What is LISCAD?

Welcome to the LISCAD Surveying and Engineering Environment (SEE).

LISCAD was the first professional Surveying and Engineering application to be developed for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Today, it is a full 32 bit Windows application, built on many years of development and continuous improvement, to be the outstanding purpose built solution for Surveyors and Engineers.

Ease of use has been a critical factor in the design of the system. Like all Windows applications, the system is menu based and mouse driven. Once a user has become familiar with one Windows application, the use of other Windows applications becomes effortless.

Setup is simple and straightforward, automatically sensing your Windows 32-bit operating system and installing all required drivers and system files.

The product supports multiple languages from a single installation, allowing selection from the available languages within the application.

Commands are logically and intuitively structured according to the following task tasks:

A detailed on line Help system includes step by step procedures making the product extremely easy to learn. The Help is always available and can be viewed while actually using the various commands in the system. The Windows environment also increases user convenience by enabling other Windows applications to be accessed without exiting the current application.

The system is totally graphical and user configurable, giving the user complete control over the configuration for unit types, projection, colours, attribute data, and feature display etc. As such, the system can be configured by each user to meet individual requirements all over the world.

Much time and effort has been spent on the development of the geographically indexed database used in the software. This has resulted in extremely fast speed of operation and the capacity to handle data sets of virtually unlimited size. The system will process any size data set that will fit onto your hard disk.

Viewing tools for pan, zoom, etc. are available making it fast and easy to view any part of the data set at the required scale, even while in the middle of an operation. In addition, virtually any menu command in the system can also be added to the user configurable dockable or floating toolbars, for immediate access from anywhere in the system.

Support for multiple windows allows the creation and use of unlimited views of the project in Plan, Long Section, Cross Section and 3D mode.

The user configurable tool bars provide for fast setting of object attributes and immediate access to all functionality; the user configurable status bar allows required status information to always be in view.

The system caters for full geodetic support for reduction, creation and display, utilising all the common projections in use throughout the world. Distances may be entered or displayed as grid, ellipsoid or ground values, and directions as plane, grid or azimuth values.

Field Transfer to and from all the popular data recorders and total stations is catered for with total flexibility in field coding, and support for a multitude of field operations, to speed up field work and automatically create required objects and constructions.

Least Squares Adjustment is fast and easy utilising a spreadsheet style editor. It allows automatic extraction of control measurements from your field data, as well as manual entry and editing. Observations may be constrained, and the rigorously computed results optionally saved or used to update the project co-ordinates.

There are hundreds of Computational commands for easy and flexible creation, editing, examining and display of objects and their attributes.

Digital Terrain Modelling is based on a unique method of rigorous triangulation, which has once and for all broken the model size barrier. Virtually any size data set can be modelled, and modelled faster than ever before.

Surface Comparison (Volumes) allows different models from any project to be compared, to automatically compute their intersections and common boundaries, volumes and areas of cut and fill, and generate a new height difference model.

Profiles allows creation, editing and multiple section viewing of long or cross-sections, including "tunnel type" sections. Any number of sections can be viewed in the same or different windows, allowing sectional comparison, as well as end area volumes with intelligent surface to surface interaction. A special section manager with Drag and Drop facility makes managing the sections and views simple and flexible, as you can change the sections in any view at any time. Extremely flexible user control of sectional output means that particular organisations' needs for flexible cartographic presentation of long and cross sections are easy to achieve.

Profile Design functionality provides the flexibility of creating template libraries of frequently used templates that can be used with different data sets. The Template Editor is a powerful tool that lets you create simple templates right through to the most sophisticated designs with powerful and intelligent decision options. Modifications to the design templates can be applied "on the fly" to accommodate changes for widening or superelevation. Designs can be applied to create cross sections, which can be edited if required, and then superimposed over the existing terrain to produce a design model.

Transformations allows the calculation and application of Conformal, Semi Affine, Affine, Unscaled and 3D transformations, as well as transformation between projections on the same ellipsoid. The applications for these transformations in mapping are numerous, but also in construction surveying, where the 3D transformation can be utilised, for example, to verify that an off site constructed component will fit in the required on site location.

3D allows for the viewing of the data set in 3D.  Points, lines and models can be viewed in either a perspective or orthogonal view.  The user can use a set of cameras to Walk, Fly, Orbit, Pan and Zoom the scene making it possible to see the data set from any angle.  Multiple models can be viewed simultaneously.  Models can be coloured or textured, displayed by colour elevation ranges or have Background Images draped over them.  Individual triangles can also be coloured or textured to artificially render a scene.

Complete and comprehensive CAD Output facilities for final plan production purposely designed for Surveying, Engineering and Mapping applications are also included. Sophisticated two-way data exchange with AutoCAD, MicroStation and a multitude of other systems guarantees effortless transfer of data between yourself, clients, colleagues and peers.

All of the above makes LISCAD SEE the ideal software tool for the Surveying and Engineering industries.