​​​🟩​ Plant Kit FAQ’s
​​CAMPUS > Plant Kit > Plant Kit FAQ’s
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​Installation 

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​Q: What are all the plug-ins that need to be installed for Plant Kit to run properly? 
​​A: Plant Kit examples sometimes use the Elefront and Human plugins, open-source downloads, which are included in your Plant Kit installation files. 
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​Setting up an Environment 

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​Q: How do I define areas? And why are areas so important? 
​​A: Areas will determine the extents of your planting design. You can easily add multiple areas to be planted by drawing the extents you’d like to see planted, projecting these extents to the C-plane, selecting these curves, and then assigning one, or multiple curves to the “Area Boundaries” component at the start of the script.  
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​​For Plant Kit to work properly, it’s important for your areas to be closed curves.
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​Q: How do I integrate multiple meshes into one environment? 
​​A: In grasshopper, right click the “Topo” parameter and set multiple geometries. 
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​Q: How can I define solar and light conditions specific to the location of my site? 
​​A: The Plant Kit sun exposure component accepts sun vectors from Ladybug, an opensource software. To gather data relevant for your site, input latitude, longitude, and time zone into the “Sun Vector” component, which will provide the “Vectors” input for the “Add Sun Exposure.”
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​Changing Planting Mix Parameters  

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​Q: How do I add new plants to the plant list? 
​​A: To add a custom plant to the hypothetical plant list from “Pseudo Plant Parameters,” create your desired plant through the “Create Plant” component, and use the grasshopper component “Merge” to join your new plant with the plant list.  
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​Q: How do I adjust the number of plants in a pseudo planting mix? 
​​A: To adjust the number of plants in a planting mix, simply change the sliders for min_sp and max-sp in the “Pseudo Plant Parameter” function.  
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​Q: Can I restrict which plants from the plant library are selected for planting iterations?  
​​A: You can restrict which plants are selected from the plant library in a few different ways.
  • ​​You can pull a subset of plants out using Grasshopper components (“Sub-List”, “Culling”, etc.)
  • ​​You can design a niche within your environment that matches a plant’s desired range for environmental conditions with the designed environmental conditions.
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​Q: What does it mean to pack plants? What is a packing ratio? 
​​A: The Packing Ratio will determine how densely your planting areas will be populated. A packing ratio between .1-.3 will generate a widely spaced planting design, .4-.6 will be moderately spaced, .7-1 will result in a tightly planted area, and values over 1 will help when  plants seem less dense due to constraints. Packing plants will position the center-points of individual plants to create a “fish-egg” effect where plants can be placed densely while still respecting the radius of neighboring plants.
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​Q: Can I restrict species selected from the plant library to a specific planting zone or ecoregion?  
​​A: This is a function that is unavailable. We currently only address micro-climatic site conditions.
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​Q: Can I create a planting scenario that holds the species the same, but factors in changes to their growth radius and likelihood of viability over time? 
​​A: Right now, Plant Kit does not accommodate for plant growth over time. 
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​Introducing Customization within Planting Mixes

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​Q: How do feature proximities influence planting designs? 
​​A: Certain features in the landscape will influence what kinds of plants are best able to grow nearby, such as proximity to salted paths, proximity to contaminants, etc. Plant Kit allows designers to plan for these conditions through the “Add Feature Proximity Layer” analysis function.
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​Q: Can I integrate cartesian geometry into Plant Kit? 
​​A: A: Yes! There are several ways to disrupt planting mixes with custom designs. 
  • ​​One way to do this is through the “Add Plant” or “Add Plants Constrained” components, where you can set plants to specific points within your planting areas. 
  • ​​You can create any layout you wish in Grasshopper or Rhino, subdivide this geometry into points, and assign the resulting points as fixed points to the “Add Plant” components. The resulting plants can be fixed or can drift during packing. To allow drift, simply change “Fixed” to “True” or “False” for the “Pack Plants” component.
  • ​​Another way to introduce new geometry into a planting mix is through the “Layout Plant Row” component. 
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​Q: Can I integrate attractor points for plants within an area? 
​​A: You cannot integrate attractor points with Plant Kit, but you can create your own pattern in grasshopper and assign the resulting points to the “Add Plant” or “Add Plants Constrained”
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​​Plant Kit does allow for clustering or grouping within planting designs, which functions similarly to attractor points. To cluster plants, change the group radius in the “Add Plant” or “Add Plants Constrained” components. A group radius of 0 will produce no clustering.

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​Defining niches 

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​Q: How do I isolate hillsides orientations or specific slopes to define a planting niche? 
​​A: To factor in hillsides and slopes into your planting mixes, add “Slope Layer” to the Environment. Plants that you created through “Add Plant Constrained” with specific slope requirements will appear within the defined range. Likewise, if you’re using hypothetical plants from “Pseudo Plant Parameters,” only the hypothetical plants with slope requirements that match your site’s slopes will populate planting areas.
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​Q: What is a planting niche?
​​A: A niche describes a specific environmental condition that is the ideal habitat for particular plant species. In Plant Kit, a niche is defined as the minimum and maximum value of an environmental condition where a plant is allowed to occur in a given planting design.
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​​To create a niche through Plant Kit, it’s important to add environmental analysis parameters that feed into the “Create Niche” component. The more environmental analysis parameters you add, the more specific your planting niches will become. Once you have defined the environmental analysis layers of interest to you and the planting mix parameters that make sense for your design, you’re ready to add this niche output into the “Create Plants” component. Adding with “constrained” layout components will ensure that plants are not outside there niches.
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​Exporting Designs

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​Q: How do I export a planting design into Revit? 
​​A: Please see the template and the video.
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​Data Sources + Data Management

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​Q: Where does the data from the plant library come from? 
​​A: At this point in time, the plant parameters or attributes from the “Pseudo” or generative components is generated through randomization functions. Plant Kit can create plant mixes and custom planting designs but it is up to the designer to assign plant species to the resulting list of hypothetical plants. You can manually define your own attributes.
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​Q: I’m developing a planting plan for a vast landscape. What techniques and data management practices should I follow for maximum processing speed? 
​​A: Create a test plot that you can move to different areas while you are testing out planting mixes. Once you have a design that works well, apply this mix to a larger area and go get a coffee.
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​​When working with heavy files, it’s best practice to disable grasshopper components while you make adjustments to the script and re-enable the components once you’re satisfied with the parameters you’ve set. And remember, the computer is doing a lot for you. Be nice to the computer.
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​​We will keep working towards the best data management practices and techniques.
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