What's a good CAD package?

[robertn]

My wife and I are looking at Landscape CAD programs. Does anyone have any recomendations? A few years ago, I had a brief intro to AutoCad-LT, but for mechanical drawing. I do not know if it does lanscape parameters.

Any recomendations? My wife is looking at Smart Draw-6, and GrowitME.

[retired_young]

We use Punch - Superhome Suite. Its mainly a home building CAD, but the landscape functionality is enough for us to get ideas.

- You can adjust the age of your foliage. (decent selection of species)
- Able to create walkways out of various materials
- ponds
- decks
- variations in topography
- grass, stone, dirt, water, mulch surfaces

It's enough for us novices. And it's a ton of fun to play with!

[chrisjbell]

We actually have a full copy of Sierra Complete Landscaping, which will obviously do some neat stuff. It looks pretty cool and is supposed to handle plant aging, pictures, and neato stuff like that. We haven't ever really used it, though, because it requires precise measurements, including elevations. This makes perfect sense, and we probably should bite the bullet and do it (and then I could justify buying a surveyor's level [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] ).

But it has just been sitting and we wound up using graph paper and tracing paper to lay out irrigation, walls, plants, paths, etc. Not as accurate, since we don't have precise elevations, but our measurements are pretty close and if we're off by a bit when we build - that's what a backhoe and a loader is for [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img] ...Chris