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What Is Draw Fence?

Draw Fence is a tool that lets you control terrain edge Fencing by pointing-and-clicking on your terrain. You can Fence and Unfence, in batch or single edges.

But What Is a Fence?

A Fence is a fundamental concept in Landshape. A Fence is a property of an edge in your terrain. You can conceive of Fences as a kind of power-edge. Your Fences can persist even if you Embed across them, or remesh the terrain around it.

To learn more about what a Fence is, and why it is useful, see commands Fence and Unfence.

To Fence or Not to Fence

The Draw Fence Tool allows you both to add Fences and to remove Fences.

You may Fence your terrain plot, based on one single terrain material. This controls Fencing around or within all Zones of this material, in your plot. To do this, hover the interior of a terrain material Zone. Watch the cursor label closely, and click.

You may Fence your terrain plot, based on two adjacent terrain materials. This controls Fencing between all Zones where these two materials meet, in the Landshape plot that you are clicking. To do this, hover the border between two different terrain materials. Watch the cursor label closely, and click.

If you no longer need Fences, your can turn them off at any time. You can turn off individual edges, or around a zone, or where two zones meet, or for your entire terrain. This called unfencing.

To Unfence correspondingly, hold Shift, and click.

For full local control, you may also Fence individual terrain edges. Click an individual terrain edge to toggle Fencing on and off.

Inspect Terrain Topology

When hovering the cursor over terrain, Draw Fence highlights your local terrain mesh in a kind of spotlight. This allows you to understand where the individual terrain faces are.

To adjust the size of the spotlight, hold Ctrl and drag your mouse.

Combine with Fence and Unfence

Draw Fence is a useful tool for fencing your entire model. Draw Fence's batch editing is mainly based on preexisting terrain Zones.

But what if you need a fencing that is independent of Zones? Maybe you need a more differentiated fencing. For instance, you wish to Fence a particular edge pattern within one and the same Zone.

To accurately fence terrain edges based on preselected edges, use commands Fence and Unfence.

Fencing a Zoned Model

In Landshape, a Zone is a contiguous terrain material. Often, a mature terrain model contains different Zones, one or more per groundtype represented. For instance, you may have a road material, a lawn materials, a gravel material, and so on. When your terrain model contains many different Zones, delimited by embedded edges, you can use the following approach.

In this case, redoing the fencing in you entire model can often be faster than trying to micromanage local fences.

A good way to do this is to start your Draw Fence session with simply wiping out all Fence data from your model. Then, you can use the Draw Fence tool to add fences only where needed. To erase all model fences, start Draw Fence, then hit key F9. For details, read the statusbar instructions.

Or, if what you want is to remove fences locally, you can do the opposite. You first Fence all Zone Bounds, and then, you use the Draw Fence tool to selectively Unfence. To fence Zonebounds, start Draw Fence, then hit key F8. For details, read the statusbar instructions.

Again, note that the approach above presupposes that you have first achieved a terrain model with meaningful zones.

Read Statusbar for Details

• When Draw Fence is active, Sketchup's statusbar will show the current state and options. Read the statusbar carefully.
• To explore the tool, open a new sandbox model. Plot-quake a random terrain. Add some Zones. Then try Draw Fence on it. Don't be afraid to play around!

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🌱 ...this Learn section is still incomplete. Expect more content in a future Landshape update. Keep Landshape updated and check back soon.