Mapping out beds - software
Susan H. Simko wrote:
What I'm looking to do is a layout of the yard with beds marked and then a detailed layout of each bed with markers indicating what's planted where. Any thoughts, ideas? I've had a number of house projects going on over the past few years and have tried two major "consumer" programs (Broderbund Home Architecht and Punch! Master Landscape suite). The HA was pretty useless for anything precise, I found - I finally got enough into it to lay out my kitchen remodel and visualize what I wanted, but wanted nothing to do with moving further into its landscape capabilities. This was version 3 I was using, and didn't like it. The Punch! on the other hand did work out very nicely - I happened to have a plat survey from when I bought the house, and the s/w had a feature to scan that in and use it to get a scale base for the entire lot. Quite handy, and in about an hour I had my lot line, the fence around the house and a simple exterior sketch of the house (good enough since I wanted to experiment with deck designs and tree locations). Our only garden project at that time was a rose bed with some sedums for low level interest and this was quickly sketched out and plants added - in the 2d plan it looked quite neat, with little circles and lines for the plants like what you see in gardening mags. However, I haven't looked to see if it can actually label each of the plants yet - maybe you could use those tools to do the layout, then import into photoshop to add the text and labels where you want them. Playing with the 3d-modelling was fun, but maybe not what you're looking for from your description of what you wanted to do. You can "grow" the plants over a couple years which seemed kinda hokey at first, but turned out to be helpful to me in visualizing stuff. Then I tried to add the land countours, heights, slopes, elevations. A *major* struggle. A friend bought the "Master Landscape Platinum Professional" version of the software and lent it to me for awhile - that version had a nice contouring tool which worked better than the less expensive version I had purchased - it had a slope tool which you could define starting and stopping points as well as the angle (the cheaper one let you define a "lot slope" as though the entire lot was completely evenly sloped like a piece of cake on it's side. Not very realistic!) Then you have "hole" and "berm" tools to raise and lower more specific shapes. I found that using the custom slope tool with MANY intersecting and opposing slopes I was actually able to "approximate" my lot pretty well - good enough to plan the decks visually, but not accurate enough to actually measure the number of steps needed to hit the ground - it's not meant to do that easily. If I get the chance and if there's any interest, I'll export the 2-d and 3-d models to .bmp and post them on a web page. -- Brent Harsh - KD4PBO Cary, NC |
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