Landscape designers need an accurate base plan from which to work. Here we discuss in some detail converting from surveyors’ drawings to make a base plan ready for subsequent work with gCADPlus.
There are several ways to obtain a base plan:
- Use the services of a drone operator and take a high-resolution overhead photograph of the site, taking care to include an object of known size in the image. The image can be imported into the gCADPlus drawing editor and scaled, in the metric environment, to meters and in the USA Imperial environment, to decimal feet.
- Use Google Earth to ‘fly’ to the site and capture an image, ensuring the Google Earth scale bar is included.
- Use a survey firm’s AutoCAD drawing file, convert it to DXF and import it into the gCADPlus drawing editor. Changes will almost certainly be needed to drafting settings such as UNITS and the drawing scaled to an appropriate base unit.
- Conduct your measurements of buildings, boundary lines and existing trees and shrubs using triangulation techniques for accuracy.
Surveyors CAD drawings
We take a drawing converted from an AutoCAD dwg to DXF and then to the gCADPlus native file format – lcd. The drawing will be used as a base plan for a landscape design team, but some adjustment is required. We show how to convert surveyors’ drawings and change the units from surveyors’ units, scale the drawing to convert the base unit of meters to mm, turn on all layers and begin turning off layers not required by our landscape team.