Working with CAD software benefits professional landscape designers.
Please use the link below to download a paper we have written that sets out the benefits of using CAD software in the hands of a landscape designer.
Landscape Design and CAD 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.
The mouse or touchpad is used to zoom in and pan about to display different views of your design.
We suggest that the Properties window be kept visible to the left of the drawing editor while drafting, as it displays the size of entities selected and a wealth of other information.
Unlike hand drafting, you don’t need to draw every symbol from scratch when using CAD. An extensive 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 at will, displaying more or less of the design. This ability is handy when printing a design.
Symbols can be associated with plant species and 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.
This movie below guides you from designing on a board to designing in CAD. Here is an overview of various software applications used by landscape designers.
Landscape design is a two-way street.
We suggest that communication between the designer and the client should be ongoing during the design phase. gCADPlus can quickly and easily generate a PDF version of the design. The SavePDF facility even enables zoomed-in views of a portion of the design. These views can be emailed to the client. Once that’s done, encourage clients to use the annotation facility in Acrobat Reader and add comments to promote two-way interaction between designer and client.
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:
This movie below guides you from designing on a board to designing in CAD.