The Plant Placement command allows you to select a plant from a database of around 2,500 individual plant listings. The plants are separated into categories to make locating the correct plant quick and easy. You may create your own plant categories and add more plants to the database as necessary. Once you have selected a plant for placement, the symbol representing the plant will appear on the design screen and you may immediately move it to the desired location. Simply click to set the plant on the design and set a second point to rotate the symbol in any direction. Another plant of the same type will immediately appear on the mouse cursor allowing you to continue placing additional symbols as required.
You can color plant symbols with different gradient blends to create beautiful designs. You can also add a rendered effect to make symbols appear to be hand colored or painted with water colors.
With the combination of Symbol Exteriors and Symbol Interiors, you can create a large number of symbols from just a few different drawings. For example, suppose you had two Symbol Exteriors consisting of a circle and a square. You have two Symbol Interiors consisting of a cross and a horizontal line. You now have six different symbol combinations - a plain circle, a circle with a cross inside, a circle with a horizontal line inside, a square, a square with a cross inside, and a square with a horizontal line inside. With the capability to also add a solid fill, gradient blend or hatched fill and the ability to add a rendered background texture, you can easily see where you can have a large number of possible symbol combinations from just a few basic drawings.
The Area/Volume Calcs command will calculate an area and volume of fill material and store the information for the material list or estimate/proposal. Areas may be filled with a solid fill, gradient blend, or hatching pattern that is assigned to the fill material. There is no limit to the number of areas you may have per design. The Fill Material command will allow you to create a database of fill material to be used with the Area/Volume Calcs command. You can group the fill materials into categories for easy selection. For example, you may create a category called Brick Pavers or Bedding Mix. In the Brick Pavers category you might add a fill material for brick pavers and one or more fill materials for the sand base. The Bedding Mix category may include a fill material for top soil and another for a bark mulch. You can assign hatching patterns to the fill material to make them easy to locate on the drawing screen.
The Quantity Label command allows you to place the description and number of plant symbols on the drawing screen. You can adjust the leader to include multiple arrow types or no arrow at all. In addition you can adjust the font style and size and color of the labels. You can outline multiple different plant symbols on the design and quickly label all with just a few clicks of the mouse.
The Plant Shadows command will allow you to place shadows on the selected plant symbols. You may select the desired position for the shadows to appear in relation to the symbols, as well as the specified offset or distance the shadows will appear from the symbols. You can set the opacity of the shadows and place shadows on more than one symbol at a time.
A Tied Assembly is the combination of supplies that are associated with the installation of a single piece of equipment or plant material. Tied assemblies can be built for fixture and transformer installations. Each assembly may be assigned to one or more pieces of equipment in the database. All of the product in an assembly is counted in the Material List/Estimate command.