Photorealistic Rendering

It can be difficult to read landscape plans if you're not an architect - even we have trouble sometimes visualizing our plans outside of the 2D world! Plans on flat sheets of paper take away several factors that are important to design: depth perception, angles, proportion, and balance to name a few. This is where 3D rendering comes in handy... it allows us to visualize how a landscape plan might look in real life, taking into account all of those factors that are lost on paper.

Above: Example render from one of Lumion's in-house models, with a custom plant model created by Plan-It Plans.

Our Renders Look Better

We realized early on that the more realistic the plant models in our renders, the better our renders look, and the better they convey how the landscape plan will look in real life when it is installed and maintained properly. Considering the lack of Florida native 3D plant models, we started creating our own!

Above: A custom plant model of Chrysobalanus icaco 'Horizontalis' (Horizontal Cocoplum) created by Plan-It Plans.

It All Starts with Real Life

To be able to better represent the plants that will be going into your landscape plan, especially if they are Florida native, the first step in our process is to find real-life examples of the plants. We carefully study the growth habit, phyllotaxy, and leaf proportions to better model the plant. In most cases, the models we create use scans of real leaves from our neighborhood (of course with permission). All these factors come together to enable us to create an electronic representation of the plant to then use in our renders.

Above: The same above example with leaf textures and colors properly assigned.

From Real Life To Digital

When you see a render with one of our custom plant models, it truly brings the design up a level and allows our customers to add that desperately necessary 3rd dimension.