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.