Hi all,
Lands Design 5.7 is finally available for download!
This update is mainly focused on improving performance. Here are the main new features it includes:
- Display speed
- Faster 2D drawing code
- Reduced amount of geometry in the viewport
- Optimized 2D plant crown files
- Way lighter realistic plants
- New billboard mode combining 3D (in front views) and Billboard (in top views)
- File open/save
- Reduced 3dm file size
- Faster convert from previous Lands Design versions
- Faster and more reliable regeneration of missing texture files
- Automatic replacement of deprecated realistic files
- Plant generation
- Faster species insert from database into document
- Faster plant 3D display switch
- Faster document season change
- Faster generation of very detailed plants for the render
- Customizable level of detail
- Up to 4 levels in the viewport
- 2 quality options for the render: Good and Final
- Avoid hangs
- Improved materials management to avoid overheads due to a large number of them
- Progress bar on tasks taking more than a few seconds
- Realistic Plant Library
- 50+ new ArTree files
- 40+ ArPlantX files replaced by better versions in ArTree format
- Improved texture mapping in Walls, Paths and Stairs
- Export list dialog show now the icons, and can export icons for all kind of Lists
- Plant Database fields translated to Japanese
We did many improvements in the code and implemented lots of strategies to speed up those parts of the code where the program was spending most of the time. You should benefit from better frame rates, better Rhino responsiveness and, above all, no exaggerated delays or hangs. The changes should also lead to less RAM consumption.
The worst performance issue we faced —and users were suffering— was caused by the realistic plants in the viewport. These were supposed to be “lowpoly” versions of what you’ll get when you take a render, but in the reality Lands wasn’t achieving such a drastic face count reduction, resulting in some cases on hundreds of thousands of faces per plant. This could easily compromise the Rhino operation. As we were replacing old ArPlantX files by better ArTree versions these cases increased and became usual.
To overcome it, we have developed a completely new way to reduce these plants, attaining rates of 99% or even more, while conserving the general look and bushiness. User can control the level of detail from the Species properties. Depending on the ArTree file, there are up to 4 levels, being the last one the same you got in Lands Design 5.6.
Some strategies to speed up the operation are based on caching hard to compute data in both RAM and disk. Thus, Lands Design becomes faster as it is used.
The amount of disk space used by this cache can be checked and cleared from the Lands Design options. You can expect it to consume 1-2 GB in a regular use.
In short, we hope this version will enhance your experience using the software. Let us know!
Lands Design development team
