LandDesigner 3D - Old Disc Journeys

[monsterrobotics]

In the depths of a messy, disgusting tech store, there she laid for 7 crisp united statesian dollars: Sierra Home LandDesigner 3D. I brought her home--Sierra Home. Ah... no, that doesn't make sense...



And what a beautiful disc she is!



Now, this is a program that was apart of the "Sierra(TM) Complete Home 3D Design Collection". It advertised it on the back of the jewelcase, but I'm not 100% sure if individual discs were sold separately or if this one just got separated from the pack. One of the programs it lists was "Electrical Wiring" which was supposed to help plan wiring projects, and I'm highly interested in seeing that one in the future. 

LandDesigner was for the outdoor parts of one's abode, though: the gardens, the backyards, the patios, etc. And it just WORKS on my modern, terrible Windows 11. It did crash a lot though. Remember to save!



Once you run the program, you can see an example of how this planner works by opening up many, many samples. Here is one opened called "Rose Garden" that shows off the UI of the program.



Yes, the controls at the bottom do move you around. And it's quite smooth and intuitive. I'm sure it probably didn't run as fast or smooth on whatever y2k machine you had, and probably was confusing for a nice middle-aged person who'd be using software to plan their home improvements, but for me, it's fun! Grabbing the big yellow arrows axis at the bottom serves as a sort of Analog stick for movement. It's basically tank controls, but feels better somehow. Also, I'm not 4 foot 6 inches. I changed it to my proper IRL height after this (which is when I noticed it was there!)

You can render the current viewport, too, which is that 3D Photo button. But gee, it takes a while. It seems to render by line of pixels over and over again, increasingly... increasing the quality of the picture. Not like the render settings I use in Blender, which renders the final result at once. Fun to watch, though. It exports the picture as a BITMAP.

Here's that bitmap I made of this sample area, converted to a png. I did a middle setting (640 x 480).



Anyways, it's really neat for making some fun spaces to take photos of and have fun in. I plan to certainly play with it. It's a very unique, funky, rare art program now, haha!

It's interesting for its actual purpose too: it has a sort of questionnaire you can do to get what plants are best for your area (called an "interview"), adjust the slope of the land, the lot size, the latin v. common names of plants, irrigation planning, blah blah blah gardening.

But, most importantly, you can upload images to use as sprites and sky-boxes. Oh yeah, baby!



I can't for the life of me figure out how to make custom objects vertical and show up properly in first person, so here's a helicopter view. Of course, I have my little house, my pet Satan Clip Art, and a tree house and wooden gazebo next to my mismatched walkway. My entire lawn is dirt. This is the life.



And as you see, a lovely custom skybox from a jpeg. (Hi again honey, @stellarfieldanomaly I'm using your photos again)!

Maybe I'll think of something fun to make in this. The basic environments remind me of some boomer shooter/doom mod type stuff. Maybe I'll figure out how to make custom objects vertical aligned instead of horizontal and flat to the ground. Maybe I'll upload a mushroom cloud sky box and make conceptual art about the juxtaposition of simple user-friendly software and the boundless potential of human technology at its worst. I'll probably just make a weird meme about it.

More to come, but I wanted to share the basic gist first. I'll double check if the ISO's archived on archive.org, and if not, I'll share it out. We can all make our dream y2k era suburban garden-forward houses featuring your favorite bitmap images. Let me know what YOU want to see from a magnificent, low fidelity garden space. AND what images would best fit there.

[virtualpet2001]

WOW this is really fun to look at. i will have to look at this program myself sometime. big fan of your pet clipart satan

have you ever seen PlantStudio because it captures a similar energy, to me.

[monsterrobotics]

have you ever seen PlantStudio because it captures a similar energy, to me.

Wow! That's a great complimentary program, yeah. It does a similar thing but more zoomed in to just being about the plants rather than a simulation of planning a garden/outdoor space. LandDesigner is also a bit more advanced and has some features this article's author would've appreciated in PlantStudio.

I've also been studying and looking at UI a lot lately, so it's very much similar era of that turn of the century (the 21st century, that is) albeit slightly older and less hand-crafted for the program. Similar menu-ing and "interview" on what you want from your output.

It also makes me think of a conversation I had recently. I miss when the user experience of something was in boxes and confined. I've called modern website design "open-concept" today in a rage (because my partner and I hate open concept in houses, lol). I want to know where my dang buttons are, not just floating text in a void built for "mobile-first"! Alas, the skeuomorphism of tangible buttons in these programs makes me happy.