Scale figures in architecture are the human silhouettes, photo cutouts and CAD blocks that tell a viewer how big a space actually is. Drawn at a consistent height of roughly 1.75 m and placed on a believable ground plane, they turn an abstract elevation into a room somebody could walk through.
Most students treat entourage people as decoration added in the last hour before a review. That is why so many boards have figures floating above the pavement or standing eight metres tall in the background. Getting them right costs almost no time and changes how a jury reads the project.
What Is Entourage in Architecture?
Entourage is everything you add to a drawing that is not the building: people, trees, cars, furniture, sky. Architectural entourage people, usually called scale figures, are the human part of that set. The word comes from the French for surroundings and has been studio vocabulary since the Beaux-Arts era.
A blank wall has no inherent size. Your eye cannot separate a four metre ceiling from a six metre one until something with a known dimension appears beside it, and the object every viewer knows is another person. Figures also carry program: three people at a table read as a canteen rather than a corridor.
How Tall Should a Scale Figure Be?
Use 1.75 m (about 5 ft 9 in) as the default adult and vary it between roughly 1.55 m and 1.90 m so the crowd is not made of clones. The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's global height study, summarised by Our World in Data, puts the mean height of men born in 1996 at 171 cm and women at 159 cm, so 1.75 m sits at the upper-middle of that range.
The maths is one division: real height over the scale denominator, so a 1.75 m person becomes 17.5 mm at 1:100. The millimetre value matters most when you paste cutouts onto a Photoshop board instead of drawing them at an accurate drawing scale in CAD.
Figure Height at Common Drawing Scales
| Scale | Height on paper | Pixels at 300 dpi | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1:20 | 87.5 mm | 1033 px | Detail sections |
| 1:50 | 35 mm | 413 px | Room plans, interior sections |
| 1:100 | 17.5 mm | 207 px | General arrangement plans |
| 1:200 | 8.75 mm | 103 px | Building sections, elevations |
| 1:500 | 3.5 mm | 41 px | Site plans, urban diagrams |
📐 Technical Note
At 300 dpi one millimetre equals 11.81 pixels, so pixel height is the millimetre value times 11.81. For a cutout of unknown size, measure a door head at 2.1 m in the image and scale every figure against it. Eye level for a 1.75 m adult sits near 1.60 m, which is also the camera height that makes a render feel like standing rather than hovering.
Choosing a Scale Figure Style
One rule governs style: figures must be no more detailed than the drawing they stand in. A photoreal cutout in a flat vector diagram looks like a mistake, and a grey silhouette in a lit interior looks like a hole.
- Flat silhouettes stay quiet and read cleanly at small sizes, which suits diagrams and site plans at 1:500.
- Diagrammatic figures in one or two flat colours suit axonometrics and concept drawings that want life but no texture.
- Photoreal cutouts belong in lit renders, and need matching light direction, colour temperature and a real contact shadow.
- Line-drawn figures pair with hand drawings and ink sections, at a lighter line weight than the building's cut line.
💡 Pro Tip
Build one folder of eight to twelve figures per project and reuse only those. Pulling people at random from five libraries leaves mismatched grain, colour casts and lighting angles across a single board. A small consistent set reads as a deliberate graphic language, which is what a jury notices.
Diversity and Representation in Entourage
Default cutout libraries skew towards young, slim, able-bodied adults in Northern European clothing. If your project is a community health centre in Lagos or a bus interchange in Ankara, that crowd tells the reviewer you never thought about who uses the building. Vary age, body type and clothing to suit the site, and include wheelchair users, walking aids and children if your circulation claims to be accessible, since a seated eye level near 1.20 m tests counter heights and sightlines in a way a standing adult never will.
Placement Rules That Make Figures Read as Real
Placement, not cutout quality, separates a convincing image from a cheap one. Five habits cover most of it.
- Work in depth layers: one or two cropped figures in the foreground, a readable group in the middle ground, a few small ones at the back.
- Align to the horizon. On level ground every standing adult's eye line lands on the horizon, however far away. Scaling by feel instead of by that line is the biggest giveaway in student work.
- Give every figure a shadow matched in direction, length and softness, with a dark contact patch at the foot. Without it people levitate, one reason renders look fake.
- Crop deliberately. Foreground figures may run off the frame edge, but never crop somebody mid-shin in open space, or let a head collide with a key building line.
- Use fewer people than instinct suggests. Six well-placed figures beat thirty. Our guide to using cutouts without making renders look cheap covers the post-production side.
⚠️ Common Mistake to Avoid
Pasting one figure at the same pixel size at three different depths. In perspective a person twice as far away is half as tall on screen, so identical sizes flatten the image instantly. Scale each copy against the horizon line, then mirror or swap it so the repetition is not obvious.
Scale Figures in Plans and Sections
In plan, figures are small top-down shapes and their job is circulation, not character. Use them to prove a corridor takes two-way flow, that a queue fits, or that a wheelchair can turn, and keep them the same grey as your furniture.
