Creating Lush Landscaping Design with 2D Plants in SketchUp

In this next video, we are going to do the same thing we did with trees, but with plants. So again, let's go kind of zoom in.

We want to add plants around this hillside and in our planter. Really just kind of focus on that. We want to create a nice dense amount of plants that could be swapped out with 3D plants and 2D plants, etc.

This is going to be used to create some really nice perspectives to use for our final deliverables. So let's go back into our tags and let's make a new layer or new tag called plants. We have that ready to go.

And now go into our components and go into landscape. In here, let's go into plants low poly. And going into our 3D warehouse, let's scroll down to shrubs 2D.

We want to download four different types of shrubs that we can use. SketchUp has very limited amount of 2D plants to use. I think the 2D fountain grass is okay.

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But for now, we'll just use these and we'll swap these out with 3D ones. This is a little bit faster to place plants. We'll first start off with these 2D sumac shrub.

We'll download that and then we'll kind of place this periodically around. We'll open up our end model. We'll find that 2D sumac shrub and we'll again keep kind of placing this periodically around this hillside.

We can put them in kind of little groups, make it more kind of a natural arrangement. And these are all face me components. When you're looking from above, they look really kind of skinny and small.

But when you're on the ground, they look a lot better. I'll kind of demonstrate that. And we look down here, they look nice.

Okay, the next component that I want to bring in is another plant. Go back to our landscape, plants low poly, shrubs 2D. And this time, let's bring in 2D fountain grass.

We're going to put a lot of these fountain grasses kind of throughout. However, when you bring these in, the scale of this is very large. So let's modify this scale.

And let's do an S for scale. And we'll kind of scale this down, making sure that it's kind of the origin is still centered. You know, we can even kind of click H to show rest of models so we can see.

But we're going to put a lot of these grasses all around and they can be kind of small, like this size right here. Maybe even a little wider if you want, kind of modify that. Yeah, just like this.

Perfect. Now we can go into our in model and find this 2D fountain grass. And we can keep click and then kind of paste these all around.

We want to do just a whole bunch of these guys. These are these are nice kind of grasses that kind of gives you some kind of depth and some kind of accent behind this wall. Really make this landscape wall have a nice kind of hedge of plants and little grasses sticking up.

You know, this may take a little bit of time. Feel free to feel free to skip forward as you do this on your own, as I continue to kind of, you know, place these things around. You have to each time you click a component, you got to make sure you click it in the component and then paste it in there.

I won't allow you to do multiple. Slowly working my way around the site, being careful to have on face in group and being on the actual grass and not anywhere else. You see here, once this was a snap onto the top of that, make sure I get on this grass.

You don't need to go too high up the hill as you won't really be able to see too much of that. But we do want to add some of these grasses over here. OK, before we do anything else, let's do a selection window over these plants.

Select only the plants and right click make group and add these into our plants. OK, and let's add another plant. Let's go back into our landscape tab and our components dialog box plants low poly.

And let's go back into our shrubs 2D and let's go add in more like a flowering plant. This 2D gay feather shrub. You want to add this flowering plant kind of in sort of in the in the front.

Go back to our in model tab and start putting in these flowers. Want to make this one maybe a little bit smaller so that was more of like a little flower. Maybe it's maybe it kind of goes a little bit underneath the origin, so it's, you know, something like that.

We can place a lot of these. These flowering plants, ones that are a little bit lower and more or kind of in front. You don't need to go too far around the corner, just kind of kind of halfway is like a good place to kind of start and stop.

So yeah, I want to put a lot of these plants kind of in this area and then I'll put a lot of these flowering plants inside this planter box here. Again, this can kind of be a little tedious, so if you're on a flat surface you can click multiple, move, copy. You kind of can kind of place them like that, you know.

If you're on a curved surface it's not as easy to do that. Again, you can go back to maybe the fountain grass, add some fountain grasses inside here. Now that you have them kind of loaded, you can kind of click, kind of play with how you want this to be, you know.

Ultimately, you're designing this landscape. Sometimes you'll have a landscape plan from a landscape architect where you'll kind of follow that and place them accordingly or you can import that plan all together and place each of these on top of it and as the plant selections change or you find a new model, you can kind of swap those out. So this is kind of a really kind of nice way to do it.

The key of mind that I'm placing these not inside of this group, so you'll have to again do a selection window. I'll just at this point, I'll just do a copy, delete, select this group, and then paste in place. Now I will start actually adding these things inside of this group to keep it a little bit simpler.

Alright, and then I will import one last plant. I'll go into my landscape tab again, plants low poly, shrubs 2D, and this time let's bring in 2D sketch grass. We'll add a little bit more of these kind of grasses, maybe a little bit taller ones, kind of fill in this area in areas where maybe it's a little bit kind of bare.

I'll put a few in the planter box. Again, this doesn't have to be perfect, you know, plants kind of grow organically and so you can kind of place these wherever you like. They can be as dense or not as dense as possible.

I'm making mine fairly dense because I want to create a very lush landscaping behind my patio space. So people are out partaking in this in evening activities or day activities, they are looking out on a really well grown and beautiful landscaping design. And this would actually come across really, really nicely too in any sort of perspectives and renderings that we end up doing.

Let's see a few more areas where maybe we might need to add some landscaping, kind of fill in fill in the empty voids. And now as we kind of look down you can see that we have this really nice kind of landscaping around our patio. We can modify these by changing the transparencies and we'll just do this temporarily as we're going to swap these out soon enough.

But if you end up wanting to keep these 2D plants or change them out later, at least you have some of these colors. You can even modify some of the colors. You got some more yellowish plants and you got some, you know, maybe this pink ends up being a bright yellow-orange type color, right? You can really kind of have some have some fun with this.

Maybe this, um, these grasses maybe are a bit, maybe they're a little darker. So you can really see like adding some color and some playfulness to this landscaping really, really punches it out. I'm going to save my file and I want to double check my tags and see if this will churn off the plants.

I select that and it does.