For landscape designers and visualizers, the right tools can make all the difference. Let’s take a closer look at how a powerful real-time rendering software can bring your landscape projects to life.
Real-time rendering for better, easier landscape design
As landscape designers/architects, we arrange the natural features in/between infrastures and communities, thus adding more liveability and functionalities to the space, and addressing a variety of problems for the people living in this area.
Thus, when modeling our designs, we often integrate real-time rendering to experiment with different plant species, materials, and lighting conditions.
-- D.R. LANDSCAPE
The real-time raytracing technology powering D5 Render can accurately present landscape projects in a realistic and immersive way.
Since D5 Render works with SketchUp, Rhino, Revit, 3ds Max, Archicad, Cinema 4D, and Blender, designers can make informed decisions about the placement of elements in their designs.
For some reason, Lumion plants tend to appear with a pale tine and have white edges in the scene, while in D5 it is much better with a natural look. With an optimized GI effect, vegetation assets also show an improved visual effect for shadow occlusion.
2. Efficient asset tools to save time placing vegetation
D5 Render not only has a library of over 2000 vegetation assets, but it also provides handy tools for us to speed up our workflow: brush, scatter, path. With these tools, you can easily place multiple assets wherever you like in the scene, fill a certain face with selected models, or curate a curved path on which trees and grass grow.
3. Great results without many adjustments
"For me, realistic plants take a long time to achieve in Lumion, and the rendered image could differ from that of preview. However, in D5, the realism is out-of-the-box. As soon as you place a tree model into the scene, you'll have a good-looking tree that doesn't need further adjustment. In the rendered images, there won't be much difference," said TENGTOU LANDSCAPE.
4. Rendering output done in minutes
When we were still using Lumion, we would leave the computer on all night to render, and see the results next morning, which makes further editing impossible before deadline. Now that we shifted to D5, rendering images and videos are so much faster that we are given more time to adjust and render again. The workflow just got a lot better.
How is D5 Render used for your landscape design work?
We deal with a large number of projects where we design and visualize the roads or parks. Curating the road in the park/community, we use the D5 path tool and D5 assets to easily plant trees along it, which saves a lot of time. Placing different types of trees to form a line is boring and time-consuming, but now in D5, I would first select the trees I want, and draw a route, then the work is done with just a few clicks.
The same set of vegetation assets won't work for projects located in different regions or even countries, and you also need to figure out what is specifically needed there.
Luckily, D5 offers more than we could possibly ask for: shrubs, broadleaf, palm trees, herb, vine, crops, grass, stones, fallen leaves. It also has a dedicated category of landscape assets including landscape ornament lamps and various exterior furniture for you to fill the outdoor space.
We keep an eye on each new release of D5 assets and make use of them in our scenes.
Tips for landscape designers/architects
Although it seems like a discipline that centers around plants, landscaping is actually all about people. We have to always bear in mind that we design for the good of the dwellers, so their needs should be addressed first.
We had a commissioned project from the local government to rebuild an area as a cycling path for the citizens, so we designed a few spots along the way for people to take a rest, and also a bike rental center. Now this cycling path has taken on a new look and become a popular destination in that area.
For this little playground in a community, we aim to make it children-friendly. Safety comes first, so there are rows of trees as a natural barrier to road traffic. We also curated a rubber running path for kids to exercise. To avoid strong sunlight, especially in summer, we chose Camphor trees to surround this area.