Introduction

InQI offers a wide range of features when it come to landscaping design. Users can define their own Plant Collections and then use them to create gardens and landscape designs within projects. Features such as hydro-zones, Plant Lists and InQI Landscaping Reports are also provided to make InQI a one-stop shop for all your landscape design needs. In this article we go through all the steps of creating a garden in an InQI project.

Plant symbols are much easier to see in the Zen mode where there are no background aerial image. So let's first switch to Zon mode from Preferences menu. For a blank and clean view you may also want to disappear the elevation lines too. You can do this from the preferences menu as well.

Plant Collections

You can start by creating a number of theme-based Plant Collection. A Plant Collection is a set of plant usually defined to represent a specific gardening style. For example you can create two Plant Collection, one called California Plant Collection , and other named Arizona Style Collection

Preparation

To start creating your Plant Collections, simply go to Dashboard and from there click on Plant Collection tab. Start by creating a new Plant Collection and then add your desired plants to the collection.

Note that all the Plant Collections that you define will be accessible in all of your projects. Also, please note that making changes to your plants would not reflect on plant instances that already exist in your old projects.

Once you have defined your Plans Collections, next step is to create a new project or open an old project.

Once you are in a project view, you need to make sure that your drawing tools are visible to you. To do that, click on Layers Setting and then make sure these two layers are visible to you.

• Planting
• Planting Hydro Zone

You may find it easier to do your design in a solid color background. If so, you can simply activate Zen Mode.

While in Zen mode, you might notice that some roof footprints do not match with their background. You can safely igonore this. The background in the Zen mode is not used by InQI. These background come from inaccurate/outdated sources. They are not used anywhere in your project. On the other hand, your InQI roof footprints are accurate and come from reliable sources. They precisely match with the most recent aerial images.

Things would look crowded if there is going to be a label for every plant symbol. So you probably also want to hide labels for plans. To do so, simply go to Layers Settings, find Planting in rows, find "Display Annotations" in columns and update the value to "None".

Now that we have a clean view (Zen mode), let's zoom into a part of the map view where you would like to do your design work.

Hydro Zones

Planting designs are often based on hydro-zones. You may want to start by drawing your hydro-zones. If this layer is not visible, activate it from the Layers Settings view.

Once you have drawn your hydro-zones, you will need to lock the layer. Otherwise, you would not be able to draw your plant over it. Locking a layer makes it possible to easily draw objects from other layers on it. If you don't lock the hydro-zone layer, you will have a some trouble while trying to select the plant object that are drawn over the hydro-zones.

Creating Plant Objects

Now that you have drawn you hydro-zone and have locked the layer, now it is time to actually draw plant objects on your hydro zones.

Go to Plants menu where you find your predefined Plan Collections. Expand it of it is already not expanded. Find you desired plant and lick on the drawing tool on the right side. Choose a drawing style and start drawing on the hydro-zone.

Drawing tools are set to repeat the drawing action. Once you are done drawing the plant, simple press Escape key.