Reply To: CAD – colored/rendered trees in plan and elevation and other blocks for graphics

Generally plants are drawn, in plan or perspective, at 3/4 mature size. Designs are not sold to the client depicting 2″ caliper trees with gator bags and guy-wires. We show what it will look like… Visualization is still, and always will be the designers job. Sure, it would be cool to see the whole site “grow” before your eyes in a 3D illustration but it’s not necessary to sell a project and doesn’t contribute to the design process. When you place the 3 Pin Oak symbols, 10′ O.C., in your plan with a 30′ canopy, the resulting image should be sufficient to alert you to a potential issue… either you need to specify a very rigorous pruning regiment (and make sure there’s the budget for it) or you need to give them more room… but you could probably figure all of that out in your head, or with a quick sketch… Complicated 3D plants, especially those that grow “intelligently”, are a waste for landscape architecture. You don’t need to have every variety of plant, with every leaf detailed in 3D. If anything, 3D plants should be simplified and emphasize form rather than detail. That is, unless you enjoy waiting for drawing to regenerate or render… They really don’t even need to be 3D, they just need to automatically “face” the viewer. For LIM, a 2D tree symbol could have a 3D tree form associated with it (conical, weeping, columnar, vase, globe, etc), so that you could design in 2D then orbit into 3D to see what it looks like… in case you can’t see it in your head or want to generate a quick perspective…