Multi-building projects let you design more than one building, each with its own story heights, views, and geometry, inside a single Snaptrude project. Instead of splitting a campus or mixed-use site into separate files, you model and coordinate everything together, on one shared site.

TL;DR

• You can now add multiple buildings to a single Snaptrude project, each with its own story count and story heights.
• Built for the projects that never fit one story stack: campuses, podium-and-tower schemes, and mixed-use developments.
• Shared site elements like roads, basements, and bridges get their own "Common Building," or live in a default building until you reassign them.
• Reassign objects between buildings from the Object Properties Panel. Vertical position updates automatically, and your edits never silently change building association.
• Existing projects migrate automatically with no data loss. Full master plan editing across buildings is coming next.

Most real sites have more than one building on them. A campus has an academic block, an auditorium, and a hostel. A mixed-use development has a commercial podium with a residential tower above it. A masterplan has a cluster of towers at completely different heights, sitting on the same plot.

Until this release, every Snaptrude project worked off one global story setup: one floor-to-floor height, one story stack, applied to everything in the project. That's fine for a single building. It breaks down the moment your site has more than one.

Why did multi-building projects need their own setup?

A single global story setup assumes every structure on your site shares the same floor-to-floor heights. In practice, almost nothing does.

A residential tower might run on 10 to 11 foot story heights. The commercial podium underneath it needs 14 to 16 feet for retail and parking clearances. An auditorium on the same campus might need 30-plus feet for a double-height volume. None of that fits into one story stack.

So teams worked around it. The most common pattern: separate Snaptrude files for each building on the site, with story heights set independently in each one, and manual coordination to keep them aligned on the same datum and site context. Every change to the master plan meant updating multiple files and cross-checking them against each other.

That workaround is the kind of overhead that eats into the early stages of a project, exactly the phase where you should be exploring options, not managing files.

A single, project-wide story setup couldn't represent how real sites work. In Snaptrude, each building is now its own layer with an independent story stack, story heights, and views.

How does Snaptrude handle buildings with different story heights?

Every project starts with a default building. From there, you can add, rename, duplicate, or delete buildings as the project develops. Each building carries:

• Its own story count and story heights
• Its own plan views, 3D views, elevations, and renders
• Its own base offset (datum), set relative to the project's base point

When you duplicate a building, you choose how. Duplicate just the story configuration if you're starting a new building with a similar setup. Duplicate with geometry if you're repeating a building type, which is useful for the kind of repetitive residential tower typologies you see in multifamily projects.

Here's what this makes possible, all within one project:

• Master plan layouts. A residential tower at 15 foot story heights and a commercial block at 20 feet, modeled together and coordinated on one site.
• Campus layouts. An academic block at 24 feet, an auditorium at 35 feet, and a hostel block at 15 feet, all visible together for coordination.
• Podium and tower configurations. Podium parking at 12 foot story heights with a residential tower above at 18 feet, in one project, one model.

Story heights are set per building, not per project. A tower, a podium, and a low-rise block can each run their own story stack, accurately, inside the same Snaptrude model.

What happens to shared site elements like roads and basements?

Not everything on a site belongs to one building. Roads, shared basements, bridges, and phasing elements span the whole project, not a single structure.

Snaptrude gives you two ways to handle this:

1. Model shared elements in a default building, and reassign them to the right place later.
2. Create a dedicated "Common Building" for anything that spans the site.

This matters most for:

• Site design, where roads, landscaping, and site boundaries need to relate to every building at once
• Shared basements, which often run continuously underneath multiple towers or blocks
• Phasing and costing workflows, where you need to separate what belongs to Phase 1, Phase 2, and shared infrastructure

Shared site elements like roads, basements, and bridges don't need to be forced into one building's geometry. A dedicated Common Building keeps them organized without affecting any building's story setup.

How do you move objects between buildings without breaking your model?

Mistakes happen. An object gets drawn in the wrong building, or a design changes and something needs to move from the podium to the tower above it.

