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How to Turn a 3D Scan Into a CAD Floor Plan

The step-by-step guide to turning a 3D point cloud scan into an editable DXF + PDF floor plan with clean vector walls

36 min readOct 5, 2026

A before and after thumbnail on a light sepia card with a blue border, an oblique 3D view of a classroom point cloud with blue walls and green, orange and purple furniture on the left, and on the right a rectangular plan with two 5.26 m walls marked 100 percent seen and a dashed orange 10.54 m wall marked 12 percent seen, under the headline Scan to floor plan. — The card for article 01: the classified classroom scan in 3D before, the measured plan of its four walls after, the barely seen one dashed. © F. Poux

I still grin every time a wall I never drew snaps under my cursor in a CAD tool.

By the end of this one, it will be your wall, pulled out of a point cloud by your own script, with a length the architect can click and trust.

An animated wipe over a top view of a classroom point cloud coloured by class, revealing behind it a clean floor plan with three solid black walls, one dashed orange wall, a red unseen stretch by the door, blue dimension lines of 10.54 and 5.26 metres and a pale blue room labelled 55.42 square metres. — From 1,422,440 classified points to four walls, one room of 55.42 m² and a layered DXF. The dashed orange wall is the one the scan barely saw, and the file says so. © F. Poux

A scan SHOULD never reach an architect’s desk; what lands there is a drawing,

and scan-to-plan tools stop one step short of it.

They hand you a picture of walls, a top-down raster that looks right and can’t be edited, so there’s no wall you can grab, no corner you can drag, and no length you can ask the file for.

SO, as I like to do, let me bring you on a research journey, that starts with a simple idea I discovered while writing this piece.

In 1963, Ivan Sutherland wrote a thesis at MIT about a program called Sketchpad. He drew on a screen with a light pen, and the machine didn’t store the ink: it stored…

Incredible walkthrough, Florent!

Breaking down the geometric pipeline from a noisy point cloud raster down to clean vector lines via morphological closing, skeleton thinning, and total least squares SVD fitting is a masterclass in transparency.It…

Data Science Collective

How to Turn a 3D Scan Into a CAD Floor Plan

The step-by-step guide to turning a 3D point cloud scan into an editable DXF + PDF floor plan with clean vector walls

Written by Florent Poux, Ph.D.⁠

Published in Data Science Collective

Responses (5)

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