The van body & openings

The Van inspector

The van itself is a selectable base layer: press the Body button in the toolbar (or B), or click the pinned base-vehicle row at the top of the Components list, and the Van inspector opens in the right rail — same place an item's Inspector would. It holds the van picker, the shell build-up (insulation), body style, paint, cab seats, measured wheel arches and door openings, 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.

Body style & paint

Body style switches between a Panel van — the familiar curved shell with a slider seam, drawn with the walls' real inward curvature — 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.

Door openings: the sliding door and the rear doors

The factory doors are not a guess from the van's size: each platform carries the clear opening its manufacturer publishes — sliding-door width and height per roof, rear-door width and height — rounded, and shared by the badges built on the same body. They decide where the wall is cut for the slider, the keep-clear entry zone that flags furniture blocking the door, where you can step in and out in walk mode, and the door gaps on the plan sheets. A few smaller vans without a published figure still use an estimate from the body size.

Seals, trim and model years move these by a centimetre or two, so the Door openings section of the Van inspector lets you type your own: for the Sliding door, From bulkhead (where the opening starts), Width and Height; for the Rear doors, Width and Height. Measure between the seals. The sliding-door panel follows its opening, the wall hole, entry zone, walk-through and drawings all use your figures, and they travel with share links. Use the built-in figures returns to the database.

Two limits, so you are not surprised: the rear-door figures change the numbers — the walk-in gap, the insulation area, heat loss — but the barn doors themselves are still drawn full width; and there is one sliding door, on the right side. A left-hand or second slider isn't modelled yet.

Windows, roof fans & cutouts — one thing each

A window or a roof fan is one thing: the item you add from the Library (search "window" or "roof vent") or with the Window / Roof fan buttons under Windows & cutouts in the Van inspector. It cuts its own hole in the body — you see through it from inside and out — and the hole follows it: drag the window along the wall, resize it, flip it to the other wall, delete it, undo — the hole goes with it. Its weight, price, power and ventilation are counted once, on the item, with its Real-model presets (Dometic S4, Maxxair…).

Select a window or fan and its inspector shows a Cutout block: which wall, how big the hole is, and for a window a Left / Right switch. Size and Position above it ARE the hole.

Some holes have no fixture item: a window in the rear doors, a glazed skylight in the roof, an open hole for a cable gland, or a cutout drawn before windows cut their own. Those are listed under Cutouts without a fixture, keep their own inspector (kind, width, height, position) and count their own install weight and cost. A wall-window or roof-vent cutout there has Add the window / Add the fan — one click puts the item in its place and the cutout becomes the item's own.

Draw on the body is the quickest way to size one exactly: arm Left, Right, Roof or Rear, then drag a rectangle on that panel in 3D (a plain click places a standard size). On a wall you get a Window item, on the roof a Roof fan (draw it bigger than 50 cm for a skylight cutout), on the rear doors a door-window cutout.

1. Open the Van inspector (the Body button) and find Windows & cutouts.
2. Click Window or Roof fan — or arm a side under Draw on the body and drag the rectangle on the panel.
3. The new window or fan is selected: drag it into place, and set its size in Size (or pick a Real model).
4. Need it on the other side? Use Left / Right in its Cutout block.
5. Every window and fan is listed under Windows & cutouts; tap a row to jump to it.