Tactile Drawings

a 3D model you can read with your fingers

Turn any 3D model into a drawing you can read by touch. Drop in a Rhino .3dm (or OBJ / STL / PLY / GLB) and each of its layers gets a tactile material pattern — drafting hatches or tiles from the studio’s graphic-texture library. Then cut a plan or section anywhere, or set up an axon or elevation with hidden-line removal. Scales are the architect’s imperial ones (1/8" = 1’-0" and friends) and never squeezed to fit: pick the PIAF sheet you have — 8.5 × 11 or 11 × 17 — and a drawing bigger than one page tiles across as many sheets as it needs, packed to the smallest margin you allow. The lower-right title block carries the title and the scale in print and in Braille, next to a tactile scale bar you can read with a fingertip. Line weights stay in millimetres of ink, the same units a 3D printer is dialled in. Exports a millimetre-true SVG plate or a 1-bit PNG ready for PIAF swell paper, where every black mark becomes a raised ridge.

Everything runs in your browser — the model never uploads. Hidden-line visibility is sampled (not exact CAD Make2D), and in a cut-away axon a foreground wall’s edges can occasionally be overdrawn by a cap fill behind them — check the read-back counts if something feels off.

Model

Demo courtyard (built in)

.3dm files read best from their render meshes (in Rhino, shade once or run Mesh before saving) — but meshless files work too: extrusions and surfaces are rebuilt on import. Nothing is uploaded; the file stays in your browser.

Site walk — walk the scan

Walk the scanned ground on foot, 3 ft a stride. Solid things block and say how far and how tall; ground change speaks; unscanned ground never blocks — it warns and lets you pass, because a hole in the scan is ignorance, not a wall. The sensor saw 100 percent of this ground.

At 28.7 ft east, 25.7 ft north

Not yet stepped — press an arrow key or a direction button.

Sound pins

Mount a field recording at real site coordinates; walking within 60 ft speaks its cue and, with Sound on, plays it at its true bearing and distance. Saves keep the pin, not the recording — re-mount the audio file next session.

Nothing solid within 100 ft reads as open ground. Voice: “walk north”, “surroundings”, “pins”.

View
Sheet & scale
Paper (PIAF sheet)
mm

Fits one sheet — 202 × 258 mm of drawing, centred with a 5 mm margin.

Title block

The block sits in a band below the drawing so nothing overlaps the line work: title, the scale written 1/8" = 1'-0", and a tactile scale bar 64 mm long = 20 ft. Braille is drawn as real dots (1.4 mm on a 6.2 mm cell), true size — no Braille font needed on the printing machine. When the drawing tiles, every sheet is also stamped with its number, top left.

Relief print — when the PIAF is down

The same sheet as a thin 3D print: a base a few layers thick, every inked mark raised a few layers above it — what the swell paper would have raised. Heights are whole printer layers, never fractions. Write it from Export → Relief STL; see it under Relief print in the middle of the page.

mm
mm

A sheet wider than the bed is cut into pieces that each fit it — the same presets and the same clearance Relief prints with.

in
  • No drawing on the sheet yet — the relief print describes itself here once there is one.
Line work

Paints each visible face with its material — floors in plan, wall faces in elevation.

Weights stay in millimetres of ink on paper — the same units a 3D printer is dialled in — so a weight reads the same whatever the drawing’s scale. Under a fingertip, roughly 0.5 mm is a hairline and 1 mm is a firm ridge.

Layers → tactile materials
  • 456 tri
  • 36 tri
  • 72 tri
  • 36 tri
  • 12 tri

Read-back

The drawing in words — updated live, and embedded in the SVG export as its description.

  • Plan, cut 6 ft 8 in (2.02 m) above the model's base, looking down, north up the page.
  • The drawing covers 62 ft 4 in by 62 ft 4 in of model (19.0 by 19.0 m) at 1/8" = 1'-0" — 1 to 96 — which is 198 by 198 mm on paper.
  • The plate is 202 by 258 mm of paper and prints on ONE sheet of 8.5 × 11 in (letter), portrait, centred, with a 5 mm margin.
  • Layer "Walls" is cut in 16 closed regions, filled with crosshatch at 45° / 135°, 3.2 mm apart, ridges 0.3 mm wide.
  • Layer "Walls"'s visible surfaces — the faces seen flat-on, like floors in a plan or wall faces in an elevation — carry crosshatch at 45° / 135°, 3.2 mm apart, ridges 0.3 mm wide (8 faces).
  • Layer "Floor"'s visible surfaces — the faces seen flat-on, like floors in a plan or wall faces in an elevation — carry 0° hatch lines 3.5 mm apart, ridges 0.35 mm wide (reads as wood / siding) (6 faces).
  • Layer "Roof" is not crossed by the cut; it appears as projected line work only.
  • Layer "Glazing" is cut in 3 closed regions, filled with left open — outline only.
  • Layer "Ground"'s visible surfaces — the faces seen flat-on, like floors in a plan or wall faces in an elevation — carry 135° hatch lines 3 mm apart, ridges 0.35 mm wide (reads as insulation / second masonry) (2 faces).
  • Beyond the cut: 48 visible edge segments drawn solid, 110 hidden segments drawn dashed.
  • Line weights on paper: cut lines 0.9 mm, visible edges 0.6 mm, hidden (dashed) edges 0.5 mm.
  • Lower right, a title block 190 by 53 mm: “Demo courtyard (built in) — plan”, scale 1/8" = 1'-0".
  • Its tactile scale bar is 64 mm long — 20 ft at this scale — in four alternating segments of 5 ft, labelled 0 and 20 FT.
  • Every line of the block is repeated in Grade-1 Braille, set as real dots at 1.4 mm on a 6.2 mm cell — true size, not scaled with the drawing.
Tactile Drawings · Good Tools