Plans and visualisation

ELITECAD provides a large range of line types, fonts, hatches, textures and colours to design high-quality graphics for your projects. For realising your individual ideas appropriate editors and libraries are available.

A clear and logical user interface supports you by defining colours, surface structures, material properties and much more. Settings can be checked before they are assigned using graphical previews. Due to the consistent parametric in ELITECAD all project changes are refreshed automatically in the views.

ELITECAD offers a library specific for architecture, including more than 5.000 parts in 2D and 3D. In the clear structured folder structure, you can find the desired components either according to name or graphic and allocate it to your draft by drag and drop.

A pen in ELITECAD can be changed individually by any colour, thickness and form, such as wavy lines, crossed - dotted - dashed and similar.

Colours

Optionally available are the NCS colour definitions or the RAL colour palette. Colour gradients can be configured cylindrical and linear.

The material management delivers an extensive selection of construction-specific materials. These include inter alia stone, masonry, wood, glass, metal and plants.
In just a few steps you can supplement the material management individually with custom materials. Using drag and drop, you can assign materials to your objects directly. All properties and effects, which are important for rendering, can be set here too.

Hatches

In addition to an extensive range of hatches for material definitions, it is possible to define free hatches in an editor. The simultaneous depiction of colours, colour gradients and lines offers an optimal and individual design process.

You can choose from TrueType and vector fonts for a professional labelling of plans and documents. Because of numerous parameters, inter alia text colour, background colour, alignment, angle and tabs, the fonts are optimally useable.

You can name and save value settings so they are available to be used again later. Auto-texts enable the usage of system and project information, such as date, user, drawing name, drawing content, scale, etc., whereby for example layout templates and header can be labelled automatically.

With the clear functionality of the integrated pixel editor changes can be implemented easily. This supports you in creating individual plan graphics during the CAD planning. Numerous pixel-based graphic formats such as JPEG, TIFF, GIF and BMP can be read and written directly.

The usage of OpenGL technology derives the advantage for the user having a cast shadow, which forms and adapts automatically and simultaneously during the work on the model.
The depiction with colours, textures and cast shadows helps you to edit 3D design models dynamically and enables a realistic representation long time before the actual render process starts. The required resources are provided by the graphics card, which guarantees an optimal performance in image composition.

The camera can easily be positioned in several views at the same time. You can specify the view position, focal point, viewing/target height and opening angle by dragging the handles or by entering numerical values.

Five different light source types, ambient light, sunlight, parallel light, point light and spot, are selectable in any number and combination and support the optimal illumination of the design model. Like the camera, light sources can be easily positioned in several views at the same time and set intuitively.

An animation tool is available for simulating the progression of the shadow over a specified period of time. This enables you to simulate the illumination of rooms as well as the shadow cast of buildings and if you wish, present it in fullscreen mode.

In order to depict a realistic shadow cast, the sunlight can be positioned individually according to the geographic position, date and time. As a result you get important quality information about the shadow gradient during a single day towards a whole year.

Due to the application of further visualisations like bump mapping, texture filter, reflections, specular or bluescreen, ELITECAD generates high-quality, realistic images with very short definition and calculation time. Another big benefit is the automatic assumption of model changes through the parametric of components.

Due to a well-balanced light distribution, effective images can be achieved. As a preview to the actual render process, the calculation of the light distribution on the design model therefore runs based on the radiosity procedure. The design model receives information about how the light should behave on the design model in subsequent rendering. Realistic, high-quality images can be rendered due to the light distribution in the radiosity procedure.

Raytracing

Raytracing steers how light from the sun and other light sources behave in the design model. Raytracing calculates whether light should be reflected by certain materials and to what extent rooms should be illuminated. Depending on the definition, materials can also appear as light sources themselves.