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

Installation 


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. 

Setting up an Environment 


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.  

For Plant Kit to work properly, it’s important for your areas to be closed curves.

Q: How do I integrate multiple meshes into one environment? 
A: In grasshopper, right click the “Topo” parameter and set multiple geometries. 

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.”

Changing Planting Mix Parameters  


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.  

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Introducing Customization within Planting Mixes


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.

Q: Can I integrate cartesian geometry into Plant Kit?Â