Landscape Design Software

Adding a Pond

Ponds and other water features are an important part of many modern landscape designs. In Realtime Landscaping Architect, you can build ponds of any size and shape. Once a pond is built, you can easily change its shape, increase or decrease the water depth, or move it to another location of the property. You can choose from a wide variety of fill materials, including rocks, stone, and dirt. You can design ponds from scratch, or add a pre-built pond using the Pond Wizard as a starting point for your own design.

During realtime walkthroughs and when creating movies, fish will automatically be added to ponds that are large enough to hold them. This adds an extra element of realism that will impress your clients. See Realtime Walkthrough for details.

To add a pond:

1. Click Add Pond.

2. Draw the pond's outline by clicking to add points. Press Backspace to remove the last point. Press Esc to cancel.

3. When finished, click the starting point to close the outline. Or, right-click to automatically join the last point to the first.

The following is a landscape design featuring a pond, waterfall, plants, and other objects.

Rock Border

Ponds come with built-in support for rock borders. A rock border is added to the entire pond by default.

To turn the rock border on or off per-edge:

1. Click Edit border to enter rock border editing mode.

2. Click the edge(s) where you want to turn the rock border on or off.

3. When done, click Edit border again to toggle it off and leave rock border editing mode.

Controlling the Render Order

When working with overlapping ponds, regions, and/or paths that use different materials, you can control which ones are drawn first. See Adding a Region for details.

Customizing the Plan View

Ponds can use a unique fill material in the plan view. This is useful, for example, when you want the plan view to have a hand-drawn look. To do this, check the Custom appearance in each view option. Two tabs will appear: Plan and Perspective. These allow you to customize how the pond appears in each view. Uncheck the option if you want the pond to use the same material in both views. You can change this option at any time.

Tips:

• Important: Depending on your local building codes, ponds deeper than a certain depth may require a fence or have other restrictions for safety purposes. Please check your local building codes before building a real pond.

• Adding a pond is easiest in the plan view.

• See Adding a Stream for information on how to add a stream that flows into your pond.

• See Adding a Fountain and Adding a Waterfall for details on how to add fountains and waterfalls to your pond.

• See Pond Wizard for information on how to add a pre-built pond using the pond wizard.

• To add landscaping rocks in and around your pond, see Adding a Rock.

• To add plants in and around your pond, see Adding a Plant.

• You can easily edit the shape of your pond, as well as add or delete points. See Editing Points for more information.

• If you want to add a pond using exact dimensions, make sure grid snap is enabled and that the desired grid size is set. Otherwise, when adding a more organically shaped pond, you'll probably want to disable grid snap. See Snap Settings for more information.

• During a realtime walkthrough, fish are automatically added to the pond if it has a depth of at least 2'. The number of fish depends on the Amount of Wildlife setting. See Program Settings for more information. Fish only appear during realtime walkthroughs. See Realtime Walkthrough for details.

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