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Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 4:39 pm
by Ambrose
hiya,
earthscapes landscape design software.
Has anyone purchased this software or ever used it before? Ive recently been sent an introduction pack off them, they are based in America but apparently sell a lot of packages over here in the UK, ive saw the demo, and i reckon its well worth a look. Let me know what use think,
there website is:
www.visualimpactimaging.com
It may be of some use to smaller contractors etc, Tony by the looks of it, it does what you were talking about: photo manipulation i think. see the demo, it does seam pretty good.
let me know what use think.
cheers 
Edited By Ambrose on 1110832154
Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2005 6:29 pm
by Tony McC
That bloody muzak on the demo is straight out of a porno film!! I kept expecting a buxom underdressed young lady to appear in the doorway and ask me if I'd come to fettle her pipes! :p
The thing seems targetted to soft-landscaping, as far as I can see, and, with it being a US product, it will be stuffed with US plants, which are not the same as those of the British and Irish flora, a source of much argument on the internet gardening groups. Further, the hard-landscaping materials it features will, similarly, be US products - how many job have you priced up where they wanted Arizona Bluestone?
The demo doesn't show enough of its tricks with hard-landscaping to allow a proper judgement to be made, but the bit where is showed 'brick pavers' being drawn in was painfully small and indistinct. The image manipulation, where plants and walls and bits of fences are dragged and dropped into place is nowt new: I can do that in Photoshop, and the layout planning doesn't seem adequately developed to allow proper design detailing. The estimating software is useful, but doesn't offer anything that's not already on the market, and may well be limited to working in dollars. However, a central database is essential when working with estimating software, so that global price changes can be implemented in a stroke, rather than having to work through the entire library updating prices one at a time.
I usually like Micrografx programs - they produced one of my all time favourite drawing programs that I still use for certain tasks even though it's a good 10 years old and running on a 486 machine. However, this seems to be of little use to me - it may be interesting to a garden construction company or soft landscaper, but it's a long way from what I'd look for in a hard-landscaping package.
And then there's the price - 1,000 of them funny Merkin dollars? I'd need some serious convincing, far more than I can see from their website, before I'd be willing to splash out 600+ quid on a piece of software. I can get a new version of AutoCad for about the same!