IQcad — The Complete Guide: CAD for Civil Engineering, Surveying and Tunnelling
IQcad is a CAD program built around the work of surveyors and civil engineers: besides AutoCAD-style drafting tools it handles terrain, point clouds and alignments. Development is fast and new builds appear frequently.
IQcad
IQSoft
2D CAD for civil and tunnel work: TIN surfaces, point clouds and alignments. Free to use; licence terms not published.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- TIN surfaces — a terrain model from survey points and breaklines.
- Point clouds — loading and processing large scans.
- Alignment design — straights, arcs and transition curves.
- Tunnelling — comparing a tunnel scan with the design and reporting deviations.
- Formats — DXF, LandXML, Shapefile and GeoJSON, plus online map backgrounds.
Licence notice
You can download and use the program free of charge, without registration. However, the developer has not published an explicit licence, and the site presents it as free to evaluate — so the terms may change in the future. For study and testing there is no problem; before using it on a commercial project, check the current terms on the official site and make sure your files are saved in open formats.
Related tools
For point cloud work — CloudCompare. For spatial analysis and mapping — QGIS. For road design and earthworks — Lima VVA.
CloudCompare
CloudCompare Project
Point cloud and laser scan processing — registration, cleaning, as-built comparison and measurement.
Get it from the vendor
QGIS
QGIS.org
Open-source GIS for spatial analysis, layer work and map production.
Get it from the vendorLima VVA
Lima VVA (open-source project)
Road design and earthwork quantities for small and medium projects — alignment, cross-sections and volumes.
Get it from the vendorSurveyTools (incl. Alignment Solver)
SurveyTools (open-source project)
Surveying toolkit: network adjustment, road and rail alignment solving, coordinate transforms and levelling.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
IQcad brings together much of what a surveyor or civil engineer needs in one tool. It is worth trying — and worth keeping an eye on the licence terms before you build paid work on it.