Overlay is Structured AI's tool for visually comparing architectural and engineering drawings by stacking them on top of each other. Built for AEC teams who need to coordinate across disciplines, it replaces the painstaking manual process of flipping between sheets or printing transparencies with a fast, reliable digital workflow.
At its core, Overlay lets you load two drawings, for example an architectural floor plan and the corresponding mechanical or structural sheet, and view them as a single stacked image. Each layer has independent controls for color, opacity, and blend mode, so you can tune the visualization to make discrepancies obvious. Fade one layer back to a ghosted outline while keeping the other at full saturation, recolor a layer to highlight contrast against the base, or switch blend modes to surface overlapping geometry that would otherwise be hidden. The controls are designed for the way reviewers actually work: small adjustments that reveal different kinds of conflicts as you scan across a sheet.
What makes Overlay genuinely useful, rather than just a viewer with sliders, is automated page alignment. Drawings from different disciplines are rarely scaled, rotated, or positioned identically on the page, even when they describe the same physical area of a building. Overlay handles this automatically. It detects the plan region on each sheet, identifies exterior building corners as alignment anchors, matches corresponding anchors across the two drawings using AI-driven spatial reasoning, and solves for the geometric transform that brings the layers into register. The result is that when you stack a mechanical plan over its architectural counterpart, the walls, columns, and openings actually line up, with no manual fiddling required.
The practical payoff is earlier clash detection. Misalignments between disciplines that would normally surface as RFIs, change orders, or field rework during construction become visible during design review, when they are cheap to fix. Project engineers, architects, and coordinators can catch conflicts in minutes instead of waiting for the next coordination meeting or trusting that someone, somewhere, flipped between the right two sheets.
Overlay is part of Structured AI's broader platform for engineering and architectural firms, integrated with project-level document management so overlays persist across sessions and stay scoped to the right team.
