Landscape designers who wish to move from hand drafting landscape plans to doing the same using CAD drafting face some challenges. It is often easier to see what’s involved rather than read about it.
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 display 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.
Tip: Naturally enough, the movie focuses on the use of our landscape design application (gCADPlus), but hope that the notes are sufficiently useful for those using other CAD programs such as AutoCAD and DraftSight. These alternative landscape applications work in a similar way. Read more about using CAD for landscape design. Here are some links to resources that might be useful: