AgroForest Designer vs Picogen

AgroForest Designer is web software for planning food forests and other layered planting systems. It lets users map site boundaries over map, satellite, combined, or orthomap views, then add features, planting zones, and paths. Its public plant database can be filtered by growing conditions and includes reusable recipes, cultivars, and personal plant records. The generator creates an editable proposal from a recipe, planting area, density, objectives, and a 1-, 5-, 10-, or 20-year horizon. Other planning tools show sun paths and indicative shade, elevation contours, distances and areas, and harvest periods. Professional plans include technical drawings, plan sharing, QGIS workflows, and selected GeoJSON, project-data, and 3D model exports. The shade model omits terrain and objects beyond the plan, so critical conditions need on-site verification. The Free plan is free; paid plans start at €14.99 a month. Free and Starter omit professional delivery tools.

Picogen is a free outdoor ray-tracing system for generating large terrain scenes with realistic illumination across day and night and detailed plant populations. It supports procedural scene work through SSDF userspace scripting and heightfield objects. Implemented rendering choices include Whitted-style rendering and path tracing. Materials include fully diffuse Lambertian and perfect mirror specular types, while Height-Slang programmable materials and shaders support terrain. A sun-sky global setting controls scene lighting, and cameras provide yaw, pitch, and roll controls. Picogen is licensed under GPL version 3 or later and runs on Linux and Windows. Linux downloads include 32-bit and 64-bit packages for Debian, Ubuntu, and similar distributions, plus tarballs. Windows offers an installer and portable zip or 7zip archives. Source code, a no-signup forum, and wiki documentation are available. The roadmap lists several features as unimplemented, including a graphical interface.