The drawing

What you see

CAD shows only what you need to understand the layout:

• No textures. Every part takes a flat colour for what it is: platform, road with its middle line, wall, fence, hedge, water, quay.
• No grass, no small stuff, no patches. Those are gone.
• Trees become a shape. A cone for a conifer, a ball for a broadleaf, a crown on a bare trunk for a palm, a dome for a bush — each with the real height and width of the model standing there. That keeps the drawing readable and you still see where your wood is.
• Buildings turn mid grey.
• Nothing moves. No wind, no waves.

Shadow, though

The shadows stay on. A flat drawing without shadow cannot be read in three dimensions: you would not know whether a surface runs up or down. The light is different — much more ambient light and a weaker sun — so that the flat colours keep their colour.

Ink lines

The settings drawer has Ink lines. It draws a line around the outline of everything, the way a draughtsman does. In CAD it is on by default; it works in the realistic look too if you like it there.

The tables' dimensions

In CAD every side of every table longer than 150 millimetres is dimensioned, in grey, just outside the table. They appear by themselves and disappear again when you go back to realistic. They do not belong to your layout and are not saved with it.

Double-click such a dimension and you can type it in. The table is then stretched along that side until the measurement is right — a rectangle stays a rectangle. That is how you make a table of exactly 2400 by 600 without dragging.

Every look remembers its own settings

Choose CAD and TRAX turns the outlines, the labels and the grid on and the textures off. After that those switches are yours again, and TRAX remembers per look what you chose. Your layout is saved with the look that was on.

The moment you choose the CAD look a tab joins them: CAD. That is where the measuring tools are.

The four kinds

• Measure a length — click two points. You get the distance between them.
• Measure an angle — click a point, then the corner, then a point. You get the angle.
• Note a height — click a point. You get that point's height above the rail level.
• Place a text — click a point and type your text.

You click on anything that is there: on a table, on the ground, and on the track itself. So a height note on a rail says exactly what level that track lies at.

A click where your mouse moved more than a few pixels counts as a camera movement and not as a measurement. Esc cancels.

Adjusting a note

Click a note. The CAD tab jumps to it and you can change two things:

• the text. On a label that is the text itself; on a measurement it is a name put in front of the value, for instance Radius 500mm.
• the colour, from a row of eight.

or Delete takes it away.

How they are drawn

The lines are real fat ink lines of three pixels — an ordinary line in 3D is always one pixel thick, however you set it. The text stands on a plate that stays the same size on your screen however far you zoom in or out. At the scale of a table a text at a real size would simply vanish.

They belong to your layout

Notes are saved with your layout and are there again next time. They are visible only in the CAD look: it is the drawing they belong to, not the landscape.

A measurement may run across two tables — the dimensions are in world coordinates, not per table.