Landscape Design Software

Plant Symbols

Realtime Landscaping Architect includes a wide variety of professionally drawn plant symbols. Many styles and color themes are included, helping you create appealing landscape plans that will communicate your ideas and impress your clients. You can use these symbols as-is, or adjust their color and brightness to make your own variations.

To change a plant's symbol:

1. Select the plant you want to change. (You can change multiple plants at once if they all use the same symbol. Use Select Similar to select them.)

2. Click the Symbol tab in the property window.

3. Uncheck the Use default symbol option (if needed).

4. Click the picture of the symbol.

5. Choose the desired symbol and click OK.

To change the symbol's color and brightness:

1. Select the plant you want to change. (You can change multiple plants at once if they all use the same symbol. Use Select Similar to select them.)

2. Click the Symbol tab in the property window.

3. Uncheck the Use default symbol option (if needed).

4. Click the options button next to the picture of the symbol and select Edit Color and Brightness from the drop-down list, as shown below:

5. Edit the brightness, contrast, tint, and saturation as desired and click OK. See Editing Color and Brightness for more information and an example.

The plant symbols in the following landscape design were adjusted in this manner.

Creating Custom Plant Symbols

The above procedure only changes the color and brightness for plant symbols that you have already added to your landscape design. Use the following procedure to create a library of custom symbols that you can use in multiple designs.

To create a custom plant symbol:

1. Click Plan to switch to the plan view.

2. Click Add Symbol.

3. Click the picture of the symbol in the property window and select the desired plant symbol. Then click OK.

4. Click to temporarily add the symbol to the landscape.

5. Click the options button and click Edit Color and Brightness, as shown below.

6. Edit the brightness, contrast, tint, and saturation as desired and click OK. See Editing Color and Brightness for more information and an example.

7. Click Tools > Symbol Creation Wizard and follow the instructions for creating a custom plant symbol. See Symbol Creation Wizard for details.

8. Repeat steps 3-8 for each symbol you want to create.

9. Press Del to delete the temporary symbol.

Your new symbols will appear in the Custom category when browsing for symbols, as shown below:

Creating Custom Symbols using Shapes

We have included a set of shapes that you can use as a starting point for creating your own plant symbols. These are located in the file Plant Symbol Shapes.rla which can be found in the Sample Landscapes folder. Use the command File > Open Sample to open this file.