WITH THE LATEST RELEASE OF LAND DESKTOP, Autodesk updates a mature product for land development design while maintaining compatibility with the latest release of AutoCAD. Long-time users looking for new discipline-specific features won’t find many. But because Autodesk Land Desktop is built on AutoCAD and Autodesk Map 3D, the AutoCAD 2006 features alone offer productivity gains to numerous disciplines, making this an enticing upgrade Dynamic blocks are one of the more intriguing new features in AutoCAD 2006. Land Desktop puts this new feature to work with its Block Editor (figure 1), allowing quick layout of repetitive items such as parking lot stalls and islands. Using Block Editor, you can build one stall and quickly replicate it, changing it on the fly as it’s inserted. Dynamic blocks are assigned parameters, such as linear and point properties, and actions, such as array behavior. The upshot: by inserting a dynamic block and dragging the cursor onscreen, you can graphically lay out a series of parking stalls in one fell swoop Land Desktop 2006 also includes a new set of CAD drawing standards for both Imperial and metric projects, helping simplify project setup and adherence to office standards. Prototype drawings are provided with standard layer definitions, point group definitions and other settings.

If you missed the 2005 release of Land Desktop, it improved such mainstay features as alignment tables, allowing more options and dynamic resizing when inserting tables into a drawing. It also introduced the Detail Component Manager, which creates and saves construction details such as curb and gutter, fire hydrants and storm drainage pipe for reuse in multiple projects. Somewhat like dynamic blocks, detail components are inserted with parameters such as pipe diameter, so you can select from numerous variations of one detail.

Buy Autodesk Land Desktop 2006 – 39$