The van body & openings
Control the shell you're building in — show or hide panels, switch body style and paint, and cut windows, roof fans, and holes exactly where they'll go.
The Body menu
Everything about the van itself lives in one place: the Body dropdown in the toolbar. It holds the van picker, the body style, paint, per-panel visibility, and the opening cutter. The interior dimensions and payload of the current variant are shown right under the picker.
Body panels & auto-hide
The shell is drawn as six independent panels — Cab, Left wall, Right wall, Roof, Rear doors, and Bulkhead — and each has its own toggle, so you can open up whichever side you're working from or strip the van down to a floor plan.
Most of the time you won't touch the toggles: Auto-hide walls facing the camera (on by default) fades out whatever walls sit between you and the interior as you orbit, so the inside is always visible and the far side of the van still reads as a van.
- Manual panel toggles are the tool for screenshots: hide just the roof for a floor-plan shot, or just one wall for a cutaway.
- Press O at any time to swing open the doors — sliding door, rear barn doors, plus furniture doors and drawers — with their swing clearances drawn on the floor.
Body style & paint
Body style switches between a Panel van — the familiar curved shell with a slider seam — and a Box body with straight walls, matching Luton/box conversions.
Paint recolors the exterior: ten classic van colors from white to anthracite, sand, navy, and orange, or any custom color from the swatch. Paint is purely visual — pick your real van's color and your photo-mode shots will look like your build.
Cutting openings — windows, fans, holes
Real conversions cut into the body, so VanPlot lets you plan the cuts. An opening is a real hole in the shell — you see through it from inside and out — placed on the left or right wall, the roof, or the rear doors.
There are three kinds: a Window (adds about 8 kg and a typical window price to your build), a Roof fan (about 5 kg, priced like a Maxxfan-class unit), and an Open hole (free — for vents, cable glands, or a cut you're pricing yourself). Openings are counted in the build's weight, balance, and cost automatically.
- Open the Body menu and, under Cut an opening, click the side to cut — Left, Right, Roof, or Rear.
- The new opening appears selected. Pick its kind — Window, Roof fan, or Open hole.
- Set Width and Height in meters — drag the labels to scrub, or type exact numbers.
- Position it with Along wall and Height off floor (roof openings use Across roof instead). The cut clamps inside its panel with a structural margin.
- Repeat for every window and fan in your plan. Each opening is listed in the menu with its size; the trash icon removes it.
- You can also click an opening in the 3D view to select it for editing — Esc deselects.
- Check your window heights against the furniture: cut the openings early and you'll notice a counter blocking the galley window before you build it.
- The factory openings — sliding door and rear doors — are already modeled per variant, including a keep-clear entry zone that flags furniture blocking the slider.