Drawings and drafting basics
The drawing step turns your sized design into a clean, council-ready set of drawings. It's drawn 1:1 from the same structural model, so the drawings match the design rather than being re-created separately.
Bringing in your design
Your design is brought straight into the drawing step as an editable model. You don't start from a blank page — the structure is already there, ready to detail.
If your design doesn't arrive
If you open the drawing step and your engineering design can't be shown — for example the job was opened directly instead of via Continue to Drafting in the engineering step, or the handover was interrupted — Draftly tells you instead of leaving a blank page. You'll see a message explaining what happened with ways to recover: open the exported .designset.json file yourself, go back to the engineering step and use Continue to Drafting again, or start with a blank canvas.
Site intel from the 4 Realms capture
If your project had a site visit captured with the 4 Realms flow, that package opens for you here automatically: the drawing checklist the site capture requested, engineering tags, notes and the tagged site photos. It appears as a panel you can reopen any time from the 4R intel chip — it's the same captured truth, read-only, so the drawings start from what was actually seen on site.
Tracing and detailing
From the model you can trace, place and detail your drawing. If you're starting from an existing plan or sketch, you can trace over it to build an accurate, editable drawing that reflects the real layout.
Drawing on a phone or tablet
On touch screens, drawing works tap-by-tap: tap once to place the first point, tap again for the second, then tap the ✓ tick to finish the shape at the size you've placed. Switching tools midway simply cancels the half-drawn shape — anything you've already ticked stays on the canvas.
Menus you tap open stay open until you tap somewhere else or finish the action — they never time out and close on their own. On smaller screens, menus open as a sheet along the bottom of the screen so they never run off the edge or hide behind the top bar.
Block previews in the Insert menu match the space you're working in: dark background while you're drawing in the model, white background when you're laying out paper sheets — so what you see in the preview is what you'll get.
Sheets and the title block
Your drawings are laid out on sheets with a proper title block and schedules — the pieces a lodgement set needs. The output is prepared to Australian drafting conventions so it reads the way a council or certifier expects.
Council-ready output
When your drawing is ready, it becomes part of your lodgement set as a clean PDF. For how downloading and printing work, see Saving and exporting your work.
Working back and forth
The drawing step and the structural design stay in step with each other, so a change in one is reflected in the other rather than drifting apart. Your finished drawings feed into your submission package — see Your submission package.