CAD
STREAM is CAD software for terrain that sits right next to your CAD workflow. Bring DXF drawings onto the real terrain, draw and edit vectors that follow the surface, and send contours, cross-sections and volumes straight back out as clean DXF — no round-trips, no cloud.
CAD is where drawings and deliverables live; terrain is where the ground truth is. STREAM bridges the two: it opens DXF in true position over the DEM, and produces the CAD outputs a survey or civil project needs.
It's not a general drafting tool — it's the terrain side of a CAD workflow, focused on getting accurate vectors and drawings in and out.
Import DXF drawings onto the terrain and export vectors, contours and cross-sections back to DXF, keeping layers.
Draw points, lines and areas that drape on the DEM at true elevation, organized into layers with snapping.
Generate station-based cross-section drawings with a cubature (volume) table, exported as DXF.
Triangulate a TIN surface from break points, and generate editable contour vectors at any interval.
An imported DXF becomes STREAM points, lines and areas you can edit. Layers with many objects load read-only to stay fast; right-click the layer and choose Make Editable when you need to change it. Text, blocks and dimension records stay read-only.
Fill an area with a hatch — straight, diagonal, soil, rock, concrete or fill — at a spacing measured in ground units and at any angle. The hatch is written to DXF as HATCH with the same spacing, so it arrives in CAD the way it looked on the terrain.
Select objects and rotate, mirror or scale them by an angle and a factor you type. Array copies them in a line, with a step length and a copy count, or around the centre of the selection at equal spacing.
Draw a convex outer boundary around selected objects, or a concave boundary that follows their indentations — the footprint of a stockpile or a cluster of drill holes. The source objects are left untouched; if a concave outline would cross itself, STREAM falls back to the outer one.
Right-click a layer to zoom to it, show only that layer, lock it — still visible and snappable, but not selectable — recolor the objects that follow the layer color, or export just that layer to DXF. The right-click menu also moves objects and data (DEM, orthophoto, DXF, analysis maps) to another layer, and Ctrl+Z undoes the move.
Lines can be split, joined, filleted or chamfered at a corner, exploded into segments, divided or measured with points, closed into a ring, simplified or densified, and offset in parallel. Two or more selected areas can be merged, subtracted or intersected, and a line that crosses an area splits it; buffer and line-to-area conversion are on the right-click menu, and a single Ctrl+Z undoes an area operation.
Load the drawing; the layer structure comes with it so you can switch parts of it on and off.
Confirm the coordinate system. If the drawing sits off the terrain, fix the assignment or apply an offset rather than editing the source file.
Project the drawing onto the terrain so its geometry picks up elevations from the real ground instead of sitting flat.
Triangulate a TIN from the drawing's break points, or generate contours at the interval the drawing needs.
Send sections, contours and design geometry out as DXF, keeping the layers your CAD workflow expects.
Yes. STREAM imports DXF drawings onto the terrain and exports vectors, contours and cross-section drawings back to DXF, keeping the layer structure.
Yes. STREAM generates station-based cross-section drawings with a cubature table and exports them as DXF.
No — it's the terrain side of the workflow. It gets accurate vectors, contours and sections in and out of CAD via DXF.
Probably not. If you just want to view a drawing, a lightweight DXF viewer will open it faster. STREAM earns its place when the drawing has to sit on real ground: draped at true elevation over the DEM, checked against the coordinate system, and turned into contours, sections and volumes you can export back to CAD.
Yes. Points, lines and areas from the DXF become ordinary STREAM objects. Busy layers load read-only for speed and are made editable with a right-click on the layer; text, blocks and dimension records stay read-only.
Yes. An area's hatch is written to DXF as a HATCH entity with the same spacing in ground units, so it lines up with the geometry in CAD.
Yes. Array copies the selection in a straight line with the step length and number of copies you enter, or polar around the centre of the selection at equal spacing.
Yes. STREAM opens DXF drawings on Windows and places them on the terrain in the project's coordinate system, so you can view a DXF over a DEM and orthophoto, measure on it and use its lines as boundaries and alignments. It also writes DXF: contours, sections, designs and measured geometry.
Free beta for Windows x64. Works fully offline with GeoTIFF, LAS/LAZ and DXF.
Download STREAM free