CAD
General Features
Tessera offers advanced CAD capabilities, thus reducing or even eliminating the need for any external programs. In particular, combining the platform's general design features with its road planning functions is a very potent way to expand the list of things that can be accomplished. The user can easily come up with alternative ways to complete a task, without the need to switch between multiple working environments.
Design capabilities
The program includes an extensive array of design objects such as polylines, circles, ellipses, clothoid parabolas, TrueType fonts and images. It supports line types (.lin) as well as hatches (.pat). All objects can be separated into layers and can acquire their properties from them. Typical CAD functions such as copy/paste, rotation, scaling, snap to any object or to the grid are also supported.
CAD, Road Design and Construction
The coexistence of an advanced design platform with the Road Planning environment has not been pursued just for the sake of completeness. Neither is the development model used a linear road layout to adjustment via CAD drawing tools' progression. The existence of a drawing environment serves to assist road planning, enriching it with capabilities beyond the ones typically expected from a road design and construction program. A range of features are common to both road planning and drawing. The user can use the Snap facility with a point, line, vertex, cross section, circle or sideline irrespective of the object's type. A road vertex can be moved by using a line, a circle or a sideline as a guide. Tessera makes it easy to quickly hide or display any objects, select a specific one according to user-defined priority levels, choose an object among many, or even copy/convert a road axis to a polyline (as well as the inverse operation).
Vectra technology
In order to satisfy the sophisticated rendering requirements of a CAD platform such as Tessera, Anadelta Software has created a custom vector graphics engine with advanced capabilities. Vectra takes full advantage of a machine's underlying processing power by using CPU features such as the MMX, SSE and SSE2 instruction sets as well as employing all available CPU cores to display a frame, resulting in very fast rendering speeds as well as high quality renders (subpixel accuracy, antialiasing, alpha blending). As a CAD oriented engine, it supports 2D and 3D transformations, composite line types and polygon patterns, fast high quality bitmap rendering and TrueType fonts.