It’s now time to translate our ‘mud map’ to a proper accurate base plan ready to add design elements. It is certainly possible to produce acceptable landscape plans drawn using hand drafting techniques, here we will use CAD software called gCADPlus. While it a fully-fledged CAD software application, it has been designed with the needs of landscape designers in mind and enables you to produce drawings with some of the look and feel of hand-drawn plans.
Survey some CAD landscape designs
We will start by looking at some typical landscape designs created with gCADPlus.
Tip: Use the diamond shape button at the lower right to play the movie at full-screen resolution.
Comparing hand drafting to CAD drafting
This movie introduces the world of computer-aided landscape drafting and compares the process to hand drafting. To sum up when using CAD to produce your designs rather than hand drafting:
- You work full size when designing. Concern about scale comes later.
- Use the mouse or touchpad to zoom in and pan about to display different views of your design.
- Keep the properties visible while drafting as it displays the accurate size of entities selected and a wealth of other information.
- You don’t need to draw every symbol from scratch. A large set of pre-drawn symbols are available.
- The SCALE tool can be used to change the size of a selected symbol.
- A drawing can contain layers. These can be switched on or off displaying more or less of the design. This is especially useful when printing a design.
- Symbols can be associated with particular plant species and will be displayed in the properties box when selected.
- It is possible to automatically generate a plant schedule showing the species name and the exact number of all plants used in the design. If changes are made, the plant schedule can be refreshed and will show count changes.
You will need to download and install a copy of gCADPlus or email us about obtaining a copy of GardenCAD so you can complete the next exercises in the course.