It’s like painting a wall, explains one scanning tutorial, except your paintbrush is a camera, and your roller brush can reach 15 ft high. Set the app to video mode and “paint” away, up and down, following walls and moving down halls. You can cover a small wall with just a few up-and-down strokes. As you scan, Polycam figures out edges and shows them on the camera view. Lines form and follow you as you walk down the hallway. The app determines where the walls meet the floor and ceiling — even if they are obscured by cabinets, potted plants, tables or any office clutter. It is artificial intelligence (AI) in the truest sense, though Polycam does not trumpet the AI horn. But here it is, like magic, starting and completing walls, figuring out doors and windows, filtering most, if not all, that’s irrelevant.

You end up with not only a floor plan but a 3D model — a remarkable feat, indeed.

Okay, it’s not perfect. Accuracy is not the ± 1/16 in. you get with a tape measure. More on that later. There may be artifacts to remove. There will be some cleanup, for sure. The cleanup may take another 10 minutes. But let’s say the traditional tape measure/sketch/CAD workflow would have consumed half a day. With the phone app, you can still take most of the morning off.

I have used Polycam and Canvas to scan interiors to make floor plans. Not a month goes by without another app appearing. All use the Apple iPhone’s built-in LiDAR but have different usage plans and costs, from free, to a cost per square foot to an “all-you-can-eat” buffet. I chose the all-you-can-eat buffet with unlimited use for $99.99. This is convenient and can be cost-effective. Canvas estimates the cost by the square foot of scanned floor area before you submit but charges per square foot of the model created, which can be considerably different. My initial estimate was $309, but my final charge was over $500 for a roughly 2,000-ft2 one-story house.

Polycam distinguishes itself with X-ray vision, which is able to sense and complete whole wall sections, perfect for a floor plan using the app’s “room” setting. However, if you want it to see and model everything — furniture, doorknobs, bookshelves, desks, computers, etc. — use the default LiDAR setting. Then, instead of lines, the camera view maps your rooms with a triangular mesh, like a fine net that covers everything. If you are a realtor who stages homes and wants to show them off with video inventory of your art, or for any other application that requires more than measuring and recording walls, the LiDAR setting is the one to use.

In either case, you send scans to Polycam for processing, and within the hour, you have the result, either a floor plan or a full, color 3D model.

About that tape measure. Don’t throw it away. You will need it to check the dimensions. Canvas estimates 1 to 2% errors, or almost 2 ½ in. for a 10-ft wall. Contractors can’t cut to this tolerance.

For “quick and dirty” but neater-than-hand-sketches floor plans, scanning can’t be beat. If you are estimating flooring or carpet, adding 5% extra will cover any inaccuracy. If you are using the floor plan in a real estate brochure and fear being sued by clients with 4% smaller closets, add a disclaimer such as “Measurements generated by AI based on a scan — all measurements should be checked.” Your clients will be impressed by your use of technology.

Here’s a smattering of apps on the market for quick floorplans with your iPhone.

CamToPlan is the scanning app for those who can’t part with their tape measure.
CamToPlan is an even simpler concept and easier to relate to if you can’t see a future without your trusty tape measure. With Cam2Plan, you see a virtual tape measure as you scan. Instead of scanning up and down the wall, you keep the camera pointed to the floor. Click anywhere on the screen as the virtual tape measure unfurls while walk to lock in each wall section. It makes simple scanning in 3D even simpler in 2D. I found myself wishing I could snap to right angles as some of my measured points drifted, but perhaps that would be counter to the simplicity CamToPlan seeks. CamToPlan is free for the first month, after which it converts to a $19.99/month subscription.

Other scanners that can be used for floor plans: