There are a few homegrown examples of landscape design software for Australia. gCADPlus, the landscape design tool that can be downloaded from this website, is one of them. It was released in 2010 and is based on GardenCAD, a software tool developed when one of the authors was asked to teach landscape students in a local college to use Autocad for design. The students were very frustrated with Autocad. They needed a low-cost, straightforward tool with a substantial collection of plant symbols designed around Australian plant species. As a sizable proportion of graduates from the course would go on to work in landscape architecture practices that used Autocad, the gCADPlus interface is designed to mimic the Autocad interface.
The screenshot below shows a typical landscape plan developed in gCADPlus for revegetating an area in a Melbourne school. A series of menu items like those found in Autocad runs across the top of the screen. A set of toolbars is seen below the menu strip. At the left of the screen is a properties dialogue box used to quickly change the selected entity’s colour, linetype, layer, and size.
The main drawing editor shows the design and includes a plant schedule and photos of species used in the design.
This movie shows how to manage a database of Australian native species when developing a design to regenerate a narrow site. A simple plan text database is attached to a CAD design created using gCADPlus. Plant symbols are tagged with entries in the database, and a schedule is generated. A second copy of the design is created in model space and displayed in layout space. Viewport layer switches allow for the display of both upper canopy and understory planting.
Here is another example of the use of gCADPlus in Australian conditions. It has been used to create a master plan for developing a small-scale holding in Victoria. The owners wanted to create a wildlife corridor to encourage the movement of native birds and animals through the site.
We responded to a user’s request for examples of how gCADPlus can be used to design constructed wetlands.