SketchUp and Online Landscape Design - Creating a 3D Landscape

By Global Assocaites SketchUp Team

Landscape architects utilize SketchUp on different kinds of projects. From residences to large-scale urban parks, SketchUp is an easy to use but powerful tool for exploring and presenting your ideas in 3D.

Landscape Architects use SketchUp to generate powerful presentations and life-like models of residential and commercial projects.

For residential design, this programme can be used in a couple of different ways. The drawing can be set in a perspective position easily. Guidelines tool warn you for correct or incorrect drawing. You can enter actual heights and lengths of objects, such as a house and put in the dimensions of the house. Then with the help of pull tool expand it to the correct height.

By adding window components to a house, you can actually position a person inside the house. Your view will be like as if you were inside looking out.

You can also create scenes. Scenes let you save a particular view. These scenes can also be exported into jpeg images. You can also create an animation which is a fly by or walk through of the entire design!

You can draw complete surfaces from scratch and add resolution. Sketchup’s 3D landscape design software offers you an intense creative outlet that not even paper and pencil can beat. The home landscape design software allows you to push and pull 2D shapes in order to create 3D models in just a few seconds.

You can also view different materials for landscape elements. For example, if you are drawing a patio, you can go to the Materials area and choose what you might like. There are many different materials and you can change them as you like to see the differences. Some choices are stone, pavers, brick and concrete.

Some of the components you can add to the 3D landscape design are people, cars, grills, pergolas, plants, any many, many more. These are available directly through the program or through something called Google Warehouse. They are all free.

There is a lot of flexibility with the components. You can resize or rescale them if you need to. You can also change colors of both components and materials. The software enables real-time shadow research for design with its SandBox tool. Its unique Push Pull tool can add illumination to the design/model. Shadows can also be included to automatically move as the intensity of light falling on the model varies. It also helps to visualize lighting ambiance, shades and plant types along with texture and terrain modeling.