Drawing Style and View Controls
The left toolbar hosts two sections that control the look of the working canvas: Drawing Style (visual quality) and Show (visibility and snap toggles).
Drawing Style and View ControlsThe Style & Display flyout — opened by clicking the eye icon in the left toolbar — collects every visual setting that affects how the working canvas looks while you design. It has three tabs: Style (surface rendering and plant display), Display (grid, rulers, overlays, and underlays), and Snap (snapping master switch and per-type toggles). None of these settings touch your exported drawings or Presentation mode renders — they only control the live editing view. Adjusting them is the fastest way to trade visual richness for editing speed on large or complex projects.
PBR Shading — on
Surface material textures (albedo maps) are displayed in both the 2D and 3D editors. Plant symbols and hardscape surfaces show their assigned material. Slightly slower to first load.
The flyout stays open while you continue working so you can make several adjustments at once.
PBR Shading — on with lighting
Enables the full PBR stack — normal maps, roughness/metalness, environment reflections. Available in both 2D and 3D editors. Best sense of the final look while working.
Normal style is ideal during the layout phase when you are placing and resizing shapes — flip to Material when you want to check how finishes read.
Plant style — Balloon
Plants render as coloured sphere/cone proxies. Very fast. Good for planning layouts when material quality is not important.
Material mode loads texture images from the server. On a slow connection, surfaces appear briefly as flat colors before the textures arrive.
Plant style — Leaves
Plants render as detailed 3D cluster-card trees with foliage geometry. Slower but gives a strong sense of planting scale and character. Available in both 2D and 3D editors.
Watercolor style is well suited to design-review sessions where you want the canvas to feel sketch-like. It is separate from the Watercolor render in Presentation mode, which produces a higher-quality output image.
Show flyout
The eye icon in the left toolbar opens the Show flyout. Toggle grid visibility, grid size, rulers, axis, canvas background, underlay visibility, annotation overlays, and snap settings — all in one place.
Style & Display flyout
The eye icon in the left toolbar opens the Style & Display flyout. Toggle grid visibility, grid size, rulers, axis, canvas background, underlay visibility, annotation overlays, and snap settings — all in one place.
Configure snapping behavior
Click the Snap tab. The master Snapping toggle enables or disables all snap behavior at once. Below it, individual switches control Grid Snap, Object Snap, Angle Snap, Magnetic, and Snap to Canvas. When Object Snap is on, a sub-section expands to let you enable or disable individual snap types: Endpoint, Midpoint, Center, Intersection, Nearest, Tangent, and Perpendicular. When Angle Snap is on, a dropdown sets the increment to 5°, 10°, 15°, 30°, 45°, or 90°.
For the smoothest editing experience on large drawings, use Balloon plants with Normal style. Switch to Material and Leaves when you want to review how the planting reads. For presentation-quality output use Presentation mode — the canvas style controls have no effect on exported renders.
All three style settings (Normal, Material, Watercolor) are workspace preferences stored per session. They do not affect any saved drawing data, and other collaborators viewing the same drawing can have a different style set simultaneously.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my drawing look flat with no textures?
The surface rendering is set to Normal, which deliberately skips texture images for speed. Open the Style & Display flyout (eye icon in the left toolbar), go to the Style tab, and click Material to enable surface textures and reflections.
Will changing the drawing style change my exported images or Presentation mode renders?
No. The Style & Display settings only affect the live editing canvas. Presentation mode has its own style controls and always renders from the saved drawing data, not the canvas view settings.
The Snap tab is missing — where did it go?
The Snap tab is only visible when the snapping feature is included in your subscription plan. If you do not see it, check your account plan or contact support to confirm snapping access.
How do I stop snap points jumping to a grid cell when I am trying to place something precisely?
Open the Snap tab in the Style & Display flyout and turn off Grid Snap. You can leave Object Snap on to still snap to endpoints, midpoints, and intersections of existing shapes, while freely positioning points off the grid.
What is the difference between Adaptive and Fixed grid visuals?
Adaptive mode scales the visible grid lines as you zoom in and out, always showing a manageable density of cells at any zoom level. Fixed mode always shows grid lines at the exact cell size you set in Grid Size, which can become very dense at high zoom or very sparse when zoomed out. Adaptive is the default and works best for most workflows.