For students, studios, and small practices

Find your site.
Draw it. Take it with you.

Every parcel, building, wetland, flood zone and census figure for the towns we cover — in one place. Pick your site, choose what matters, and pull it out as a titled sheet, a layered CAD file, or a Rhino model you can build on.

Loading the towns we cover…

or No account needed to explore.
towns curated
4export formats
30+data layers

What comes out of it

Four things, done properly.

Not a general-purpose GIS. Four deliverables that match what a site analysis actually needs, each one already set up so you are not choosing a DPI before you have seen anything.

Site plan sheet

A titled, scaled PDF with north arrow, legend and source note. Set to a real drawing scale, not "fit to page".

PDF

Figure–ground

Footprints solid on white. The Nolli drawing, clean enough to drop straight onto a board without redrawing it.

PNG · SVG

CAD package

Layered DXF, organised by discipline — parcels, buildings, roads, contours — so it arrives in AutoCAD already sorted.

DXF

Rhino site model

Terrain and extruded massing as real geometry on named layers, in declared units. Model on top of it, don't rebuild it.

3DM

Where it comes from

Sourced, dated, and yours to cite.

Every layer carries its origin and the date it was pulled. Nothing here is modelled, weighted or scored — if a number appears on your screen, it was counted, and you can say where it came from in a review.

  • Parcels & assessingState and municipal open data
  • Buildings & streetsOverture + OpenStreetMap
  • Wetlands & floodUSFWS NWI · FEMA NFHL
  • DemographicsCensus ACS · LODES
  • TerrainUSGS 3DEP LiDAR
  • ZoningAdopted municipal ordinances
Layers stack in the order a drawing needs them — context underneath, constraints on top.

Students

Built by two people who just did this the hard way.

We graduated last spring. Every site model we ever built started with a week of hunting parcel data and stitching context together by hand — or paying per drawing for someone else's. Substrata is the tool we wanted. Student accounts are priced accordingly.

No card required to look around.

Create your account

One login for Substrata and every other Synthetic Schematics tool.

or

We send a one-time link instead of asking for a password — nothing to forget, nothing for us to store.