3D Visualization
A window into the future of your garden. See your design in three dimensions, walk around it, and watch it change with the seasons.
What the 3D view is for
The 3D view shows your design at full size, with plants drawn at the dimensions they'll eventually reach. It sits beside the 2D plan in the editor, so you can rearrange the 2D and immediately see the result in 3D.
Use it to check spacing, see how colours sit next to each other, and walk through the garden's year using the season bar.
Moving the camera
The 3D view defaults to orbit mode — your camera orbits around the garden as you drag.
- Left-click and drag — orbit around the garden
- Right-click and drag — pan the camera sideways
- Mouse wheel — zoom in and out
- Hold Space — temporary pan mode; left-click and drag pans while you hold it
The 3D toolbar at the top of the panel has dedicated Orbit and Pan buttons if you'd rather not use modifiers, plus Zoom in, Zoom out, and Reset view. Reset is your friend if you lose your bearings.
Click a plant in the 3D view to select it in 2D and see its name pop up in a tooltip.
Toolbar extras
Beyond the basic camera controls, the toolbar has three options worth knowing about:
- Perspective / no perspective — switch between a natural, perspective-camera view and a flat, orthographic projection that keeps lines parallel. The flat view is useful when you want to compare sizes without foreshortening.
- Link 2D and 3D (desktop only) — when on, panning or zooming in one view does the same in the other. Helpful when you want to focus both views on the same corner of the garden.
- Expand 3D / Collapse 3D — give the 3D scene the full canvas area for a closer look, then pop it back to share space with the 2D plan.
Seeing different seasons
The season bar at the bottom of the 3D scene lets you flip through the year. Step forward and back with the arrows, or click a coloured segment to jump straight to a moment. There are eight stops in total, across Spring, Summer, and Fall — each split into early, mid, and late.
Plants only show flowers when they actually bloom in real life, and herbaceous perennials disappear during their dormant periods. Watching the same view across several seasons is the fastest way to spot a "nothing's happening" stretch in your design.
There's no Winter view yet — see Seasonal Planning for why, and for tips on designing with year-round structure in mind anyway.
A note on the art
Curious about how the 3D images are rendered? Designing the art was the most fun part of this project.
I have a design background and enjoy drawing and painting plants. But as much as I'd love to, there aren't enough hours in the day to draw a picture of every plant out there. To represent as many plants as possible, flower shapes are divided into about ten categories (daisy, plume, trumpet, etc.). Same with foliage (round, palmate, oval, and so on).
The textures for each of these categories are hand-drawn by me, then digitally coloured and sized to match each plant's characteristics. The colouring and positioning are controlled by the code and happen when the 3D scene is rendered. There's a little bit of randomness in the flower positioning, so no two plants are exactly alike.
This covers a wide variety of plants surprisingly well, but nature has endless variety and there are many special cases. Irises, for instance, have a pretty unique flower shape that doesn't fit neatly into a category. I have a list of these special cases and am continuously adding new art to make the garden renderings as lifelike as possible.
If you encounter a plant that looks funny or unrealistic, please let me know and I'll add it to the custom artwork list.
What to look for
The 3D view is great for catching things that are hard to see in the overhead 2D plan:
- Spacing — at mature size, do plants crowd each other? Do pathways stay clear?
- Colour combinations — what blooms next to what, and at what time of year? Step through the season bar to find out.
- Visual balance — orbit around the garden. Does one side feel heavier? Are there enough tall elements for visual interest?
- Gaps in the calendar — flip through the seasons and look for moments where nothing is happening. That's where to add another wave of bloom or structurally interesting foliage.
Troubleshooting
Performance
The 3D view depends on your device's GPU and how much graphics memory it has free. Modern computers and recent phones handle most gardens smoothly. On older devices, the app automatically optimizes performance as much as possible, but it is a visually detailed and resource intensive app.
If 3D still feels slow or choppy:
- Close other browser tabs. This matters most on phones and tablets, where the GPU is shared across everything running on the device.
- Switch to desktop. If you're on a phone or tablet, try a laptop or desktop computer. The 3D view is much more demanding than the 2D plan, and desktop GPUs are more powerful than mobile ones.
- Reduce plant variety. Each unique species loads its own set of textures, so 100 plants across a handful of species is much lighter than one each of 100 species. Consolidating to fewer varieties is the most effective way to improve performance.
A plant looks wrong
If a plant appears at the wrong time of year or has unexpected colours, drop me a note with the plant name and I'll take a look. The plant data is continuously being refined.
Lost your bearings
The Reset view button on the 3D toolbar brings you back to the camera's starting angle.
Another way to find your place is to turn on Link 2D and 3D Views from the 3D toolbar. With the views linked, panning or zooming the 2D plan pulls the 3D camera along — so you can use the familiar overhead view to point 3D at whatever corner of the garden you're working on.
Where to go next
- Seasonal Planning — designing a garden that changes well across the year
- 2D Design Tools — the side of the editor where most edits happen
- Plant Library — search and filter plants by bloom time, colour, and more