Landscaping a site: grass, flowers, trees, rocks and water

The building is half the picture

A house sitting on a flat green plane looks like a model. The same house on a lawn, with a hedge, a path and a tree throwing shade looks like a place. These are the landscape tools that have arrived since the summer.

Grass

Grass is made of real blades, not a texture. There are two ways to lay it:

• Draw an area with the Line or Rectangle tool and choose Grass. Any closed slab can also be switched to grass in its inspector.
• Use the grass brush on the terrain and paint it where you want it.

You can set the height, density and size of the tufts, and choose from colour presets. House Builder's sites get a mown lawn, cut short, and grass runs right up to the kerb rather than stopping short of it.

Flowers

The flower brush paints flower beds onto the terrain, and flower borders on the Line tool run a bed along a path. Each flower has leaves, buds and bowed stems, and the heads face different ways. Every type has its own colour, density and height.

Trees, shrubs and hedges

The tree set now includes:

• a tapered fir, with its lowest branches sweeping down
• an ash and taller broadleaves
• palms, with dry and dead fronds among the green ones
• shrubs, from a leafy mound to a clipped block

Tree rows on the Line tool plant an avenue in one stroke, and laid end to end the shrubs become a hedge. Every tree colour can be changed. Trees keep their full detail much further from the camera than before, even through a long lens.

Wind moves grass, flowers and trees together, from still air up to a gale.

Ground and rock

Paint the terrain with natural ground: grass, earth and rock instead of the flat pastel turf it used to have. Pick a texture and drag. Rocks scatter over the terrain in several types and sizes.

The road brush drags a road across the ground and levels the terrain under it, so a drive can climb a slope without floating above it or sinking into it. Models you drop onto the terrain stand on the ground wherever you move them, and every terrain stroke can be undone.

Water

Sculpt a hollow, turn on water, and the pond fills to its level. Its depth comes from the shape you sculpted, so it is shallow at the edges and dark in the middle. The surface ripples, and foam breaks along the shore without visible tiling. Ponds and pools can also be drawn as water areas with the Line or Rectangle tool.

In renders too

All of it renders in the path tracer as it looks in the 3D view. Trees are lit the same way, grass keeps its variation in shade, and leaves let light through.

Open the editor, switch on the terrain, and start planting.