Growing Trees

[stafforj]

First apologies for the long post, just felt I had to say it all:

I've been playing with the Grow Plants slider, and I cant make any sense of it.

I want to model what my garden will look like with some extra trees added.
So first I add the existing trees, these are all mature, ie 25 years old,
so I pick mature ones from the plant library
Then I add new trees, I pick young ones from the library.
OK, 3d view shows big existing trees, and small new trees.
Now I set grow trees slider to 0 years, and click OK, Now all my mature trees have become tiny!

OK, so now set slider to 10 years, some trees grow, some dont.

Whatever I do In cant make any sense of it.


I expected to be able to pick a tree/plant and set its age as of today, then add new planting, and age the whole lot together.
ie if I have a two existing trees, one 10 years old, the other 15 years old, and am planting two new 2 year old trees,
I expect to set the slider to 5 years and see what everything will look like in 5 years time,
which should be existing trees then aged 15,20 years, and the new trees aged 7 years.


Also why do we have to pick young/medium/mature trees from the library ? I understand that scaling up a young sapling to a mature tree wont give realistic results, so an image of a mature tree is needed,
but I would expect the program to automatically pick the correct image for the trees age.
i.e the program should scale the young image for tree age 0-5 years, the medium image for tree age 5-15 years, and the mature image for age > 15 years.

As an alternative to setting plant age now, we should be able to set plant height now, from which program could compute its age, becuase I can easily measure the height of existing plants/trees, but guessing there age is difficult.

I was already dissapointed by the range of plants in the library (although I was intending to get the Bonus plant library),
but this growing thing is awfull.

Can anyone explain how it works, and the logic behind it.

PS: I've only played with trees, it may work better for small plants.

[Dan Park]

It looks like there is a discrepancy in the growth when a slider is placed directly to 0. Try placing the slider slightly over 0 to see the effect.

Also there is a setting in each plant that states what it's starting age is. If you lower the slider below this age the plant will not continue to shrink. If you edit the plant so that the image is smaller than the starting age it will grow but then when you move it back it won't shrink all the way.

We used a simplistic algorithm to show this so that you can easily return the plan to the original state. Check each of your trees and see what the starting age is. This will determine how small the plant will get as you slide the slider to 0. The height at maturity controls how tall the tree will get. If you were to size the tree larger than maturity and then start using the slider the plant will likely shrink in size at some point causing confusing results.

Your suggestion of having different images for different aged plants is a good one but is more complicated to produce and is more than our underlying system can handle at this point. It is something we have logged in our database for future development.

[stafforj]

Dan,
A few more points:

The age at maturity cant be set to more than 20 years!
So according to this, a Oak, or Giant Redwood is mature at 20 years!

I can accept the gwoth slider only having a 20 year range, as I dont really want to look more than 20 years in the future, but having a limited maturity age means iether the groth rate for slow growing trees must be wrong, or else that you cant have such trees older than 20 years old.

For a landscaping product I find these limitations unacceptable.


Some of the points I have raised are surely easy to fix (Im a software engineer myself), so is there any chance of a fix for these problems in the near future. The two main fixes I would like to see are maturity age > 20 years, and being able to grow trees on from their current age, ie start with trees aged 3 and 6 years, set groth slider to 5 years, and see trees aged 8 and 11 years.

PS: are the same problems in home designer pro 7.0 ?

[Dan Park]

I have filed the problem with the limit with our engineering department. It seems rather arbitrary to limit the aging of plants to only 20 yrs when most houses can be there for much longer.

[rraisley]

Well, looks like in almost 8 years there's been no change on this. I've just run into the same problem and confusion. A have a 31' Shagbark Hickory tree in my yard, and Net info tells me it can grow to 70' or more, and averages less than 12" per year growth. So a mature tree is over 70 years old. And, let's say my current tree is 31 years old. I can't enter either of those values into the Plant Information, which limits age to 240 months (20 years).

So, I try to fudge, and say that it's current age is 106 months, with a mature age of 240 months, figuring it's a little less than half grown. But now it grows much too fast, of course. Well, actually, it seems pretty messed up:

With these settings: 840" height at maturity, 240 age at maturity, 106 starting age, 372" height, I get the following heights for years:

Starting - 372"
36 Months - 371"
60 months - 371"
96 months - 371"
120 months - 420"
180 months - 630"
240 months - 840"

Oh, and it never goes back to 372", even when set at 0 months.

After it gets growing, it averages 42" per year, which is roughly 4 times what it should be. But it doesn't grow at all for the first 106 months (almost 9 years!). Something's really messed up there.

As to Dan's comment about the 20 year arbitrary limit when houses can be there much longer, the main thing is that TREES can be much older. And without a reasonable life of tree, I don't see a way to get a reasonably accurate tree growth. BUt then I haven't even been able to get a /consistent/ growth, so I may have other problems.

So, I'd appreciate some suggestions as to how, if it is possible at all, to make trees grow at a reasonable rate, or even prevent them from growing at all, as even that would be preferred when trying to look at bush growth in the near term.

[rraisley]

So, I guess no one uses HD Pro 2014 to insert and grow trees?? And nothing's improved in this area inf 8 years??

I entered everything as logically and methodically as possible, and not only do the trees grow incorrectly, but going back to zero months does not take you back to where you started. My 8', 21' and 33' trees all ended up the same height when going back to zero!

Plus, the library of plants is VERY limiting. Someone above mentioned downloading an additional plant library; is there one available? I haven't been able to find it.