Garden Sketchbook vs Picogen

Garden Sketchbook is a browser-based tool for designing gardens to scale and previewing them in 3D across the seasons. Its 2D drag-and-drop editor lets users arrange plants, while the seasonal view shows how the garden and its colors change through the year. Filters cover hardiness zone, sun, soil, bloom season, color, deer resistance, and drought resistance. Plants are sized automatically, and users can trace a floor plan or aerial photo while drawing beds, paths, and structures. The library contains hundreds of plants with growing information and specific varieties; custom varieties can be made by changing size, color, and bloom time. The software runs in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge without installation. The 2D planner works on any device, but the 3D seasonal view requires WebGL. The free demo needs no account, though gardens expire after 24 hours. Gardener costs $39 a year after a 14-day free trial and saves up to 10 gardens. A one-time $9 add-on provides PDF export in the free demo.

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.