Lands Design vs Picogen

Lands Design is landscape design software for creating gardens, green spaces and landscapes in Rhino or AutoCAD. As you draw 2D elements such as contours, plants, paths and walls, the software builds a live 3D model. Terrain can be modeled from contours, meshes or point clouds, or imported from satellite maps, DEM or GIS files. A filterable library covers more than 8,000 plant species, with botanical descriptions and 2D and 3D representations. Planting tools support individual placements, rows and mass groups, with settings for species mix, density and distribution. Parametric walls, fences, ramps and stairs, along with urban furniture, cover hardscape work. Project lists for plants, furniture, terrain and other elements update as the design changes and can be exported to Excel. The Rhino version integrates with Grasshopper and lists compatibility with several renderers. Lands Design runs on Windows as a plugin and requires a matching Rhino or AutoCAD license. A 60-day trial is available; educational and commercial perpetual licenses cost 95.00 EUR and 795.00 EUR once, respectively.

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.