Land Kit 1.3 Stability Release

Land Kit had an exciting year with the introduction of Workflows, Water Kit, other great improvements, and…

Land Kit just got better again.

There are several quality improvements that we think are a real gift to all who use these tools.

On a Mac 🍎

We are so excited the recent release of Rhino 8 which allows us to get Land Kit reliably onto macOS 💻(and we don’t mean using Parallels folks). Yes, that’s right, you can use Land Kit right in your familiar macOS workspace and it feels so great to have the best of both worlds (if you are a Mac user). We especailly love swiping between Rhino and Grasshopper fullscreen spaces.

** Our Workflows are not currently working on macOS as of this posting. Our workflows still work on Windows but not on macOS because they rely on another plugin: HumanUI which does not work on macOS. We are working to remedy this and to make as much functionality available to as many different users as possible (as always). Workflows also still work in Parallels for folks on macOS and eager to try them.

Land Kit on a Mac in Rhino 8

Simpler Carbon Calculation 🪂

Our Climate Action Tools Workshop earlier this year shared a first version of our vision for intuitive carbon calculation in a Land Kit workflow. But we have made a major improvement:

Adding and calculating carbon data during the design process is super simple.

You can now assign landuse categories or materials from the Sasaki Carbon Conscience database with a simple UI that we’ve devised.

Here is a simple workflow showing how you can assign landuses. Each landuse makes assumptions about more than just surface materiality. It includes a whole landuse profile including estimates for topping materials, sub layers, and setting beds AND things like lights, benches, and walls all in one 60-year value per square unit. We can not take any credit for that innovation. All the praise for this should go to Chris Ng-Hardy and Sasaki for the Carbon Conscience data they’ve pulled together. We hope to continue to partner with them and others like Pathfinder on integrations for exporting and importing these data and calculations.

Overall, we hope this will allow people to take our rapid design process even further by understanding the impacts of the design moves they are making, while they are making them.

Solid Wall Drawing 🪨

Walls are one of the most unique features of Land Kit. With just a few simple imputs you can create retaining walls (or curbs) AND they help to drive the grading in your model. This was the primary reason we added walls (and curbs, which are like cute little walls).

We realized a lot of people (including us) wanted the output of the wall geometry as much as they wanted the control of the topography. So wall drawing is now more solid than ever. Wall geometries are crisper, more consistent, and more reliable. We are feeling the difference and we hope you do too.

Errors Beware! 🪳

We did some significant work to remove some errors we were seeing recently.

One error used to require a Rhino restart. We are still testing, but we think we have almost fully eliminated this issue (it was something to do with parallel processing which we do a lot of to make Land Kit faster). So if you thought that “Nonetype Error” would never go away, start saying your goodbyes. 🥲

Other bugs that we fixed include:

• speed improvements to Get Plant Info

• component naming updates (old input and output names will update with new version naming when you drop the Help component on the canvas)

• create topo can take either geo set or features or both. Before a geo set was required. Geo sets are also now more reliable.

• Plant data csv import now understands “Jan To Dec” or “Jan-Dec” (meaning: you can visualize bloom periods with the standard ERA database in our examples)

• Water catchments are now divided into pervious and impervious categories for CN calculations (ie more accurate volume calcs)

• And more tweaks probably not worth mentioning

The improvements are FREE 🎁🎄🌎

All of the improvements listed above are available in the free version of Land Kit. Many folks forget or miss the fact that Land Kit is a “Freemium” product. We do this so folks can take advantage of a lot of the benefits of working in this way before they have to commit to a Pro Key. And these free improvements will help the Pro users as well.

Watch for more updates soon!

Happy Holidays! Happy New Year!

-Team LANDAU