Product Description

5 unbeatable tools for designing and maintaining theperfect landscape!
 

Everything you need to easily create a beautiful landscape and garden. Getgreat ideas from 84 professionally designed gardens and landscapes. Experiment with 1,400 structures and objects including fencing, arbors, benches,statuary, bird feeders, and much more.  Stroll or fly through yourlandscape or garden design in smooth, photo-realistic 3D!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10536 in Software
• Brand: Vivendi
• Model: 71195
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 95
• Format: CD-ROM

Amazon.com Review
Sierra's Custom LandDesigner 3D Design 7.0 may offer only five landscaping and gardening applications as opposed to the eight titles bundled with Complete LandDesigner 3D Design Collection 7.0, but the suite still packs an enormous amount of functionality for its relatively low price. The program let us design complete landscapes and gardens by dragging plants, walls, trellises, and other elements from an extensive database into either a 2-D or 3-D representation of our yard. It was easy to position and reposition these elements, and the truly uninspired can turn to the included predesigned gardens and design guide for inspiration. These two aspects of the program can incorporate everything from your climate to feng shui in order to provide suggestions that are relevant to your landscaping needs.

The software comes with so many features it's tough to decide where to begin. We really liked the aging feature that let us see how the plants we had selected would look any number of years after we planted them, letting us plan for the future. There's also a handy slider bar that let us easily see how the plants would look during various seasons, adding accurate blooms in the spring and leaf color changes in the fall. It was simple to import digital pictures of houses and add virtual landscaping elements, and once a design was finalized everything we wanted to include was added automatically to a shopping list.

The one drawback to this software is that the graphics aren't too great, especially in the 3-D modes. They are adequate for giving an impression of what a garden will look like from a distance, but up close everything disintegrates into a mess. Still, the top-down 2-D views are crisp, and the photographs in the plant encyclopedia are good, and as long as you have the patience to deal with the frequent CD access this software demands you'll be planning the landscape of your dreams in no time. --T. Byrl Baker

Amazon.com Product Description
Custom LandDesigner is a collection of five products to help you visualize and create your ideal landscape and garden: LandDesigner 3D, Photo Garden Designer, Garden Encyclopedia, Landscape Design Guide, and Designer Garden Library.

LandDesigner 3D offers a library of 4,600 plants and more than 2,200 objects and materials to use in your designs. Design wizards help you create virtual garden beds, sprinkler systems, and more. You can walk or fly through your designs, viewing them from every angle, and see how your landscape will grow and change in appearance through the seasons. Photo Garden Designer allows you to import a photo of your own home and design around it, experimenting with over 1,000 plants, trees, and shrubs. Garden Encyclopedia is a reference guide with full-color photos and entries on over 3,000 plants, and features a multimedia guide on selecting and caring for your plants. Landscape Design Guide gives you expert advice and tips on all the details of keeping a great garden, from choosing appropriate plants to what containers are best for what plants. Designer Garden Library lets you use predesigned gardens for inspiration, including feng shui, rose, herb, Japanese, and other gardens.

Customer Reviews

Intuitive, but too cookie-cutter like to be of any use.
Custom Land Designer is advertised as "5 unbeatable tools for designing and maintaining the perfect landscape and garden." The only way it can be unbeatable is if there is no competition. The 3D design portion is intuitive to use, but has no precision measuring or snap-to capabilities, making designing a facsimilie of your house impossible. The selections for your home are sorely lacking as well--a handuful of ugly windows, a handful of ugly doors--so you're better of selecting a prefab house resembling your own. The software has a slope feature, but you can't see any slope in the miserable 3D view. The mousewalk in 3D seems to be random--you move the mouse, sometimes you head in the right direction. The sky backdrops are laughable--one has a worms-eye view of a house, skewing the perspective in 3D and making your house and lot appear fit for a mouse. The trees and plants in 3D all look the same, and become distorted when you change height. This has the effect of making every design look like something from 1988's Jack Niklaus Golf for the 386; or better yet, colorforms. Grating sounds are played whenever you place an object thereby adding to the irritation of arduous design. It is as intuitive and easy to use as it is completely useless and bland. Also, as a side note, the manual I got was for 3D Home and Land design, so I have a manual describing programs I don't own.

Doesn't live up to expectations
Perhaps later versions will be more intuitive to use and the plants more realistic but this one is neither. I found the user interface and help confusing and inadequate. Many frustrating hours were spent trying to learn it. My hope was that the program would provide a better idea for plant spacings and mapping of what I have. I had also hoped it would illustrate visually what groupings would look like before I purchased them. But when I entered the groupings I already have, what I saw was a badly rendered cartoon version of my plants. It is like looking at a badly done portrait and recognizing only elements of the person. Maybe a later version will be worth the time and effort to get the data entered.

Buyer beware!
I NEVER write product reviews, but I just had to with this item. Be advised that (according to Sierra online support) you DO NOT get everything listed on the box--LandDesigner, PhotoGarden Designer and Garden Encyclopedia are the only products you'll receive software for. You WILL NOT get Designer Garden Library or Landscape Design Guide. I wrote support three times on this and the fact that I can't seem to go back to fix the windows I added to my house, and received curt, insufficient answers days after I submitted them. I'm considering sending this product back, but I haven't seen another with reviews that were much better. I'm very frustrated and wish you better luck with your software purchase.