Hi, some of you may remember me from the HL1 mapping scene from the past 4-5 years, I’ve been a bit of a ghost to the community for awhile so I understand if I have very little credibility as a seemingly new poster. Anyway if its necessary for me to post some old portfolio stuff just let me know.
I’m posting this idea in a general forum because I’m hoping to generate a discussion on the idea, maybe get some useful feedback besides just recruit people for what I hope doesn’t appear to be a conventional project.
The Idea-
I’ve worked in the landscape construction industry, primarily as a carpenter (befitting a mapper) for the past 8 years or so and I believe I have a fairly thorough understanding of the business. For a few years I’ve been building on the idea of using mapping technology, rather than autocad or hand-drafting, as a design tool. This is intended for multi-million dollar high-end jobs, not for little weed-ridden backyards.
This is my reasoning which I see as the market potential.
The average client is completely incapable of conceptualizing a two-dimensional blueprint as an actual structure. When handed a topographical map, few lay people can visualize a rolling green pasture. If you could provide a fully detailed navigable medium in which a client could preview their new property, actually walk around in it, hear the trickle of their new waterfall, and feel the proportions of the space, that would be a very powerful tool indeed. The crux of this idea is that this simple failure of communication leads to hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars in redesigns just in the medium-scale company I currently work for.
Imagine if in communicating with your client, they decide they are unhappy with the position of their new pool, the work gets sent back to the level editor, the pool is dragged over a few feet and resubmitted to the client. It sounds obvious, but believe it or not, in this business, simple change orders like that regularly cost thousands of dollars.
The use of a level editor in the design process firstly is more efficient in the use of time, and provides a more clear representation to the client. To me, the most exciting aspect of this idea is what happens after using such a tool for more than a few jobs, you would begin to have so many assets pre-manufactured that you could do what would take a hand-drafter days of work in just a few hours. While he is carefully illustrating the branches on the rose tree to make the drawing look presentable to the client, you have dragged and dropped the tree in and are moving on. At first, this idea would be rather unwieldy, I’m going to be making hundreds of photo-sourced textures of trees, rocks, different types of wood and masonry, patio stones, etc etc etc… but once those assets are done, they are completely reusable. And gradually the system would get more and more efficient.
Extended scope-
I’ve already anticipated some necessary changes to the level editor, the grid settings must be scaled to a base twelve (imperial) measuring system rather than base 8, with the option of going metric. But there are some very exciting possibilities in this down the road.
As a cost estimation tool – if you cover a breadth of space with a special grass texture, a custom-coded compiler could calculate exactly how much sod is required to cover that area. If you build a fence in the editor using individual wood boards (which is how I intend for this to work) the editor could count exactly how many fence boards, 2x4s etc, and in what lengths, you would need to construct that fence. It could also calculate volume, if a zone is covered on all sides with a special texture, it could tell you how many tons of soil or pea gravel you need to fill up that area.
Practical needs-
I’m a mapper/texture artist, this job would desperately need some basic skills of a programmer to adapt the mapping tools in small ways such as changing the grid-settings. And it would need some very developed modeling skills to reproduce all sorts of different materials from photographs and drawings. No small amount of work would be involved in modeling all this, there are dozens of regularly used varieties of trees alone which would all need to be produced in a couple of variations.
Fortunately for landscape construction, there are only 4 basic elements in every yard.
-terrain (soil, gravel, grass)
-stone
-wood
-plants
Once these elements have a sufficiently ample stock of art assets the work will get more and more easy, and more and more profitable to this endeavor.
Landscape designers get paid very well, if I’m able to undercut their costs in time as well as provide a better end-product, I think this idea has a lot of money potential. Particularly for you starving students out there like me.
What I’m hoping to do is a small mock-up of a property and then first approach the company that I’m working for now, and then possibly other companies in my area, at this point I may be looking for a partner to help me get this off the ground.
