Placing Plants: Planting F/X for SketchUp Plugin
Updated on: April 21, 2026
Quick video
Power Tip: Land F/X SketchUp Plugin
After you've added plants to a project using our Planting F/X for SketchUp Plugin, you can begin placing them in your plan. For more information on Land F/X projects and how they work with SketchUp and CAD, see our documentation on:
Placing Plants
To begin placing plants, open the Plant Manager:
LandFX toolbar, Plant Manager button
Land-FX menu, Plant Manager option
The Plant Manager will open.
If you haven’t done so already, add your desired plants to your Planting F/X project.
To begin placing a plant in your SketchUp model, you can either:
- Double-click the plant, or ...
- Single-click the plant to select it, then click the Place button
Placing Trees and Shrubs
A preview of the plant’s associated SketchUp component will appear at your cursor location. Move your cursor to the desired location, then click once to place an instance of the plant. Repeat as desired.
At this point, you can stop placing plants in any of the following ways:
- Press the spacebar
- Right-click and then click Finish, or
- Press the ESC key
For a more organic appearance, Planting F/X automatically adds slight variation to the scale and rotation of each placed plant instance. To toggle manual rotation mode, press the Ctrl key (Windows) or Option key (Mac). In manual rotation mode, click once to commit the location, move the mouse cursor to adjust the rotation, then click once more to commit the rotation. Press the ESC key while rotating to cancel and select a different location.
Placing Groundcovers
If you're placing a groundcover, your cursor will change to an eyedropper and face icon, and the tool will wait for you to select one or more faces or groups in your model from which to create the groundcover. Double-click a face to add all connected faces to the selection set. Hold the Shift key to deselect a face or group.
When you're finished selecting objects, press the Enter or Return key to commit the selection and turn the selected objects into a Land F/X groundcover group. All faces within the resulting group will be painted with the groundcover's assigned SketchUp material (with the exception of faces within nested component instances, which are ignored).
You can stop placing the groundcover in any of the following ways:
- Press the spacebar.
- Right-click, then click Finish.
- Press the ESC key.
Related Videos
Troubleshooting
SketchUp: Basic troubleshooting (adding, placing, importing plants)
Issue: Objects are appearing in the incorrect locations or backward in your SketchUp model
Issue: You are unable to select a 3D symbol in SketchUp
Issue: Our Planting F/X Plugin for SketchUp freezes or becomes unresponsive
Issue: Clicking one of the Land F/X tool buttons in SketchUp does nothing