Fill an Area With Plants: Planting F/X for SketchUp Plugin
With the Fill tool in our Planting F/X for SketchUp plugin, you can quickly fill an area (faces or surfaces) in your model with SketchUp component instances of plants from your project's plant palette.
Fill Tool Overview
You can activate the Fill tool from the Plant Manager in SketchUp.
Open the Plant Manager:
LandFX toolbar, Plant Manager button
Land-FX menu, Plant Manager option
First, select one or more faces in your model to fill.
Then, in the Plant Manager, click the Fill button.
The Fill tool will activate.
One or more faces must be selected before a Fill can be performed. The tool needs to know the boundaries within which to place plants! If you don’t yet have any faces in your model, you’ll first need to draw some, or use our Import Layers tool to import layers from another platform such as AutoCAD.
Selecting Plants for the Fill
The Select Plants for Fill dialog box will open when you activate the Fill tool.
Here, you'll see a list of all plants in your project's plant palette, separated by type (Trees, Shrubs, etc.). Each row in the list represents a plant.
Each plant's information is separated into four columns: Code, Botanical Name, Common Name, and Size. To sort the plant list by any of those four pieces of information, simply click the associated column header. To switch between ascending and descending sort order, click the same column header again.
To sort the list by whether a plant has already been placed in your model, use the In Model buttons above the list.
Select the plant(s) you want to use for the Fill operation.
To select multiple consecutive plants, hold the Shift key while clicking. To select multiple plants one by one, hold the Ctrl key (Windows keyboard) or Command key (Mac keyboard) while clicking.
When finished selecting plants, click Next.
Configuring the Fill Settings
The F/X Fill dialog will open, allowing you to configure the following settings for the Fill operation:
1. Pattern: The fill pattern that will be used.
2. Spacing: The on-center spacing between placement locations.
3. Plants: The plants you selected in the Select Plants for Fill dialog box will be listed here as rows, and will be used for the fill.
4. Plant: The plant code of the plant(s) that will be used for the Fill.
5. Allocation: The percentage of the total placement locations at which the plant will be placed. The summed percentage of all plant allocations will appear below the last plant in the list.
6. QTY: The resulting quantity of the plant placed by the Fill. This column is empty until the current settings are applied.
7. Click Back to change your list of selected plants. The Select Plants for Fill dialog box will reopen, and your previously selected plants will be auto-selected in the list.
8. Click Apply to apply the current settings and perform the Fill.
After you click Apply, the QTY column will populate with the placed quantities of each plant.
Your model will populate with placed instances of the plants on the selected faces.
The plant placed at any given location will be selected randomly according to the Allocation percentage settings configured in the Fill settings.
If you'd like to re-perform or "re-roll" the Fill operation, click Reapply.
The Fill operation will run again, with shuffled placements.
If you want to leave some of the area unfilled, simply set the Allocation percentages so they sum up to less than 100%.
The fill percentage will be applied to your model.
When you're finished with the Fill operation, click Accept.
Troubleshooting
SketchUp: Basic troubleshooting (adding, placing, importing objects)
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
Contact
- Land F/X
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