Befriending Landshape's Interface
Loop view, whose icon is seen above, lets you continuously orbit around your model. You may keep designing while loop is running.
Landshape is designed to be user-friendly.
A good place to start befriending Landshape is the user interface, also known as the "UI".
While at first glance it may seem a bit daunting, there is method to the madness. Take some time to learn a few basic patterns. You will find your way.
Landshape Toolbars Overview
A good place to start is the toolbars. On MacOS, these are called "tool palettes".
Most users start exploring Landshape by clicking toolbar icons. Let's take a look at the toolbars, each in turn.
Start Toolbar
The Start toolbar is for you to get started using Landshape. The Start toolbar will automatically show at your first install. The Start toolbar has a few basic commands. If you're new to Landshape, try these commands to explore basic Landshaping.
Note that the Start toolbar's buttons are already present in other toolbars. Once you start using the other, more dedicated toolbars, you should hide the Start toolbar.
Pick Toolbar
The Pick toolbar contains Pickers. Pick commands are central for accurate landshaping. Pickers let you select reusable input groups in order to control your terrain. You communicate with your terrain via separate control geometry, often hovering in the void. Pickers can mesh, shape, and style your terrain. Read more about Pick.
Prep Toolbar
The Prep toolbar contains Preppers. No, these commands do not anticipate the apocalypse. Instead, they prepare your control geometry for use elsewhere in Landshape or Sketchup.
In a nutshell, Prep is like Pick, but where the purpose of pickers is edit the terrain, the purpose of preppers is to edit nonterrain. Prep often edits the selection itself, and sometimes a copy of it. Prep can be useful in its own right. Often, Prep is an preprocess for Pick.
Draw Toolbar
The Draw toolbar contains Drawers. In Landshape, Draw is just a short name for classic point-and-click tools. Here, you don't select anything. Instead, you interact with Landshape terrain or other geometry, simply by dragging and clicking on screen. This process is similar to drawing.
Some Draw tools, like Fill, let you directly edit the terrain. Other Draw tools, like Draw, let you draw path groups, on terrain or off terrain. You may then use your drawn path groups as input for a Pick tool like e.g. Sweep.
View Toolbar
The View toolbar contains features that control the visibility and styling of terrain and related items, like Contours. When you create new terrain, Landshape applies the current View state to the new plot. An especially useful command is Rebuild View. It will automatically align your view items, such as Contours, with the current terrain. Loop View, seen above, is a View command.
Brush Toolbar
The Brush toolbar contains all brushes. These are useful for quick, expressive terrain modelling. There are two different kind of brushes. Classic brushes and Area brushes. Read more about brushes..
Survey Toolbar
The Survey toolbar contains features that help you analyze and measure your terrain.
🤔 Please note that currently, there are very few Survey commands. Holygon aims to add new Survey commands in the future, including cut-and-fill.
Dimmed Icons
If a particular toolbar icon is dimmed, this indicates that you do not have an active subscription that covers this command.
Landshape Free covers many commands, but is limited to the basics. To access more powerful commands, order Landshape Light. To access Landshape's full range of commands, including the most powerful commands, order Landshape Pro.
— Wish to access more commands? Upgrade via Holygon Shop.
Found a Landshape Issue? Report It.
🤔 Please expect Beta versions to have some rough spots.
Have you encountered an issue with Landshape? Report the issue, or open a Support ticket. Holygon will help you.