GUEST ARTICLE

As a Landscape design engineer you have to combine the ability of art & science, these tow features must be presented in a beautiful way which fulfill both the understanding of concrete technical information & keeping the esthetic aspects.

So, how can any software provide these tow things like SketchUp?

The easy way to draw, the time saving procedure, every fine detailed presentation and finally the impressive eye catching production - all can be attained easily by the SketchUp.

For now I want to tell something about the final phase of the designing process that is the visualization.

Always we try to present our designs in a way that is easy to understand for the homeowners, and I think the best way for this, if I was in the homeowner position, is to show the all designed space in a video display as if you are watching a TV or cinema shot display.

The abrupt view changes can make it hard for viewers to understand the drawings, but using the animation feature for scenes lets you animate the transition between two scenes, so after creating the required scenes you can go to FILE→EXPORT→ANIMATION. Then you will get Export Animation dialog box…

Be patient until SketchUp processes your scenes into an amazing animated AVI extension file video display, and enjoy the great movie shot created by SketchUp to show your clients how would the situation  be after finishing the last touches. The effect on your clients will be great.

I think the incoming stage for visualization for the landscape designers will basically relay on this sophisticated way which provided by SketchUp.

My younger brother is a Java developer and told me something special about SketchUp, when he saw the huge abilities of SketchUp he get astonished by its relatively small size on the hard disc of the computer, and told me that any other soft ware may exceed 4 GB at least to provide such abilities and features.

Also the amazing plug-ins story which really have shocked me so much, these plug-ins have transformed SketchUp into an elastic drawing tool that ay fit any area of discipline.

The most plug-in I personally use in my business as a landscape designer is that the right click option (drop at intersection) this drop tool plug-in is useful when you want to drop many components at once onto a surface that is not completely flat. Each unit of a component falls exactly on its point on the surface disregarding the elevations or the depressions instead of dealing with the components one by one…..!

I think there is only one thing, SketchUp hasn’t provided yet, that is to handle your model by your own hands via the computer monitor and sculpt your ideas on it.