In article ,
J Kolenovsky wrote:
Must be true. I go to a Southern Garden landscape design school at Texas
A & M twice to keep my designers certificate current and they never talk
or say much about this subject even when quized at length. And the ones
that do use one, use expensive ones with other methodology thrown in to
boot. As one said one time, "To answer your question, there are none".


But, you know, there are lots of tools that will serve specific
functions. There are a bunch of generic CAD/Layout tools that
can be used to draw and play with placement, such as Visio,
Corel, etc. They won't give you a 3D view, but they can be
fun for doing what-ifs at the icon level.

In addition, there are a number of 3D packages that are generic which
can be used to generate 3D scenes -- for instance Maya, SoftImage,
etc. They are generic, and provide much greater functionality than
is usually needed, but they can do a great job.

I have not used Maya to plan a garden, but I did use it to recreate
a forest and wetland for a forensic animation. I generated a 3D topography
by downloading DEM files from USGS for the area, texture-mapped colorized
satellite imagery onto the 3D surface, and then populated the forest
with 3D trees, created hardscape, running water, etc. The result
compared very favorably with scene photographs, and allowed realistic
animation of clouds, fog, waving of grass and trees in the wind, etc.
The same could be done for landscape planning. While Maya and similar
products are not cheap, many, if not most people can manage significant
discounts through educational institutions, etc.


billo