Landscape Special Interest Group March (am) 2017

In this session we looked at landscape areas, pricing landscape areas, creating our plants, and how to create existing plants (particular focusing on the textures).

Topics Covered:

• 00:17    we started by looking at a file that already had plants and it had a worksheet with a calculation already and it. We deleted all the plants so that we could start from fresh and look at landscape areas. Landscape areas are important in Vectorworks because they allow you to create vast areas of landscaping extremely quickly. After we cleaned out all the existing plants we then looked at using the Landscape Area tool to create new areas of planting. The first step is to open up the preferences for the landscape area and fill in the required information. At this part of the session we did not add actual plants to the landscape area, we just use the general area. One of my favourite tracks with the landscape area is the ability to add a general unit cost to the landscape area so that Vectorworks will count up the area and show the unit price so that we can do a formula that will multiply the area times the price, returning the cost of that area.
• 09:39   in this example I also cheated and I use landscape areas to create areas of paving. Remember the purpose of this is to create a very quick budget, not a detailed plan showing all of the hardscape. We might also want to count other objects such as a pizza oven. In this example I used a very quick and dirty technique to create a 1 m² area of landscape, and assigned the price for the pizza oven to it. Again, this is a very quick way of creating a budget (but not very detailed way of creating the drawings).
• 17:15   now that we have our budget price, we can remove some of our landscape areas and we can draw polygons to represent the more accurate types of objects. We started with a hardscape areas. We have drawn more accurate polygons and assigned the correct graphics to the hardscape objects.
• 19:45    next we looked at areas of landscape area where we wanted to assign specific plants to those areas. The landscape area allows you to add plants where you are controlling specific spacings, percentages, and distributions. This makes the landscape area perfect for creating large areas of planting (which would be slow if use the plant object). You might want to use a combination of plant objects and landscape areas to achieve the look you want, which is something we did at this part of the session. When you add plants to your landscape area you can choose whether or not the plants are visible in 3D. Landscape areas that are on a site model will automatically make the plants follow the site model. If the site model are sloped Vectorworks will increase the number of plants in that area based on the slope of the site model. We also looked at the textures that are controlling the plant image props.
• 42:20    one of the users wanted to look at creating plant image props that were partly see-through. The plant image props use a combination of photograph and transparency mask. The transparency mask has to be adjusted in a very subtle and careful way in order to make the plant appear see-through. We spent a lot of time looking at different options for controlling the transparency or perhaps using a VB Visual plant and changing the texture of that, or deleting the leaves from that visual plant and creating a subdivision surface for the extent of the tree.

Landscape March 2017 am
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