Why Landshape?

Landshape wants to smash the barrier of entry to professional digital landscape design.

Anyone should be able to design beautiful landscapes!

Rising to An Old Challenge

Accurate digital 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. By complicated settings that force the user to think like a very old computer, they immediately kill inspiration and creativity.

The Inaccurate
Expressive, yet wildly-inaccurate game engines. By overloaded interfaces and focusing on what looks cool, they are disconnected from the requirements of the real world.

The Awkward
The makeshift juggling of various disjoint plugins. By grafting together partly incompatible one-trick ponys, these homestitched solutions lack reliability, performance and a unified vision.

Until now.

Frustrated by this challenge, and fired by their deep love for landscapes, Holygon decided to invent a solution.

Introducing Landshape – 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 built-in limitation is seldom a problem. It aligns well with the way humans have wanted to design objects intended 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 core editing tools were originally designed to deal with.

To overcome this challenge, and make terrain modeling 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 modeling. Especially editing terrain.

Landshape aims to retain Sketchup's approachability, user-friendliness, and expressive power. Without bloating your user experience with intrusive popups, arcane parameters, and clunky panels.

Building on Top of Sketchup

Note that Landshape is an extension of Sketchup, and not a replacement. It adds capabilities on top of Sketchup.

Landshape affirms Sketchup's premise, while transcending its capabilities. It opens the domain of terrain modeling to Sketchup users.

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 your favourite Sketchup ways to tag, to style, to set up scenes, to export images, to integrate with Layout, to share models 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.

Landshape terrain is not magic. It is ultimately just Sketchup geometry - edges and faces in groups.

🪄 But magic may happen when you start chaining Holygon commands into new workflows.