Holistic City Software has released CityCAD 1.8. This includes various improvements including a new sun-study tool and a 'tree spray' tool for quickly enhancing visualizations with trees. This will be the final release before CityCAD 2.0, due later this autumn. 

Sun Study Tool

A new toolbar gives you instant access to the location, date and time controls, making it easy to quickly test overshadowing at different times of the day.

A new 'Sun Study' tool will show a short animation of the path of the sun during any chosen day.

Tree Spray Tool

The new Tree Spray tool allows you to quickly add a large number of randomly-spaced trees to your model - helping to illustrate parks and forests in and around your city model.

• Specify the number of trees and area spread
• Place several identical trees, or introduce subtle variations in size and colour
• Specify whether you want the trees evenly spaced, or whether you want them naturally clustered into groups of two or more.

City Item Defaults

You can now enter city defaults for each DXF City Item in the City Preferences. For example, you can add:

• Land Use data (eg. 1 residential unit to a DXF model of a detached house.)
• Complex Land Use data (eg. 20 residential units, and 4000sqm of retail floor space to a DXF model of a mixed-use building, or even several buildings.)
• Energy/Resource Use data to a DXF model of an electrical substation or CHP plant.
  

Other Minor Changes

We have fixed a few obscure bugs that have come to light since the last release, and have introduced a couple of minor new features. These include:

• New Boundary Route button on the CityCAD toolbar - this is a shortcut which will select the Route Tool and change the default route type to 'Boundary route', making it quicker to switch to drawing boundary routes.
• Export  - when exporting data to XLS format, some more technical information is exported (eg. element IDs, more information about blocks, nodes and routes, and more detail about cost/value items.) This is a stepping stone on the way to more detailed import/export in Version 2.0.
• We have simplified the layout of the Movement tab to make it clearer and easier to use.