CYCAS is a piece of architectural software for drafting and design in 2 + 3 dimensions.

In addition to typical CAD functions, CYCAS offers special elements and techniques for architectural design. Therefore, you can easily design and draft your ideas.

Developing professional 2D presentation of your design is worked out as fast as and as effective as illustrating your design 3 dimensional. CYCAS enables intuitive and uncomplicated handling of 2D and 3D elements.

The input of architectural elements such as of walls, openings, and e.g. of dimension chains is intuitive and therefore, it is easy to develop the concepts of a design. On top of that 3D elements and 3D units can be worked in for achieving professional 3D presentations.

In various perspective views you may create line graphics or hidden line graphics.

CYCAS exports its 3D data in various formats in order to pass this data on to software for creating computer based graphics. Therefore, you can quickly arrange a high quality presentation of your design.

CYCAS is being developed for all those people who want to design, represent and build architecture.

Get started with the Tutorial that gives you a step by step guidance of the input procedures of CYCAS. The Tutorial 3D gives you instruction on how to build up a 3D model and how to arrange a scene in order to render a visualization of it.

After that, a description of the graphical user interface and the working environment of CYCAS follows.

The chapters about the basics explain the principles of working with CYCAS. In-depth an explanation of the process of entering points is given. Basic information on the control elements such as dialog boxes and the CYCAS layers technique follows.

Once you have read the chapters about the basics, we recommend to proceed with the reference part which describes all functions of CYCAS in detail. The line-related functions are explained exceptionally, for the other function lists are structured alike and follow the same steps for input and operation.

Explanation of how to proceed the input of 3D elements and hints to specialties of CYCAS working in 3D is offered in chapter 5.

The entire CYCAS archive for Linux consists of the program itself, the license agreement, this manual, the symbol library, the example projects, and ReadMe-files. These ReadMe-files contain information on recent changes and provide information on installing the program.

In order to install CYCAS on your system, please follow the instructions provided by the "README" file contained in this archive. The supplied installation program is used to install CYCAS on your computer.  

At this place, we would like to explain the structure of the user specific data. First and foremost, these are the example files, the symbol library, and the settings that are part of this archive. While working with CYCAS, your projects and settings will be saved in your home directory.

• ~/.cycas3/
  this directory contains the following sub directories and preferences:
• cycas.gtkrc
  this file holds the name of the font used for CYCAS' user interface.
• cycas.version
  this file holds the version number of the CYCAS installed.
• tmp/
  contains temporary data.

• ~/CYCAS3/
  contains the sub directories as follows:
• sym/
  contains the symbols library.
• dia/
  this directory contains all the settings saved, concerning the dialog boxes of the drawing elements:
• dim/
• door/
• light/
• mat/
• opening/
• pattern/
• room/
• text/
• wall/
• window/
• draw/
  contains the drawings.
• prefs/
  contains the "default.prefs"
• tex/
  contains the textures.
• ttf/
  contains the imported TrueType fonts.

The entire CYCAS archive for Windows consists of the program itself, the license agreement, this manual, the symbol library, the example projects, and ReadMe-files. These ReadMe-files contain information on recent changes and provide information on installing the program.

The supplied installation program is used to install CYCAS on your computer.  

At this place, we would like to explain the structure of the user specific data. First and foremost, these are the example files, the symbol library, and the settings that are part of this archive.

• C:\Programs\CYCAS3\dat\
  this directory contains the following sub directories and preferences:
• sym/
  contains the symbols library.
• dia/
  this directory contains all the settings saved, concerning the dialog boxes of the drawing elements:
• dim/
• door/
• light/
• mat/
• opening/
• pattern/
• room/
• text/
• wall/
• window/
• draw/
  contains the drawings.
• prefs/
  contains the "default.prefs"
• tmp/
  contains temporary data.
• tex/
  contains the textures.