Your First Drawing

Starting a new drawing

When the drawing editor has no drawing open (first visit, after deleting a drawing, or after clicking New Drawing), you get three ways to start:

• Generate using AI -- Clark walks you through it in chat: he asks for your building's length and width, offers the default column spacing or takes yours, then creates the building for you.

• Create from scratch -- instantly creates a drawing using your default settings; you adjust everything afterward.

• Guided Setup -- a five-step wizard, the recommended path for a real project:

  1. Building -- length (horizontal), width (vertical), clear height, and min clearance. Clear height minus min clearance is the top-of-storage height -- the ceiling your storage has to stay under.
  2. Columns -- horizontal and vertical column spacing, with a diagram showing which direction is which. The building gets its full column grid from these.
  3. Pallet -- the default pallet's height, width, depth, and weight. Capacity counts and rack sizing start from this pallet, so put your real one in.
  4. Info -- drawing name (required), optional description, and the project it belongs to.
  5. Review -- a summary of everything; hit Create and the drawing is saved to your account and opened.

  Every step validates its numbers against allowed ranges and tells you what to fix before letting you continue.

Racking your first building (end to end)

Here's the complete path from empty canvas to a counted rack layout:

1. Create the building using Guided Setup (or ask Clark). You land on the plan view: building outline, column grid with labeled column lines (numbers along one axis, letters along the other).
2. Draw the rack area. Press A for the Draw tool and drag a rectangle over the part of the floor that should hold rack -- hold Shift to snap to whole feet. Don't worry about perfection; you can drag corners and edges later with the Select tool, or add corners with the Add Point tool for an L-shape.
3. Select the area. Press W, then click the area. Its menu opens on the left side of the canvas -- name, colors, and Storage Options live here.
4. Turn it into rack. Under Storage Options, click the rack button (the warehouse icon). The layout generates immediately: rows of rack sized to your default pallet, laid out around the building columns, with aisles at your default aisle width (120 inches unless you've changed the setting). Every new drawing comes with a default rack elevation, so nothing else is required first.
5. Read the counts. The label in the middle of the area shows its name plus live totals (for example "pallets: 1,240"). These update on every change you make. If the label instead warns "invalid elevation configuration", the elevation doesn't fit the building -- usually storage taller than the top-of-storage height allows.
6. Tune the layout. With the area selected, open the storage options flyout (the expander button next to the storage buttons). Orientation, alignment, aisle width, single versus double deep, and the rest live there -- see the rack layout options topic.
7. Watch for the optimizer. While you work, the app quietly tries alternative configurations for your area in the background -- different orientation, aisle width, nudges, singles on or off. If it finds a layout that fits more pallets than your current settings, a "Better layouts available" button appears on the area. Click it to compare and apply.
8. Save. Ctrl+S saves to the cloud. Undo works across everything (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y).

From here the usual next steps are refining the rack elevation (beam levels and heights), placing dock doors, and per-bay exceptions with the Select Rack tool -- each has its own topic.