CHANGING THE GAME
Landscape Design Technology Can Help Seal the Deal
By Jill Odom
WHEN YOU’RE DESIGNING A LANDSCAPE FOR YOUR CLIENT, IT MAY BE easy for you to picture what you have in mind for them. However, your client may have a hard time understanding your vision if you are only using 2D plans.
Utilizing different design software and
tools can help bring your project design to life so your clients can visualize and approve your concept. “2D certainly has its uses in the design process, especially early on, but it’s when we get into 3D that clients start to really respond and get excited,” says Graham Pellettieri, president of Pellettieri Associates, based in Warner, New Hampshire. “There’s no doubt, animated video clips where we fly through their space in virtual reality, or hand them an iPad on their property with the design plans loaded on it and placed in augmented reality so they can walk through the landscape in
a mixed-reality setting, are what they respond to the most. These visual tools help the design team and our clients align on a vision together, and signifi- cantly help to get the clients under- standing the plan to a much deeper level than they would with just a 2D version on paper.”
UTILIZING TECHNOLOGY EFFECTIVELY No matter what technologies you implement, it is always a good practice to start with a basic 2D concept that the client is on board with before moving into 3D modeling, animations or virtual reality. Kurt Kraisinger, president and owner
of LORAX Design Group, based in Liberty, Missouri, says he prefers to do hand-drawn presentations early on as the design isn’t quite set in stone. Once the client approves the design, they will
move into more elaborate renderings, but even in SketchUp they won’t put finishes on materials yet. “It’s more about focusing on good
principles of design early on when we’re talking about proportion and scale and rhythm and balance,” Kraisinger says. “Those are the type of things that really make a project unique and also make it work.”
He says they don’t want to just create
a pretty picture but focus on the funda- mentals of design and consider aspects like the flow of the space, the grading and the drainage. By the time they create a 3D video, the changes are minute because the big moves were discussed in the beginning and approved along the way. This prevents them from having to redo a design multiple times. Scott Bishop, founding principal of Bishop Land Design, based in Quincy, Massachusetts, agrees with this practice. They prefer to have a rough model to convey the client’s wants without spending too much time on a design that might change.
3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATIONS Once the design has moved to a later phase, the visualization possibilities depend on the scope, scale and wants of the client. Creating 3D stills, animations, and videos have all become a common expectation for clients. In 2009, David Fletcher, founding
principal of Fletcher Studio, based in San Francisco, California, decided to take this to the next level and started building his designs in video game engines. He says he was inspired after playing video games with environments that were mind-blowingly detailed and beautiful and wanted to know why couldn’t they use them for their projects. His firm has used video game engines
like Infinity Engine, Studio 4D and Unreal Engine in the past. He says the benefits of using a game engine are the file sizes
28 The Edge //July/August 2023
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