Sections are where they earn the most. A person on every floor makes storey heights, mezzanine clearances and stair headroom legible at a glance, which is why so many of the best section drawings are full of people. Place them on the finished floor level, not the structural slab. The same logic holds on a presentation board.
Where to Find Scale Figures and CAD Blocks
Four libraries cover almost every situation, and you are not expected to use all of them. Pick one free set for studio work, one paid set for images that leave the school, one DWG source for technical drawings. Our cutouts collection and humans collection sit alongside them, sorted by pose and lighting.
Skalgubbar
Skalgubbar is the personal project of Teodor Javanaud Emdén, a Swedish architect at Snøhetta, running since 2011. The images are photographs of ordinary people shot in daylight, cut out cleanly and posted in themed batches rather than one large database.
Downloads are free with no account. The stated terms allow student and commercial architectural visualisation as long as the architecture project is the focus of the picture, and academic work is asked to credit the site with a link. The look is distinctly Scandinavian, which is either the appeal or the limit.
Best for: natural daylit exterior renders with no registration friction.
Watch for: a narrow range of body types, and no use in standalone images or product advertising.
Nonscandinavia
Nonscandinavia exists to widen who appears in architectural drawings. It offers cutouts, silhouettes and original photographs of everyday people rather than models, with the stated aim of increasing diversity in architectural representation so renders reflect the people around a site.
Everything is free and browsable without an account, in three categories so you can take a full photo or a ready silhouette. The caveat is legal: the site states the images are for educational use only, are not licensed for commercial work, and anyone pictured can ask to be removed.
Best for: studio and thesis work that needs a genuinely varied crowd.
Watch for: no commercial licence, so these cannot go into competition entries or client renders.
Mr Cutout
Mr Cutout is a commercial library of more than 5,000 cutouts covering people, vegetation, animals, vehicles, backgrounds and skies. The people section filters by pose and situation, including walking, sitting, children and disabled categories, which saves scrolling when you need one specific gesture.
It runs on a freemium model, so registration is required even for the free tier and full resolution is paid. The reason to pay is legal certainty, since the library advertises fully licensed sources with clear model release information.
Best for: professional renders that need a model release on file.
Watch for: the free tier is limited and every download needs an account.
CAD Blocks
CAD Blocks hosts over 5,000 DWG files by category, with a People section covering figures in elevation, in plan and in groups. Files open in AutoCAD 2026 and earlier, with no conversion step.
Downloading needs no registration and costs nothing, which makes it the fastest option when a drawing set is due at midnight. The blocks are line drawings, so they belong in plans, sections and elevations rather than in rendered images.
Best for: cad blocks people in DWG for plans, sections and elevations.
Watch for: vague licence wording and uneven line quality between blocks.
At a Glance
| Library | Content | Account / cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skalgubbar | Photo cutouts, PNG | Free, no account | Daylit exterior renders |
| Nonscandinavia | Cutouts, silhouettes, originals | Free, education only | Diverse studio entourage |
| Mr Cutout | 5,000+ cutouts, all categories | Account, freemium | Licensed commercial work |
| CAD Blocks | People blocks in DWG | Free, no account | Plans, sections, elevations |
Licensing and Model Releases
Two separate rights sit inside every photographic figure: copyright in the photograph, held by whoever took it, and the personality right of the recognisable person in it, which a model release covers. A library can give you the first and still leave you exposed on the second, so free download and safe to publish are not the same statement.
For coursework and internal reviews, free educational sets are usually fine. Once an image goes into a competition entry, a client presentation or a published portfolio, you need a source that states commercial rights and releases explicitly. Silhouettes and drawn figures avoid the problem, since no identifiable person appears.
Licensing terms differ by country and change over time. Check each library's current terms before using any figure in commercial or published work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What size should a scale figure be at 1:100?
A 1.75 m adult drawn at 1:100 measures 17.5 mm on paper, about 207 pixels at 300 dpi. At 1:50 the same person is 35 mm and at 1:200 it drops to 8.75 mm. Divide real height in millimetres by the scale denominator for any other case.
Where can I get free scale figures for architecture?
Skalgubbar offers free photographic cutouts with no account, Nonscandinavia offers free and more varied images for educational use, and CAD Blocks provides free DWG people blocks. Read each site's terms before publishing anything made with them.
How many people should I put in a render?
Enough to describe real occupancy, which is usually fewer than instinct suggests. Six to ten figures across foreground, middle ground and background is plenty for an exterior view. Crowds hide the architecture and make scaling errors more visible.
Can I use free cutouts in a commercial project?
Only if the library says so in writing. Skalgubbar allows commercial architectural visualisation under stated conditions, while Nonscandinavia restricts use to education because its photographs carry no model release.
What This Means for Your Next Project
Your Next Step: open your current render and check one thing, whether every standing figure's eye line meets the horizon. Fixing that alignment corrects the scale of the whole image faster than replacing the cutouts.
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