These virtual Sim-like people take on a life of their own in the Walkthrough. Although you do have the option to see a preview each of them in Perspective, and even Top-Down mode, this can only be done for one character at a time. Even if they’re sitting, or just standing, some parts of them will move from time to time, like a head turn for instance. Set their path, and they’ll perform their set action, reset, and perform it again, ad infinitum. Some can be walking, others jogging, a handful can be swimming. Need to populate your landscape? Add some people, and even animate them (Image credit: Idea Spectrum)
You don’t have customisation options with them, but to make your landscape more interesting you have the ability to animate them. You can spice up the walkthrough view we mentioned earlier with the addition of characters, and Realtime Landscaping Pro offers you a few to pepper throughout your creation.
So it’s both a time saver to help you get started, and a launchpad to further your own creativity. You have however the option of fully customising your chosen template, from its building material, to the size of individual elements. Once you’re happy with your selection, you just drag it to your ideal location and, most of the time, you’re done. The process is very simple, and once again, you’re offered a list of templates to choose from.
You have a handful of them, helping you with your Landscape, Decking, or even Pond, among others. Of course, landscaping an entire area from scratch can take some time, but just like with designing a house, Realtime Landscaping Pro is there to help speed up the process too, with the use of Wizards.
There are a series of Wizards which are there to help you speed up the design process (Image credit: Idea Spectrum) Wizards
When software offers you a wealth of options, it’s good to know you can narrow that down to help you speed up your work. If you wish to move over items you like and use regularly from project to project, that’s where the ‘Favourites’ section comes in. But this only works on a per-project basis. Changing seasons is a given too, helping you get the most of the look you’re after.Īs you build your project, the number of objects you use will increase, but you’ll find that each category has a ‘Currently Used’ section to help you locate those items quickly, should you wish to make use of more of them elsewhere. From there, the sky is changed, even the time of day, or in which phase the moon is in.
Speaking of your environment, you have full control over it via a handful of ‘Settings’ menus. But that’s not all: they have an age setting (which mostly changes their height), and you also have the option of altering their seasonal look - by default, it’s set to the general season you’re working in, but you can manually change that if you feel an autumnal look works best for a particular plant, even in summer. You have a choice of over a thousand of them (thank god for a ‘search’ feature). You’d expect a landscape program to have a lot of plants at hand, and you’d be right. You have hundreds of plants to choose from (Image credit: Idea Spectrum) Organization