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Zones as a Site Plan

Often, Zones effectively encode your site plan.

You can paint your terrain with groundtype materials, using Zone, Zone Brush and Fill. If you paint your terrain such that each groundtype – concrete, gravel, grass, tarmac, etcetera – is represented in the terrain plot faces, then you have encoded your siteplan's groundtypes into your terrain itself.

Now, often it is more convenient to control the groundtype siteplan in 2D. This is where Clone Zone comes in.

Clone Zone lets you extract the terrain materials – in Landshape called Zones – into a flat 2D group.

You can then enter the flat 2D group and edit your groundtype siteplan in pure 2D. You can then project your new siteplan, or only the siteplan changes you made, down to the terrain.

Remember, to get accurate zone borders, you may need to first Embed their edges.

Extract Zone Subareas

You can also extract inner subareas from your Zone clone.

To do so, first create a Zone clone. Then, Draw a separate Mask. Ensure that your mask in plan covers only a part of only the inside of your Zone clone.

Select your Zone clone group, and also select your mask group, both at the same time.

Now, run Clone Nonterrain Surface. This should extract a new group from your your zone clone surface.

You can then manually edit the faces in the new group.

This way of working can be useful when you wish to isolate areas where you intend impose zone changes, and then zone them back again to the terrain.