Rhinolands Feature Request: **Plant Mixes**

I’ve been in touch with Rhinolands development team about this previously but haven’t received any assurance that this enhanced functionality is in the pipeline.

Having found the functionality I need is still missing in the latest version of Rhinolands, I’m writing this post in case there is any lack of clarity in terms of the functionality I’m asking for.

Rhinolands enables plants and trees to be inserted in a number of different ways:

“Insert plants individually, in rows, or in groups using the Forest tool. Specify shrubs or ground
covers and the number per unit. Combine various species in rows or forests.”

These are all useful in different circumstances.

But there is a key functionality missing.

What I Need

I need to be able to define planting mixes which can be applied to areas in a design.

By “define planting mixes” I mean the following:

  • Selecting a number of plant species from the plant database
  • Defining the proportion of each of these species in the planting mix by percentage

Different mixes will then be applied to different planting areas in the design.

Other landscape softwares / plugins have this functionality, but at the moment the closest I can get to my desired workflow in Rhinolands is running the forest tool a series of times for the same planting area with a manual calculation of numbers/densities for each species. This is a laborious workaround, especially where I want to define multiple different plant mixes for multiple different planting areas.

In terms of how this functionality would be implemented, perhaps there should be a new planting insertion tool called ‘Planting Mix’ which could be an enhanced version of the existing Forest tool, enabling a multi-species mix to be defined as described above whilst retaining the per-species control the Forest tool enables in terms of appearance, distribution/grouping etc.

It’s essential that planting mixes, once defined, can be saved and reloaded between projects.

Thanks for the detailed request, this kind of feedback is very useful. I encourage everybody to share their wish list for version 7, as we are now planning the development and selecting the new features to be included.

Regarding the functionality you need, I guess you have already tried to combine species in a forest.

In current version it doesn’t allow to select the proportion (by percentage) of each species, and the existing distribution methods are quite limited. We plan to improve them significantly. I think your request can be implemented as a new distribution method for the current “Combine elements” option, but we can also consider the Planting Mix tool you mentioned to insert individual elements. However, the advantage of implementing it in the Forest object is that user can use the Redistribute option at any time to get a different distribution from the same parameter values (using new random numbers).

About saving the planting mixes, you would like to save them into a 3dm template? As a separated file? What info would you like to save? Just the species list and the percentages?

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Thanks Albert, good to know enhanced functionality is in the pipeline.

Yes I know about the option to combine species in a forest but as you say there’s currently no option to control the proportion of each species by percentage, so this doesn’t currently enable the workflow I’m requesting.

You probably know better than I do how best to implement my request in terms of RhinoLand’s existing functionality. I think enhancing the ‘Combine Elements’ function within the Forest object to enable control of the percentages of different species in the mix will work, but ‘Forest’ is not a logical or intuitive name for what is often likely to be a shrub mix or a herbaceous planting mix. So although it involves duplication of functionality, I would prefer to see a new Planting Mix tool alongside an enhanced Forest tool (which will allow for more nuanced control of tree mixes). Not just semantic pedantry - I think it’s important that Rhinolands makes intuitive sense to new users. From my perspective this planting mix functionality is an important addition to RhinoLands’ functionality and I think it would be better not to have it ‘hidden’ in the Forest tool.

In terms of saving planting mixes, species list and percentages is the essential info. If possible it would also be useful to save other per-species user settings like mininmum distance, rotation, spacing, scatter, but this could wait for a future update if it will hold up delivery of the essential functionality.

I’m not sure what will work best re. file format for saving planting mixes. The most basic option (if viable?) would be a .txt file. I need to do some research to find out if there are existing protocols/ formats it might be useful to tie in with - I’ll come back to you if I discover anything useful.

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Thanks a lot. Planting mix and planting pattern are requested by some other users too. We consider it important to implement it somehow.

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