Landscape designers need an accurate base plan to work from. Here we discuss in some detail converting from surveyors drawings to make a base plan ready for subsequent work with gCADPlus.
There are a number of 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 making sure that the Google Earth scale bar is included.
- Use a survey firm’s AutoCAD drawing file, convert it to DXF and import 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 own measurements of buildings, boundary lines and existing trees and shrubs using triangulation techniques for accuracy.
Surveyors CAD drawings
We take a drawing that has been 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 team of landscape designers 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 the task of turning off layers not required by our landscape team.