Jeff Smith

As someone who spent years as a contractor before going back to school, i can tell you that often the person you deal with in the office, or the supervisor, isn’t always going to be on site when the plan implementation starts. The few LARs that I worked with back home, made it a point to make sure that all plans were easy to read/understand, or in…[Read more]

For a Landscape Architect to truy be successful as a designer, he has to be able to communicate on the level of the contractor. Not to say that he designs to the level of the contractor, (which we all know contractors are alot like water, they always take the path of least resistance…) I say that coming from alot of years of being a contractor…[Read more]

I thought it was about time to get this on here. Welcome and invite everyone you know!

I want to sharpen my irrigation skills and train one of my coworkers. Are there any free online tutorials with practice problems that we could download? Any help would be much appreciated.

Hi Doug,

Check out the California Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance, at http://www.owue.water.ca.gov/. It is in the process of final revision and is set to go into effect January 2010. It outlines the services and responsibilities of CIDs.

The CID process is pretty involved with classes and tests and can take awhile to get certified. If…[Read more]

Doug,
Yes there is merit. I run a design build firm that does some bid build as well. Some of the irrigation ‘designs’ that come out of some other offices that we bid on don’t follow simple irrigation principles and spec antiquated equipment.
The IA certification (CID) is a good one. I became certified a few years ago. I am always up to date with…[Read more]

Hey everyone. I’d like to get your opinion. Does anyone see any merit in becoming certified in irrigation design? The IA offers courses and testing in irrigation design that we as landscape architects would be eligible to take. While there is a great irrigation knowledge base at my office, I feel like so much has changed over the years that I need…[Read more]

Hello.. Thanks for the group creators. It is a really good one.

I am a landscape architect from Turkey, working as a research assistant and doing Ph.D. I need some help about the small scale lansproject plans. Our students are trying to find some project, plan samples to improve their design skills especially on planting. Is there any plans or…[Read more]

thanks a lot brian…i really appreciate it…

can someone comment my work?hehehe

ya shows that there is no one right way to do it! its alros really fun looking at other peoples stuff and trying to figure out what they did so i can apply it to my own

it is so interesting all the different styles we all have and yet they can all look so darn good….:-)

very nice work guys…..here are a couple sketches for you to look at….

this is my artwork for my final project..20 min prismacolor marker

this is hand rendered perspective with prismacolor. 20min

ok…now it’s my turn..

Shimi; Thanks for the advice. I’ll give you a mini-review of the Vectorworks and its capabilities once I get started with it. I’m also interested to find out about an add-on program called Doodle. It looks promising. I’ll let you know. Thanks again.

I still have not found an intuitive terrain modelling platform for us landscape architects.
Rhino can produce nice surfaces, which can be pulled and pushed to get the aethetics right, but its contours are inaccurate and, unlike Civil 3D, very static. Civil 3D on the other hand is very dynamic and great in live sections and contours, but falls…[Read more]

Thanks RFox. I’m going to download a trial copy of Rhino and play around with it. I did that a few months ago with AutoCAD Civil and found the new interface pretty intuitive. I still need something that’ll be a simple interface with a landscape design focus. Right now, I don’t need super high-quality rendering capabilities, but I would like to…[Read more]

Personally, I would recommend Rhino 4.0. It is an extremely easy to learn platform and combines 2D and 3D design quite well. Plus there are really good render engine plugins like Vray.

Rhino is also very good at importing and exporting a wide variety of different file types from Autocad to Digital Projects to Maya. I don’t know the exact pricing…[Read more]