Despite being a self-professed non-geek, landscape architect
Daniel Tal nonetheless just finished an excellent technical presentation this morning on "SketchUp in Landscape Architecture" at 3D Base Camp, the SketchUp Users Conference in Boulder, Colorado. From clever hacks to lay pre-designed roads and bridges onto a digital landscape, to the use of a
Ruby script that automates the planting of trees on an uneven landscape, Tal demonstrated as he spoke.
Tal prefers to work with TIN files in an exploded state, as opposed to bringing them into SketchUp as a component. He finds this method more advantageous for design work, and showed several instances of manipulating the TIN (digital terrain model) directly to achieve his landscape design goals.
Tal imported TIN files from AutoCAD during the demonstration, and has used Autodesk’s Land Development Desktop for importing TIN files to SketchUp. He recently discovered that
SimuTerra works equally well for importing digital terrain models into SketchUp, and is sometimes faster.
After a break,
Stewart Brand will give the conference keynote presentation. I've been a big fan of his work over the years, and am looking forward to his talk.