A facade drives a big share of a building's cost, its embodied carbon, and how much daylight and view each unit gets. Building Skin designs, scores, and draws that facade inside your Giraffe project, so you can see the cost, U-value, and carbon impact of a cladding choice before it reaches your pro forma or your energy consultant.

Building Skin is a Giraffe app. Add it to a panel the same way you add any other app.

Building Skin reads the building sections already in your project. Draw at least one building with the Buildings tool before you open it.

If your project has no buildings yet, Building Skin shows "Add a building section in Giraffe to start designing your facade." until you draw one.

Once at least one building exists, five tabs appear across the top: Sections, Panel Designer, Elevations, Schedule, and Score.

Click a section on the map in Giraffe and Building Skin switches to the Sections tab and opens that building for you automatically.

As soon as your project has building sections, Building Skin builds a 3D facade model and drops it onto the map as a layer automatically. You don't need to click anything to generate it.

Every time you change a facade assignment, Building Skin rebuilds the model and updates the Score, Elevations, and Schedule tabs to match, live.

Building Skin decides whether each section is residential or non-residential from its Usage. A section is treated as residential when its usage is set to Residential, or when the usage text contains "bed", "apartment", "unit", or "studio", for example "Studio", "1 Bed Apartment", or "2 Bedroom Unit". Every other usage is treated as non-residential.

Residential sections use a library of residential styles. Non-residential sections use a library of panel systems. Both are set from the Sections tab and edited in the Panel Designer tab.

Pick a building from the pick a building dropdown, or select its section on the map in Giraffe, to open its editor. Below the editor, the Buildings list shows every building in your project, along with its pipeline (residential or non-residential), section count, usage, and any warnings.

For a residential building, choose a Library style: Modern, Chipperfield, or Classical, or a custom style you've created. Click Open in Panel Designer to edit that style directly.

Use Skip to leave a building out of the build, and Download JSON to export its configuration for troubleshooting.

For a non-residential building, choose By section to apply one Library system to the whole building, or By face to set a different system on each external face.

In By face mode, each face (F1, F2, …) shows its compass orientation and length, with its own system dropdown that defaults to — Section default —.

The Sections tab also shows a compact preview of that building's elevations, which you can expand or collapse.

The Panel Designer is where you edit the residential styles and panel systems that sections are assigned from, in two sub-tabs: Residential styles and Panel systems. Editing a built-in style or system prompts you to save it as a new custom one. Edits to a custom style or system save automatically.

Pick a style from the dropdown, or click + Add new style… to start one. For a custom style, use Rename, Delete, Download, and Upload to manage it, or share it as a JSON file with another project.

Each style covers five unit types: Studio, 1 Bedroom, 2 Bedroom, 3 Bedroom, and Balcony. Select a unit type to edit its own facade.

The zone bar above the facade canvas lays out the unit's rooms along the wall. Click + Living, + Bedroom, or + Master to add a zone, then click a zone to set its width in metres or change its type. Click the × on a zone to remove it.

Use Copy from… to copy another unit type's facade onto the one you're editing, or Reset to clear your changes to that unit type.

Pick a system from the dropdown. Building Skin ships with 22 built-in panel systems:

A built-in system is read-only. Enter a name and click Save as new system to start editing a copy of it.

For a custom system, set:

Building Skin shows the system's cost, U-value, and carbon figures as you edit it, alongside a live glazing/solid breakdown bar.

Both residential styles and panel systems share the same facade canvas. Click Draw Element, choose a tag from the dropdown, then click and drag on the canvas to draw a new element. Drag a selected element's corner handles to resize it, and use the fields on the right (Tag, Color, Depth, Opacity, Offset, X, Y, W, H) to fine-tune it exactly.

For a residential facade, elements are tagged wall, window, frame, balcony-floor, balcony-rail, balcony-side, cornice, or sill. For a panel system, they're tagged frame, mullion, glass, spandrel, louvre, or opaque.

The ruler along the bottom of the canvas shows the real wall width in metres. Below the canvas, the colour and depth swatches let you recolour or redepth every element that shares a value, all at once.

The Elevations tab draws your facades as 2D drawings, built from the same model as the 3D facade, so a drawing can never disagree with what's on the map.

On a Print sheets key plan, the sheet's own sections are shown solid, the rest of their building is lighter, and any other section at the same level is lighter still, with the faces the sheet draws picked out in red. Sections at other levels aren't shown. Each section is filled in its own colour, taken from a colour set on the section itself, or otherwise from the dominant colour of the facade it wears.

Click Print / PDF to print the current sheets, or save them as a PDF through your browser's print dialog. Click Download SVGs to download every drawing as an SVG file. Each individual sheet also has its own SVG and PNG buttons in its toolbar.

The Schedule tab lists every panel type used across your project, with the same table repeated at the bottom of the Elevations tab and on every printed sheet, so a code means the same panel everywhere.

Filter by All, Panels, Residential, or Shadow, and check Collapse same pattern (ignore widths) to group panels that share a layout and differ only in width.

Each panel gets a schedule code: P01, P02, … for non-residential panel systems, R01, R02, … for residential facades, and S01, S02, … for shadow walls, the short external walls drawn as a solid infill instead of a full panel grid. Codes are assigned in order of how many times each panel is used, so P01 is always your most common non-residential panel.

Each row shows a thumbnail, its code, name, size, quantity, area, glazing %, U-value, cost per m², carbon per m², and total cost.

The Score tab scores your whole project's facade against thresholds you set:

Each scored metric turns green, yellow, or red against the threshold you set for it: green at 80% of the threshold or under, yellow up to the threshold, and red once it's exceeded. Every current metric scores lower as better. Set thresholds from Settings.

The bar at the top of Building Skin shows its current save status: Saving…, Save failed, Unsaved changes, or how long ago it last saved. Building Skin saves automatically a few seconds after you stop editing, and at least once a minute while there's unsaved work. Click Save to save immediately.

Click Load from project… to pick a saved Building Skin configuration from any project and apply it here.

A few banners can appear across the top of Building Skin:

Click Settings in the top bar to open the settings drawer.

Set the starting Residential style, Panel system, Glazing, Finish, Panel ratio, and Stretch mode that Building Skin applies across your project, along with a default Internal wall colour and width, and a default Corner pillar colour and size.

Set the Max N/E/S/W glazing %, Max U-value, Max cost / m², and Max carbon / m² thresholds that drive the colours on the Score tab.

Click Download GLB to export your current facade model as a .glb file, named with today's date. This is disabled until Building Skin has built a model.

Turn on Live preview for faster, lighter rebuilds while you're actively adjusting a facade.