Lesson 3: Lay out the room

Goal: generate the room shell you will build against: a floor, walls, and guide lines at exactly the heights cabinets snap to.

Time: two minutes.

Generate the shell

Start from an empty model. Open Create Kitchen Layout from the Cabybara toolbar or menu and enter:

Press Enter. Everything the tool creates is one undo step, and it is always built at the model origin.

The four height lines are the ones you will use most: 100 mm is where a ground cabinet body starts (the top of the legs), 900 mm is the top of the countertop, and 1500 to 2200 mm is where wall cabinets start and end, so with a 2200 wall they run up to the ceiling. The dialog remembers your values, so next time you only change what differs.

Checkpoint: the Tags panel now lists Floor, Walls and a Kitchen Guides folder. Hide the Walls tag to look into the room; hide the Kitchen Guides folder to clear every guide with one click.

What you are looking at

• The floor is a flat group named "Kitchen Floor".
• The walls are 18 mm thick and extruded outward, so the inside faces sit exactly on the 3100 x 2400 you typed.
• The guides are pure snapping targets. Nothing else in the plugin reads them, and the whole shell is invisible to nesting, pricing and reports, so it never pollutes a job.

What can go wrong

• Undersized rooms, a marker beyond its wall, or a height line above the wall height are refused with a plain message above the buttons.
• Replace existing kitchen layout is on by default: running the tool again erases the previous floor, walls and guides, including any edits you made to them. Your cabinets are never touched.

Every option is described in the Kitchen Layout reference.

Next: Design the cabinets.