[Turtle]

Is there drawing techniques that make the drawing look less mechanical. I found another thread from awhile ago about this but it never finished went off into some other topic

So i have no real training in cad I currently use a visual program and hand draw more like stick draw for installation purposes. I now want to start using cad I like drawing on cad and have a better feel for it on the screen than on paper.

They just come out not being finished enough

Not sure if there is a real answer to this or whether it is just a lack of cad experience.

Is there any easy to follow cad training books with lessons rather than setup like a dictionary

[agla]

It is really no different than hand drawing except that people forget what they do in hand drawings to make them look good.

The most noticable thing is line weight. When you draw by hand you make some lines thinner and some lines thicker. People new to cad tend to make all lines the same thickness which makes the drawing very stiff. Plant symbols are much more dynamic if you vary the line weights between them. Some plants appear more delicate than others - just like hand drawing. Autocad allows you to use the line colors in the drawing to assign lineweight when you go to print. If you are consistent, you will develop a feel for what color (lineweight) you want to draw certain elements with.

Some programs, like Dynascape, have setup good lineweight defaults for less stiff looking drawings. But you can very easily achieve the same thing in most professional cad programs.

Another thing is hatching or stippling. People often tap down little dots here and there, especially near the edge of open areas. Cad users seldom do this. There are also lots of hatch patterns in most cad programs. Areas that might be annuals or ground covers can be done as a closed polyline, then edited to a spline to give it a smooth form. Then a hatch pattern added. But you can't just take the default scaling or lineweight of the hatch pattern. You need to experiment with what adjustement to certain hatch scales do in the drawing as well as line weight.

I don't know how you have a better feel for drawing in CAD than on paper if you have not been doing it for a long time. Because of zooming in and zooming out, most people lose their sense of scale and find it very uncomfortable. There is no sense of reference. The best way to overcome that is to be very consistent using the same plant symbols drawn at the same size. As you put the plants into the drawing it gives the drawing a familiar feeling and a recognizable scale whether you are zoomed in or out, or anywhere in between.

Consistency is the key to developing a good looking, not so mechanical drawing. Recognizing what looks good in hand drawings and finding a way to achieve that in CAD works. People often thing that it is the clean lines that give it stiffness. Look at good hand drawn work. The lines are usually very crisp and straight.

[rye]

Dynascapes has a tutorial. What CAD program are you using?

I have been hand drawing for many years. I have been trying to use dynascapes since April. The first few times it took many hours just to create a base map. To meet deadlines, I then would switch back to hand drawings. This week, I finally produced a dynascapes drawing that i liked well enough to present to a client.

I think it is one of those thing where it just takes time to get comfortable.

I hope to add colored pencil rendering to add a hand made look!

[sdinenno]

Another way to improve CAD plans is to use image editing software like Photoshop. There's an open source (free) image editor that will do just about anything that Photoshop will do. It's called The Gimp and you can download the Windows version here. There's also a Mac version.

The Gimp