How I Actually Draw Plans on My iPad as an Architect (Morpholio Trace)

These are floor plans I drew entirely on my iPad. No laptop, no AutoCAD, no printed paper, just the iPad, the Apple Pencil and Morpholio Trace app. I will show you the 5 steps I use every single time I make architectural plans in Morpholio Trace and why this app has become the one I reach first for plan drawings in my iPad. If you've never heard of Morpholio Trace, it's a drawing app made specifically for architects and designers. It's not like Procreate, which is great for illustration and sketching freely. Morpholio is more about precision, drawing to scale, tracing over plans or annotating. And once you understand how to use it properly, it saves you a lot of time. Alright, let's get into it. Trace over anything. This is literally why the app is called Morpholio Trace. You can import any image, a side photo, an existing plan, a PDF, a sketch you made on a paper and draw directly on top of it as a new layer. The original image sit underneath like a lightbox and your drawing sits on top, clean and separate. In practice, this means if I have an existing plan of a space, even a rough one scanned from paper, I can import it and then trace the walls, the openings, the room layout, all of it directly on top. I trace, refine and make it better. Of course, you can also redraw from scratch, starting with the outlines of the walls again. Instead of drawing freehand, I like to use the ruler, the triangle or the protractor to make accurate geometries. Set the scale. This is the thing that makes Morpholio different from almost any other drawing app on the iPad. You set your drawing scale once and after that, every line, every dimension, every tool you use is automatically calibrated to it. So if I draw a wall, I can see the exact measurement in real centimeters, for example, as I draw. If I add a dimension line, it reads the real distance. For that, I set the scale manually, choose the units, align to the digital crosshairs perfectly parallel to the wall lines, zoom in for precision and I just enter the real dimension of one wall. From that moment on, the whole drawing obeys that scale. I love this tool because a plan that isn't to scale is just a sketch and a plan that is to scale is a working document. So for architectural plan drawings, the scale is very, very important. Different pen thickness and types. In Morpholio app, you don't have hundreds of brushes. I think you have around 10 and it's more than enough for making nice plans and sections. I honestly don't think you need anything more. So you have a technical pen, different marker types, pencils and a watercolor brush. The important thing here is to use them properly with the right thicknesses. In a beautiful plan, we can usually see a line hierarchy like the outside walls are thick, the furniture are medium, the dimensions are thin. We can even trace the hidden elements with the dashed line just here and you also have multiple options there. So in short, I like to use the technical pen in a relatively thick size for main walls. Use the same brush again for furniture and notes in different thickness. I also like to add some soft colors like light wood or soft green or shadows with the marker brushes. A good thing is that you can save favorite pens so you don't keep changing settings every single time. I usually like to draw some furniture by hand but sometimes the stencils can be very useful. After tracing all your lines, you can quickly add all the furniture with the stencils. Morpholio has a whole library of pre-made symbols, furniture, bathroom fixtures, kitchen elements, trees, people, cars, all the standard things you need to populate a plan. You just drag them in, resize them and place them. No drawing the same sofa or the same bath from scratch every single time. I really like to use the plants and people stencils in plants and elevations especially because a human figure gives instant scale. You can see straight away whether the room feels right or whether a corridor is too tight just from the proportions. You can also download more stencils or create your own, you can draw them once, save them and reuse them forever. Smart fill and hatch This one is also satisfying to use. Once your rooms are drawn as closed shapes, you can fill them with a hatch or a color in one tap. Tap on the smart fill tool, tap inside the room and it fills the whole area instantly. You can choose from different hatch patterns, solid fills or material textures which is great for differentiating spaces on a plan. A darker hatch for walls, a lighter one for floors, a pattern for the bathroom tiles. It really makes the plan readable in seconds. And there is one more thing in smart fill that I love. It calculates the area of the room for you. Just tap on the room and it tells you the square meters right here. And you can also see the perimeter. Layers for iteration Marfolio works with layers. It's important to use these layers to separate your drawings into parts, walls on one layer, furniture on another, dimensions on another. This keeps the plan clean and it means you can turn things on and off depending on what you want to show. Also different layers can be a different version of the plan. So I might have the existing plan on one layer, my first design option on a second layer and a second option on a third. I can switch between them, overlay them, compare them and show a client both options side by side without having to redraw the base. This is exactly how we work in the early stages of a project. We are not committing to one layout straight away, but more exploring and the layer system is great for exploring quickly without losing anything already done. You can of course move things between layers. For this, select the part you want to move and double tap on the layer you want to place it. So the lasso and transform tool lets you select part of your drawing to organize your layers. Then you can typically move it to a new location, scale it larger or smaller, rotate it to any angle, flip it horizontally or vertically, duplicate it to create copies or delete the selected content if you no longer need it. All these are really useful and essential for iterating quickly. So those are the 5 steps I actually never miss when I draw a plan in Morpholio Trace. The scale, the tracing, the stencils, the smart fill and the layers. Together they make it the fastest and more precise way I have found to draw architectural plans on the iPad. If you want to go deeper, there's a lot more to explore in Morpholio, like drawing over 3D model views or using the ruler and triangle for really precise line work. Let me know in the comments if you want a video on any of that. If you want, I also make some 101 coaching about Morpholio, it's just a one hour call where we see everything deeply and it's really personal, you can ask any question you want and you will have all the answers straight away. For that too, you can find the link in the description. And don't forget to download the free cheat sheet if you didn't already and if you found this useful, subscribe so you don't miss the next video. If you still have some time, you can check out this video right there and I will see you in the next one. Bye!