People

[Matt]

Thanks Greg!

Peter, I think your points are good ones, and if I can prevail upon Alfred to change out some of the more idiosyncratic peeps, we'll have them in an upcoming release. Anybody else have a critique or see a gap in the people that are in that set? I think I will add a couple flying birds to put in the sky as well.

If there are any specific plants or plant types that would be useful to have in elevation, now is a great time to post them here.

[Alfred Scott]

Because of the way all this is hooked up, I can’t just add or delete any item or group, but I can replace any item with a new one. So it’s all about exchanging an existing image with another, and that’s very simple to do.

In other news, I’m adding HeadLOK and TimberLOK screws to the Sheet Metal screw tool in Nuts & Bolts. I know they are not sheet metal screws, but they have the same type of threads.

And Matt is well into the Tree and Shrub Elevation tools. They will share all the choices with the existing tools except sun angle. Doesn’t make sense to have the trees lighted from below, and a shadow will be in a fixed location on the ground.

And we going to include amorphous ground cover, flower beds and low plants. Maybe even some squirrels, hedgehogs, marijuana plants, weeds, snakes...

Alfred

[David Scott]

I have an series of tree elevation profiles that I scanned and auto-traced from a forgotten source. Happy to share if it contributes to making more tree objects as shown here.

Oh! Looks like what Dave posted, so I must have shared that before. Maybe he does not remember where he got it? Or maybe my traced CAD file has ended up on the internet?!! I have the original TIFF file scans of these, so I'm quite sure I am the original source.

Thanks lavardera. I'm sure you're right. You must have shared them before. I have a collection of various objects which I got (mostly) from the internet and thought your trees were amongst them.
David

[Alfred Scott]

Latest addition to WildTools are HeadLOK and TimberLOK screws to the Lag Bolt tool in Nuts & Bolts at the request of Gene Silva.

I never knew about these, but I understand they are now very widely used in framing. They come in a single size only and are a replacement for a 3/8" lag bolt. They are self-drilling with threads like a sheet metal screw.

These two screws took an obscene about of time (two weeks); compare that to three weeks of intense work for Nuts & Bolts 3D a few years ago. It was very difficult to get back into all the programming, which is very complex.

If I owned a software company and paid someone to work for two weeks for the benefit this would bring to the software, I would be very unhappy, but that's just how things work out sometimes.

Alfred

[Michael St Aimee]

Thanks for your hard work Alfred!

[patrickm]

Thanks, Alfred -- your screws are awesome. (Simpson Strong-Tie makes some similar screws -- I was told they have an engineer with a PHD in thread design! Didn't know that was possible...)

[Alfred Scott]

This is a good place to show examples of the Tree Elevation and Shrub Elevation tools that Matt Arnold and I are working on.

The Tree Elevation tool has a lot of very simple generic shapes for landscape architects who want a simple indication without a depiction of what the tree looks like. There are a lot of styles and the user choices are for squiggle and a shadow. You have all the same color choices in the existing Trees & Shrub tools.

Alfred

[Alfred Scott]

The Shrub Elevation tool has the styles shown above with option for flowers. These things are all built on random numbers, and they are very ‘active’ as a result. I don’t know exactly what to do to calm them down. Right now, every time they draw, they have new variations.

Alfred