I am a landscape designer/architect. Currently I do my planting plans in SketchUp Layout and my method is tedious and not time effective. Does anyone have a great process or suggestions for a good workflow? Thanks.
That’s not much for us to go on - perhaps you could elaborate on your workflow and why you think it is tedious and not time effective…?
Agreed w/ @PaulMcAlenan . Please share a bit more about your process so we can better help identify specific solutions for you.
I’ll start by asking some questions:
- Do you use CAD at all or only SU and LayOut?
- Do you show your planting designs in 3D w/ SketchUp or only in 2D?
- What kind of LayOut packages/projects are you working on? ie residential construction documents? etc…
- Do you have any project examples that you can share in addition to describing your process?
That was a little vague 
Sorry - . I currently only use SketchUp. I do create 3D models but they are separate of my plan that I use for the dimensioning and planting plan. Here’s an example of a plan. I bring the pictures of the plants in individually and label, I have the table of plant data. It is very time consuming. I want the client to have all the information but need to automate it. Even labeling the plants. I am the antithesis of organized and efficient​:joy:
Sample Planting Plan.pdf (1.3 MB)
A Sketchup or Layout file could be more useful than a PDF, if you can share one.
Into LayOut you mean? Do you use Scrapbooks? When you say images, are you referring to the plant symbols themselves? They look like CAD blocks to me. What format are they in (ie PNG, EPS, DWG, etc)? Can you provide at least some screenshots of your SketchUp model and LayOut file?
Here’s a link to the actual SketchUp File. Thanks for your help!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ntoozwsTShzTa5OZxpG4ANoJr0bVRy4F/view?usp=sharing
The table can be prepared in Excel if thats easier for you - then it can be “referenced” into LayOut - you’ll still possibly have to do a bit of formatting correction in Layout though.
With a bit of effort around reporting and potentially some Extensions, you could even get some of your SketchUp surfaces to automatically populate the Excel table with their Surface Areas (that would be worthwhile if you do a lot of tables showing surface areas/plant density calcs. )
Many people will actually use the SketchUp 3d model to generae the planting plan. Each plant (ior fence, or anything) can have a 2d (symbol or hatch) and a 3d version, and the 3d version is simply turned off when exporting the Plan View (scene) into LO. If using Tags then you can use LO to set up differnt edge colours and thicknesses as well.
This workflow means that you only need to prepare one design; a 2d/3d hybrid, rather than changing one design then updating the other to match. It’s nice to be able to design the project fully in 3d, and simply use 2D to prepare the plan outputs.
Personally I would prepare the plan itself in SketcHup not Layout but a simple plan like your example could be done in LO using scrapbooks. Dimension lables , etc, can also be saved a sa Scrapbook item - so you would want to create a customised scrapbook. You should also save all your Hatch patterns within your LO template so you can eyedrop them easily.
I dont know of any easy fix to do labelling of properties…I wish there was one. LO’s labelling will select the Entity Name which could be helpful if you do the plan in SketchUp and then name each plant as a component with its shortened name.
2d and 3d version sof the same model:
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Thank you for all of this information. I am going to take some time and try and set things up this way.
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Hi Tanya, did you ever find a way to do this? I’m a landscape designer too and trying to figure if Layout is capable of the planting plans I want to make, or if I’m better concentrating on Vectorworks?