You can reassign any object to a different building (and a different story, independently) through the Object Properties Panel. When you do:

• The object's vertical position updates automatically to match the new building's story heights
• Horizontal position stays exactly where you placed it, and needs to be repositioned manually if needed

Object-to-story association also got more predictable in this release. Objects are now assigned to a story based on whether their base elevation falls between that story's top and bottom boundaries. This removes the "half-height jump" behavior that used to make object placement feel inconsistent, and it applies across spaces, BIM objects, and imported geometry. The one exception: structural elements like slabs and beams follow industry-standard logic, where a slab belongs to the upper level it serves.

One more thing worth knowing: everyday editing actions like moving, copying, rotating, flipping, splitting, or offsetting an object never change which building it belongs to. Building association only changes when you explicitly reassign it. No accidental reassignments while you're working.

Objects can be reassigned to a different building and story from the Object Properties Panel, with vertical position updated automatically. Routine edits like moving, copying, or rotating never change an object's building association.

How do you work across multiple buildings day to day?

In this release, you work in one active building at a time. All drawing and editing actions apply to that building and its active story.

Other buildings in the project stay visible as a read-only underlay by default, so you can see the rest of the site while you focus on one part of it. You can toggle this off in view settings if you want a cleaner workspace for a specific task.

This setup keeps two things true at once:

• You get a clean, focused view while modeling one building
• You can still coordinate, align, and reference against everything else on site

Existing projects don't need any manual work to take advantage of this. Every project is automatically migrated, with all existing geometry assigned to "Default Building 1." Nothing is lost, and existing workflows like story duplication and view duplication continue to work as before.

In Snaptrude, you design one building at a time while the rest of the project stays visible as a read-only underlay, keeping focus without losing site-wide context.

What's coming next for multi-building projects?

This release lays the groundwork. A few things to keep in mind for now:

• Only one building can be actively edited at a time. There's no full master plan editing mode yet, just visibility into other buildings.
• Cut planes currently follow the existing top-down logic. Editable cut planes and support for multiple cut planes are planned.
• Duplicating a building, especially with geometry, is a heavier operation and may take longer on large models.
• You can toggle other buildings on or off as an underlay, but there's no per-building visibility control yet.

The next step is a full Master Plan View: editing across multiple buildings with a neutral cut plane, so coordination moves from "visible as reference" to "editable together."

This release lays the foundation for multi-building projects. A full Master Plan View, with editable cut planes and coordinated editing across buildings, is planned next.

What this means for your next project

If your last campus or mixed-use project lived across half a dozen separate files, this is the change that puts it back together. One project, one site, with each building keeping its own story logic, while staying visible and coordinated against everything else you're designing.

For project teams working across Program, Design, BIM, and Present, this means a master plan, a campus, or a podium-and-tower scheme can move from concept to coordinated documentation without being broken into pieces along the way. You can read the full technical breakdown of this release in the 3.53.0 release notes, and see how it fits into broader project workflows on our workflows page.

FAQ

Can I give each building in my project a different story height?

Yes. Story heights are set per building, not per project. A tower, a podium, and a low-rise block can each have their own story stack within the same project.

Does Snaptrude support campus or master plan projects?

Yes. Multi-building projects are built specifically for campuses, master plans, and mixed-use sites where buildings differ in scale, height, and use.

What happens to my existing projects after this update?

They're automatically migrated. All existing geometry is assigned to "Default Building 1," with no data loss and no change to how your existing workflows function.

Can I model shared site elements like roads or basements?

Yes. Model them in a default building and reassign later, or create a dedicated "Common Building" for elements that span the whole site, like roads, shared basements, or phasing infrastructure.

Can I edit multiple buildings at the same time?

Not yet. One building is active for editing at a time, with other buildings visible as a read-only underlay for reference. Full master plan editing across buildings is planned next.

If your next project has more than one building on the site, this is built for it. Try Snaptrude and bring your campus, podium-and-tower, or mixed-use scheme into a single coordinated model.