In a hurry? See Paint tips.
Fills an area from the linework around it: click inside a closed area of the drawing and Studio traces its outline from the CAD lines themselves, arcs and all, as a closed path on the layer Paint was started on: the layer selected in the tree at that moment (a layer row, or the layer of a selected object), or else the layer you last painted on, or else a Painted Areas layer. The status bar names it. Paint keeps that layer while you work, through an undo, the area each click selects and objects you click in the tree; click a layer row in the tree to paint on that layer instead.
Rest the pointer for a moment to see the area before you click.
Hidden layers, and layers faded by an isolation, do not bound the area, so turn off a line you do not want splitting a surface (a floodplain limit through a lawn, say) before you paint. Inside a viewport the viewport's edge bounds the area too, so a fill stops where the drawing is clipped instead of running on through linework the viewport does not show.
While Paint is on, the DRAW tab shows what it paints with. The swatch's menu offers Layer's style (the default: each area takes its layer's fill, as Paint always did), Colour... (the colour picker, which also takes a hex value) and the materials, each with its table colour.
A colour or a material becomes the area's own fill, its override, set at the Opacity beside the swatch, in percent, and with the Feather beside it, in sheet units: the paint fades in from the area's outline that far, keeping the layer's Edge (20% unless changed) at the outline (see Fill and Stroke).
Only the fill is the area's own: its stroke and the rest of its style still follow the layer, so the layer stays the unit you turn off, isolate and restyle. A layer change to the fill no longer reaches an area painted with its own colour; Clear All Overrides hands it back.
The strip under the swatch keeps your last eight colours (one click paints with one again), and they are remembered with the opacity and feather between sessions.
Join, next to Paint on the DRAW tab and on by default, merges each new area with the areas it touches on the same layer that are painted alike, so a lawn a line crosses paints as one surface with no seam.
Painted alike means the same fill: the same colour, opacity, material and feather (its width and Edge), or both in the layer's style. A red area painted beside a green lawn stays an area of its own. The preview outlines, dashed, the areas a click will join.
With Join off every click paints an area of its own, and Shift+click
joins. Areas on a locked layer are never joined.
Point and Fence, first in Paint's row on the DRAW tab, set how Paint picks its areas. Point is the click described above.
Fence paints many areas in one go: click points in turn, and every area a segment between two points crosses is picked and shows tinted as soon as the point lands, with a dot at each point and a line between them; the line follows the pointer to the next point.
Backspace drops the last point
(and the areas only its segment crossed); Enter or a right-click finishes the
fence and shows what it found, where a click leaves an area out or brings it back and
Backspace takes the fence up again; a second Enter paints the rest
as one undo step; Esc drops the fence.
Each area is painted on its own, whatever the Join setting (joining would run adjacent lots painted alike into one across their lot lines); an area lying within an area of the layer painted alike is left alone and counted.
An area the fence crosses that reaches more than 12 in of sheet from the segment, a street network say, is left out and counted in the status bar: click it to paint it.
A click inside an area already painted on that layer works like a paint bucket. Painted alike, it just selects the area. Painted otherwise, the click repaints it: the whole area when the click found all of it (it keeps its name, its place in the draw order and any stroke of its own), or, when a line inside the area split off the part you clicked, just that part. The part is cut out of the area and becomes a new area, so the two never overlap; the rest keeps its fill, and when the part ran across the area the rest becomes two areas or more.
If the rest cannot be traced cleanly, nothing is painted and the status bar says so. A repainted area joins the areas it touches that are now painted alike, as a new one would.
A new area goes under the drawing's linework, so the lines it was traced from stay on top. Painted inside a filled area (a planting bed inside a lawn, say, or a pad that carries a product on a land plan), it goes just above that fill instead, so its own shows in full rather than through the one beneath, and on a fill that stands up (a pad given a height, a roof) it stands with it, or that fill would cover it. Painted over smaller filled areas, it goes under them, as a Land Use area does. It never goes under a picture lying there: on a plan over an aerial the area lands just above the aerial, where it can be seen.
Areas painted or drawn separately can be merged into one afterwards, so the seam between
them goes: the outline and edge shading each area draws along its own edge. Select the
areas (Ctrl+click on the canvas or in the tree), right-click and choose
Merge Areas; the merged area keeps the name and style of the one you
selected first. To merge a whole layer at once, right-click the layer in the scene tree and
choose Merge Touching Areas; each merged group keeps its largest area's
style. The status bar says how many areas were merged into how many.
Rules the merge follows:
Merging removes seams on purpose: concrete panels painted one by one lose the edge shading that marked each joint once merged, so leave a layer unmerged where you want those lines. All of it is undoable.