Your 3D Garden Designer Deluxe Edition review

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Verdict:

If your garden is in need of a serious redesign, then 3D Garden Designer will let you plan out your greenery makeover in 3D.

Review Date: 22 Jun 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Martin Cooper

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

There's a lot more to designing a good looking garden than just shoving some plants in green-side up and praying. You need ideas, vision and a coherent design before you even think about getting your trowel out.

This program's interface and basics of operation are simple. In the centre of the screen is a blank sheet of paper and surrounding it are icons linking to pallets containing different shrubs, features and objects. All you need do is drag, drop, arrange and resize various objects as you see fit.

With a flick of the wrist and a few clicks, you can add decking too. You can also create buildings with roofs and windows. To make your designs more realistic, you can even add slopes, dips and bumps into your garden.

Next, transform your design from a lifeless collection of two-dimensional lines into a 3D world. With a few clicks and a roll of the mouse you can fly around your new garden layout and explore it from any angle.

Sadly though, the 3D gardens the software produces look synthetic. If the program had made use of the latest 3D modelling and texturing functions which even average graphics cards offer, the results would have looked lifelike and believable.

These gripes aside, 3D Garden Designer is fun to use and proves to be a useful tool for budding greenfingers. It does its job of helping you create useable plans of your project and helps visualise how the end result might look when it's planted. And for a tenner, you can't ask for much more.

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