Why Landshape?
Landshape wants to smash the barrier of entry to professional digital landscape design.
Anyone should be able to create beautiful landscapes!
Rising to An Old Challenge
Accurate 3D terrain modeling has always been hard, awkward and slow.
Existing solutions have left users underwhelmed for decades.
Terrain modellers have been forced between:
The Hard. Precise, yet barely-usable heavy civil engineering toolsuites, that kill all inspiration.
The Awkward. Expressive, yet wildly-inaccurate game engines, disconnected from real-world requirements.
The Slow. Home-stiched workflows juggling disjoint plugins, lacking unified vision and trust.
Until now. Frustrated by this challenge, and fired by their deep love for landscapes, Holygon decided to invent a solution.
Introducing A New Solution
Holygon Landshape is a new, playful approach that solves this old and complex problem.
Landshape aims to achieve this by way of three user experience goals:
Easy — As intuitive as Sketchup itself. Landshape lets you focus on expressing your design intent. Not on micromanaging software in between.
Accurate — Landshape offers precision when you need it. With full control of feature sharpness and transitions. Without forcing needless accuracy. Landshape lets you be expressive everywhere, accurate where needed.
Fast — Landshape invites you to explore rapid realtime workflows. On up to millions of terrain faces.
Combine the three for a landshaping process that is at the same time professional and playful.
– Embrace playfulness!
A Landscape Designer's Toolset
Sketchup itself is ideal for working with blocky, simple geometry. Tools like Select or Pushpull are great for editing hard surfaces with mainly perpendicular orientations. In practice, this limitation is seldom a problem. It aligns well with the way humans have wanted to design objects for construction and assembly since millenia.
Terrain, however, has quite different properties from such constructibles. Terrain is frequently doubly curved, organic, or irregular. It often requires a dense mesh for representation.
This family of surface properties sits in the opposite corner of what Sketchup's edit tools were originally designed to deal with.
To overcome this challenge, and make terrain feel Sketchuppy, Holygon had to invent new a new toolset, to create, edit and survey terrain. This is toolset is Landshape.
Sketchup is Thinking in 3D
Sketchup, when used properly, lets you design almost without thinking. There is nothing between you and the model. It replaces pen and paper, scissors and glue. Sketchup is thinking in 3D.
This is different from most other 3D modeling programs out there. This is also what makes Sketchup great.
Following Sketchup's Spirit
Holygon wants to capture this spirit. Landshape takes its cue from the genius user experience that is Sketchup, and carefully applies it to terrain editing.
Landshape aims to retain Sketchup's approachability, user-friendliness, and expressive power. Without bloating the user experience with clunky panels and intrusive popups.
Building on Top of Sketchup
Note that Landshape is an extension of Sketchup, not a replacement. It adds capabilities on top of Sketchup. Landshape affirms Sketchup's premise, while transcending its capabilities.
One big part of Landshape is the way it enables and encourages you to interact with and infer to standard Sketchup geometry, like buildings, ramps, and surfaces. Landshape's most powerful commands, Pickers, use standard Sketchup geometry to drive terrain results.
Another big part of Landshape is that you may continue using and your favourite Sketchup ways to tag, style, set up scenes, export images, integrate with Layout, share files via e.g. Trimble Connect, use third-party extensions. In short, you are invited to combine Landshape with all of your other favourite ways of working in Sketchup.
And Landshape terrain itself is ultimately just Sketchup geometry - edges and faces in groups. The terrain is not magic. 🪄 But magic may start happening when you combine Holygon tools into powerful workflows.