Landscape software
Rick Wilmath
regularly so I would like to get something works well. I will be using it
exclusively for design work so the parts of it devoted to problem solving or
education are not important. Thanks in advance.
KrisHur
isn't one on the market yet.
I have Sierra Landscape Designer, it stinks. It erases plants and text from
your designs, I contacted their customer service dept on several occasions
and they never got back to me. Someone here told me that it might be my ram-
I upped it from 125 to 256 and it
still happens, albeit less frequently. I've heard others here say they've
had trouble with it too.
The plants are "cartoons" and do not resemble the real thing. There are only
7 colors to choose from and they are as artificial as it gets, (white,
bright yellow, orange, red, shocking pink, purple, dark navy blue).
It doesn't appear to be made to work on garden areas or perennial beds--more
like overall landscape designs. For example, when setting the background
grid to 1'x1' a single daffodil is 3' sq. ft., once you shrink it down to
real size it's too small to tell what it is, unless you really zoom in; then
one isn't able to view the entire garden area. After all that, when you go
into 3D mode it's an overgrown mess; it doesn't appear to realize you've
shrunk things down to size. When it's set to 5'x5' it's better, but you
still have to zoom in.
Good things:
You can add info on plants not listed in the database but cannot upload a
photo.
You can set everything on "layers", for example I have 4 layers marked
spring, early summer, late summer and fall and can view the design by
season. I find that helpful so that I can see if I'm overloading w/spring or
summer plants, or if I have, for example, all the spring bloomers grouped
together leaving bare spots in the garden in any particular season.
There is a cost report that gives you to get a general idea of the cost of
the design you've built and an order form to order plants from White Flower
Farm.
When looking for plants, it allows you to search the database (flower,
groundcover, vine, shrub, bulb or tree) by zone, sun, water, soil, perennial
or annual, size, flowering season, color of bloom, color of foliage, fall
coloring of foliage, evergreen or deciduous.
Overall, it's OK for generally planning a bed, if you can overlook the
serious color flaws and can remember what is where so that you can replace
it once the program starts erasing things. Paper and colored pencils, IMHO,
work much better.
"Rick Wilmath" <wil...@efn.org> wrote in message
news:9dekvf$je7$1...@news.efn.org...
tko...@nwark.com
http://www.smartdraw.com. It is a windows drawing program with tons
of templates, including quite a set for landscape design.
You can also paste in pictures, something I find very helpful (images
of the plant in flower). I am just trying in out, mostly for work,
but so far quite impressed with the capability, speed, and
functionality. The first project I am working on it my trial version
is my own landscape (2 acres of mostly weeds at present since I am
concentrating on "bones" like trees and shrubs.) Practically no
learning curve either.
I also have LandDesigner, which I have used in the past, but have
repeatedly uninstalled to gain space over the years. It is a nice
prgram though somewhat slow. I am finding Smartdraw to have some ease
of use advantages, and it's good for work too (timelines, flow, org
charts, etc.). A lot of the advanced features are not that helpful to
me. I mostly need to have drawings I can use to keep track of how my
plan is drifting. One problem with LandDesigner is that I forget how
to use it between designing sessions, since I am not a pro using it
daily.
I find that i need several plans, even when using LandDesigner. I
need an overall, and then more detailed ones for parts of the place,
beds, etc.
I am also going to try using digital pictures of my house, back view,
etc, and pasting those in, to see if I can get a normal vertical-type
view of various ideas.
On Fri, 11 May 2001 09:34:12 -0400, "KrisHur" <kris...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
T Jaszewski
>Check out SmartDraw.
nice program. I cannot find a way to calculate area in the trial
version. Can this be done? In my old Mac days Macdraft had this
feature and it was very helpful in doing more accurate estimates.
Thanx,
A good garden may have some weeds.
Thomas Fuller