SketchUp UK Blog

Your imagination is packed with stunning landscape design ideas. You’re keen to express them using the best, easiest and most fun CAD software. If you’re considering using Sketchup for landscape design, you’re in for a treat. Sketchup landscape design software is quite simply one of the best tools available for creating beautiful landscapes that look real, expressed as superbly clear 2D drawings and in hyper-realistic 3D. No wonder Sketchup landscape design is such a popular choice with the world’s professional landscape designers. Read on to find out how the software’s landscape 3D warehouse supports the very best in exterior design, whatever your project.

Using Sketchup for Landscape Design

Is Sketchup good for landscape design? Yes, it’s an excellent tool for landscape design, helping designers bring their ideas to impressive life thanks to 2D drawings that are easy and enjoyable to achieve, and supporting creativity perfectly. Sketchup is widely used by landscape and garden design professionals across the globe. It comes with exceptional 3D modelling capabilities to help convince your clients to approve your design and inspire them to sign on the dotted line.

There’s a businesslike, logical and brilliantly streamlined workflow that takes you smoothly from the concept drawing stage to the site plan – including planting plans – with ease. And you can easily cater for practical essentials like site surveys and construction detailing.

 

The Sketchup 3D Warehouse is one of the most popular added benefits of the software. It is crammed with all sorts of valuable elements for landscape design, from trees to flower pots, garden benches to outdoor lighting and the plants themselves, plus a series of seriously handy extensions or plugins.

Sketchup Landscape Design - 3D Warehouse

The landscape design 3d warehouse in Sketchup is free to use. It provides an enormous choice of ready-made 3D models for you to use in your designs, saving a great deal of time and therefore saving money. The collection includes all the landscape design essentials you can imagine, with all manner of outdoor furniture in every imaginable style and material, plus garden plants of every type, including evergreen and deciduous, flowering plants, annuals and perennials.

 

Landscape plants are always useful in your line of work, and Sketchup 3d warehouse landscape collection contains an inspiring variety of greenery, all available for instant download and very easy to use. Terrains are another great resource, again ready for download and include grass of every kind and length, scatter rocks, gravel and aggregates, steps, hedges, even remarkably realistic forest floors.

 

If you need water, it’s catered for as well. Sketchup pro landscape design provides 3D ponds and rivers, streams and lakes, water textures and water features sets, water effects and more, all yours with a few clicks of a mouse. Plus lawns and lawn chairs, bricks and stones, patios and garden umbrellas, garden gates and garden walls, even realistic sleeping cats to add personality, life and fun to your landscape designs.

Sketchup Landscape Design - Extensions

Sketchup is loved for its many cool Extensions. So what do Sketchup Extensions do? They’re much the same as plugins, designed to support even better landscape design by providing more functionality, short cuts, and specific ways to design certain elements. All this boosts your landscape design potential as well as saving time, money, and hassle. Here are a few of the most popular Sketchup extensions for landscape designers.

The Artisan Organic Toolset is a powerful collection of organic modelling tools that supports excellence in creating terrain, rocks, tree trunks, plants, furniture, sculptures, fabric and more. It offers great subdivision, sculpting, and soft selection.

The Simplify Contours Tool reduces the number of contour segments, importing contour line drawings you’ve made in other CAD apps. Sketchup often converts polyspline contours into polylines with multiple straight line segments. The tool cuts them down, making the file smaller and therefore easier to work with.

Sketch3D allows you to make super-easy transitions from 2D to 3D, perfect for landscape designers and a top short cut. Instant Road creates roads, pathways and waterways automatically on terrain.

MODELUR for Urban Design helps you create and test different urban design alternatives fast, with real-time calculation of urban parameters like the number of flowerbeds, parking spaces and so on. Its interactive 3D Zoning warns you when your design doesn’t meet zoning regulations, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It boosts productivity, helps you make great decisions, and allows you to iterate and evaluate different designs quickly and effectively.

This is just a small number of examples. Every Sketchup extension is designed to help you do more, do it faster, and do it better, and there are hundreds to choose from.

Sketchup Features for Landscape Designers

Now you know how to enhance your Sketchup landscape model life using the top class resources provided by the software. With Sketchup, landscape architecture design is a dream. As well as a warehouse jammed with handy 3D items there’s a wealth of powerful training and learning resources and tutorials on every imaginable subject plus numerous useful YouTube videos to study.

 

Would you like to give Sketchup a test-drive and discover the magic for yourself? We’re delighted to offer you a free 7 day trial of Sketchup Pro, making Sketchup landscape design software free to use for a limited time. You might also enjoy exploring our v-ray for Sketchup free trial and see for yourself exactly how amazing it’s hyper-real 3D rendering is. Happy exploring!

 

About Elmtec

Elmtec have been the UK distribution partner for SketchUp since 2010, and service a network of UK and Irish resellers. We have over 22 years’ experience within the digital design community.

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