As in other built environment specialisms, there is an ongoing push towards BIM in Landscape Architecture. There are many reasons why this is a good idea. Unfortunately at this point landscape architects aren’t spoiled for choice in terms of friendly and efficient software to enable BIM workflows -
I haven’t used it myself but I understand Vectorworks Landmark is a good, fully featured BIM-ready tool for Landscape Architects.
Revit is widely seen as the default software for BIM, but it’s tragically ill-equipped for landscape. Modelling landscape projects in Revit is a painfully inefficient process involving all kinds of hacky workarounds. Also it’s £2000+/year
I would love Lands Design/ Rhinolands to be a viable option. It’s developed some interesting functionality, but still lacks several essential tools, specifically spot coordinate annotations and a fully featured planting design and scheduling plugin.
So what is a landscape architect to do?
Short of switching to Vectorworks Landmark I am exploring the following options -
I’m exploring options for integrating Rhino and Revit - Rhino for flexible and efficient modelling, Revit for documentation and BIM. Rhino Inside is one option to achieve this but I have limited experience with grasshopper (and other members of my team have none). A number of plugins have been developed to make Revit a somewhat less horrible tool for landscape. Environment for Revit stands out amongst these with its Rhino Assets functionality, as demonstrated in this recent webinar.
But the possibility of ditching Revit and just working in Rhino has real appeal. I just need to find/ develop a set of tools to enable this.
These tools would include -
A fully featured scheduling tool. Potentially this could be a development of Tabl_ | Food4Rhino or a user-friendly integration with Excel.
This scheduling tool needs to be able to link dynamically to a plant database in order to produce plant schedules from planting plans. Because local/regional climate, commercial availability and distinctions between native/non-native species are all important considerations in terms of the plant selection, the plant database needs to be user-editable and allow for integration with national/regional plant specification/database services. For me in the UK https://www.plantpartner.co.uk/ is an example of this kind of plant database.
I’m wondering if you’ve made a typo when you were comparing the prices of RhinoLands and Revit. RhinoLands is $800 USD? perpetual license. Out-of-the-box Revit is over $2,000 USD per year. Sure you can get plugins for Revit but that further adds to the cost. Did you mean to say that Vectorworks is too expensive relative to what it includes? Some talented people in this community are Vectorworks users. I hate the thing because I’ve had terrible experiences with Vectorworks in the field and when working with Vectorwork’s DWG exports (one reason I prefer Revit but those can be pretty bad too).
Have you tried the newest Rhinolands? You need Rhino 8. I do think it’s improved a lot since R7.
I’ve made something similar. Only catch is that it doesn’t automatically update when moved (partly because I needed to covert the text to freedom units, partly because I suck at programming and can’t do event/triggers in Rhino yet). A bit of a hack of a solution is to just have a sweep command run before you save or something that updates the marks if they move.
Hi @Keithscadservices thanks yes that was a typo, I’ve edited to correct.
Interesting to hear your experience with Vectorworks. At this point Vectorworks Landmark seems to be the best ‘out of the box’ software solution for landscape.
I would love Rhinolands to be a viable option for my practice but it’s still not quite there in terms of essential functionality, particularly on the planting plan/scheduling side of things.
I engaged with Asuni about this last Summer but haven’t received assurance that they are developing this functionality, or that they understand what & why more advanced functionality is needed for planting plans/schedules.
Thank you - you’ve helped me clarify where to direct my energies. Revit is horrible to use for landscape and has a horrible price tag, particularly with a plugin subscription on top. I’ll fire up Rhinolands in R9 and get back in touch with Asuni. If the tools I need aren’t in the pipeline I’ll see what I can do on a DIY front.
Reach out to me, lets make your scheduling tool according to your specification.
If it doesnt exist lets create it together. You already got my email, ready to help any time.
Thomas Chapman has been making some nice tools for landscape. A free plugin thats has some good spot elevations and slopes etc. He is also working on an open database for plants and it seems to be looking at scheduling. Its in Alpha i think but could be interesting to get in touch with him as well. PhytoFiles landarchtools.com
I expect Asuni will be receptive of comments on improving their tools. I have a good dialogue about visualarq with them.
Many thanks for this link @Martin_Johnson - just the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to find!
And yes - I’ll fire up the latest version of Lands Design in R8 and get in touch with Asuni with some clear constructive feedback. I finally finished a sizeable thing in Revit this afternoon so hopefully I’ll have a bit more time for software experimentation.
Blocks update dynamically. This is great! Makes these annotations easy to move/copy without having to run some kind of update command and removes any concern about the possibility of creating innaccurate annotations.
Blocks can be customised to one’s hearts content. Need a custom symbol? No problem!
The limitations I can’t figure out at this point - help would be appreciated:
Is there a way to combine these blocks with the functionality of a leader? When annotating drawings there’s usually a process of moving annotations around to avoid overlapping annotations and enhance drawing clarity. Leaders help with this process by enabling flexibility.
Ok in fact I’ve just tested a leader in R8 and I see the functionality of leaders in Rhino appears in need of an upgrade. I think it’s going to be best to create another post about this.
Is there a way to change the format of the annotation? Specifically, spot coordinates are often expressed as Northing and Easting values, looking something like this
I can’t find a way to (i) switch the order of the XY values to be YX (i.e. Northing then Easting); (ii) add a paragraph break between the XY values and (iii) add “N” and “E” as prefixes
There may be something else but I’ve forgotten what it was just now.
It was the update. I noticed you were on 8.10 with that file in the deleted post.
Well… yes, but that will be a static leader with dynamic text. You’d need 4 or 8 different blocks for leaders in different direction, or a few zillion for leaders in different directions and different lengths… That’s on the list as RH-34030 GrasshopperBlocks: AKA ParametricBlocks AKA DynamicBlocks AKA SmartBlocks
Generally, it’s possible to format text fields with Python methods.
For this specific one, I’d use multiple coordinates text fields with only X or Y and in the required order and required prefix.
-wim
I work with Landscape Architects, and Urban Designers, a lot. Yes Rhino needs more development to help users who operate in this sector. @hughecchapman some good plugins you’ve discovered already , another to explore maybe TerrainMesh, very simple plugin, not parametric though. And agreed, the use of a Table Of Contents is massively missing inside of native Rhino. Has been requested many many times over the years.
, another to explore maybe