Yet another Hacker News

20 points PrimalNick 1 hour ago 21 comments

I’m Nick, founder of Drafted (https://www.drafted.ai). We’re training models that generate residential architecture from structured design constraints.

Product demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QkJ7jNU9y4

Residential architecture is still one of the most expensive, slow, and inaccessible creative processes in the world. Designing a custom home typically costs $10,000–$50,000 or more, takes months, and requires making major decisions before most people can even visualize the outcome. As a result, the vast majority of homes are built without direct architectural involvement.

Our goal is to teach computers how the built environment works so anyone can imagine, explore, and eventually create physical spaces tailored to them.

Today, users can design homes using simple inputs such as: - Square footage targets - Footprint shapes - Lot boundaries - Room placement preferences - Spatial relationships and constraints.

Our models generate complete floor plans and matching exterior elevations in seconds. Users can explore designs in both 2D and 3D, iterate instantly, furnish interiors, experiment with materials, and export CAD, PDF, and other files for the rest of the pre-construction process.

One of our newest capabilities allows users to draw any footprint shape and generate a complete home layout inside it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJhBm7-OHI.

Over the past month, more than 120,000 people have used Drafted, generating over 325,000 home designs.

If you're building a home, developing property, working in architecture, construction, or AI, we'd love to hear your feedback!

svemyh 1 hour ago | parent

Great product from a great team!

PrimalNick 43 minutes ago | parent

Thank you :)

J7jKW2AAsgXhWm 1 hour ago | parent

Do you support 2 story homes?

amir_karbasi 1 hour ago | parent

Doesn't look like it. From their FAQ: "Drafted is focused on single-level floor plans today. Multi-story homes, second floors, and basements are in progress and expected to become available soon."

I'd love to see a two storey use case in the future! I have a few designs for a small plot of land in Toronto (2500 sqft lot) and would love to try and make alterations based on my zoning constraints.

PrimalNick 33 minutes ago | parent

Yeah - we are working on adding multi-story in the next 2 months.

I'd love to have you try it :D

Zoning constraints will likely be another few months beyond multi-story.

nibab 1 hour ago | parent

im currently building a home. one of the biggest issues is FAR which is very much driven by local laws. are you intending on addressing that at some point ?

looks great btw. congrats

PrimalNick 43 minutes ago | parent

Thank you! After we get through building out the basic design tooling, we plan to get more into designing a specific plot of land and will look at adding zoning related contraints.

twostorytower 1 hour ago | parent

ADU's are extremely popular in California. Are you going to add support for designing ADU/garage conversions?

PrimalNick 35 minutes ago | parent

Right now we are focused on single-family ground-up design. There are people using it for ADUs, but it's not trained to do that well.

We plan to make the model better for ADU's after we get through multi-story houses :)

summermusic 58 minutes ago | parent

I just looked at the very first one featured on your website ("Sprawling Dark 5 Bed")[1]:

- A car parked in the garage perpendicular to the door and the other differently-sized car

- A bedroom missing a closet

- Attached bathrooms with multiple sinks

- An office with a weird entrance from a dead space from the garage

- External doors that open the wrong way (against fire code in most places)

- Closet doors opening inward

- Both doors of the top-left bathroom opens into the sinks (why two sinks?)

- The top-left bathroom has a weird dead space between the shower and bathtub (why both?)

- the random little floating feature in the middle of the open floorplan space doesn't make any structural or aesthetic sense

- The two bedrooms in the lower left with the weird bump-out for the windows that make no sense

- The window placement for many windows don't make sense and don't even line up with the 3D view of the house

- The hallway on the left that turns and goes to nowhere for no reason

- The additional random inaccessible dead spaces next to the bottom right bathroom

It took me just a few minutes to see this. I hope nobody ever builds a home based on these plans.

[1] https://cdn.drafted.ai/thumb/drafts/23025/generations/94729/...

Edited for formatting, to add a few points I missed, and to add a link to the image

tadfisher 40 minutes ago | parent

Also they only support single-story homes but that image includes a staircase

stonogo 39 minutes ago | parent

This is a lot of fun.

https://cdn.drafted.ai/thumb/drafts/27019/generations/98723/...

- off-bathroom conference room!

- side-by-side toilets

- garage inaccessible except via bathroom

it's engrossing!

Also most (but not all!) of the designs seem to omit laundry facilities. I wonder whether there's a pattern there.

PrimalNick 26 minutes ago | parent

We had a bug with our furnishing generations that is now fixed, we are working on backfilling all of the old renders that had the issue. Hopefully this fixes most of the room rewriting that's happening.

PrimalNick 38 minutes ago | parent

I appreciate the feedback. They aren't perfect. The renders are just aethetic images that often rewrite the plan, the base plan that you can download doesn't include these. We are working on adding the generation for these objects directly into the base generation to fix these issues. They currently just serve as a way to get more context quickly so people can understand the floor plan better.

If you're someone looking for a schematic design level tool that can allow you to explore design for free then this will allow you to develop ideas and figure out a starting point to work off of.

We will continue to improve the model and build out more tooling for guiding it.

cgillett 34 minutes ago | parent

This is fun! I hadn't thought about how much possibility space there was in home layouts until now. Some layouts make a lot more sense than others.

I've thrown some weird setups at it like a high bedroom:bathroom ratio and it's doing a great job at distributing bathroom access between the bedrooms, and arranging the bedrooms around shared spaces.

Thanks for sharing.

PrimalNick 21 minutes ago | parent

Thank you for trying it out :)

There's an insanely big probability space and everyone has very unique desires/preferences when designing.

I'm really excited to see what people come up with.

roamerz 28 minutes ago | parent

Going to give it a try! Would love to see an option for an engineering stamp for brace walls, hold downs, etc.

PrimalNick 23 minutes ago | parent

Let me know how it goes!

Engineering would be awesome! We want to get to training the model on structural constraints. We will start with basic foundation drawing, but will get deeper as we have the bandwidth to do it.

glerk 26 minutes ago | parent

This is really cool!

First thing that came to mind is that I would use this for a sim city style video game

PrimalNick 19 minutes ago | parent

We've had people design a house in the software and then recreate it in the sims. We also added .GLB file types because game designers were wanting to put houses in their video games.

____tom____ 15 minutes ago | parent

There is probably more money in this as entertainment than architecture. And less liability.

How many of us have made house plans at some point?