In this session, we discussed using Landscape Areas, including a discussion of the Object Info palette settings, as well as how to make a texture for it, change its text, and have it show up on a worksheet.

Topics Covered:

• 00:12    Opening a file with a site model and some landscaping, we started by covering the settings for the Landscape Area tag in the Object Info palette. We decided that it made sense to make the Tag Class the same as the class for plant tags because we typically would want to turn them all on or off at the same time. Next, we looked at the opacity. We decided to link opacity to class, which meant that we needed to create a new class. The challenge was that the pen opacity couldn’t be adjusted separately from the opacity of the Landscape Area. We wanted the area to be at about 40% opacity, but the text to be at 100% opacity. Someone was having a problem getting the plants in their Landscape Area to show up in 3D. In the Landscape Area Settings, they had left the 2D Only option selected in the 3D Display drop-down menu—we tried each of the options to see their effect. For some projects where you’re using a lot of 3D plants, it could be easier to use a texture bed that you can quickly move around, rather than having your computer slow to a crawl while Vectorworks recalculates all of the 3D objects each time you move the Landscape Area.
• 17:50    Next, we quickly reviewed how to make a texture. You need an image that looks straight down at the plants—we just searched online for “ground cover.” You could also make a texture for mulch or grass. We opened our downloaded image in Adobe Photoshop so that we could crop it and mirror the image across itself and above, giving us a tile that could be textured seamlessly across a surface. Next, we edited our texture in Vectorworks. We had to make the texture’s size 20m so that the ground cover would be visible when applied across our large surface. After you edit the texture, the site model has to be updated so that the changes will show.
• 33:39    We went through the steps for creating a new text style and controlling it through the Text Style options in the class settings. It didn’t respond how we thought it would, so we did some experimentation to see how we could control the text of all the plants together. We succeeded with that, but couldn’t find out how to control the Landscape Area text through its class. The Eyedropper tool can also be used to change the text of objects, or you can drag and drop fonts onto an object from the Resource Manager. However, the easiest way is to use the Select Similar tool—we covered the steps for how to do this. Sometimes you want to select by class, by an object, by class and object, or by a symbol—a real timesaver is to save these common selection settings so that you can choose them from the Settings drop-down menu on the toolbar.
• 42:24    To end the session, we discussed how to use the Landscape Area-Mass Planting or Plant List-Basic worksheets, which are preformatted reports in Vectorworks. We added different Landscape Areas and plants so that we could see what the worksheets were reporting and how they were doing it. If you just need plant quantities, it might be easier to use a simpler worksheet—we ended up just creating one from scratch. We reviewed how to choose the criteria and functions you need when you’re creating your own worksheet. Next, we reviewed how to format the columns and cells. Don’t forget that once you’ve made a worksheet that you like, you can save it in your library and have it when you need it again!

Landscape June 2018 am
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