Permiehub

Help Centre & Guides: Other Topics

Managing Object Counts in Your Projects

Learn how to find opportunities to improve the readability of your project by removing parts that do not serve you at the moment.

Tips for Managing Object Limits

The Permiehub Community Plan includes an object limit tailored to student projects and individual property designs. Experience with Permaculture Design Courses has shown that a high number of objects or excessive detail can be a sign to focus on a smaller part of the design. Focusing on one or two acres at a time is often more beneficial for larger blocks during a student project.

Reducing Data Imported by the Base Map Wizard to Base Map Overlay

Unaddressed Base Map Details

While the Base Map Wizard significantly reduces the time needed to draw a base map, you might not require all the data it provides. For instance, contours in forested areas that fall into unmanaged concept zones might not need to be highly detailed. To remove detail you do not want to address in your design, you can choose to delete them.

Contour Line Density

Depending on your location and if you have not yet imported data with Base Map Wizard, you can modify some parts of the import like the contour line density. When using the Advanced Contours, you can choose a lower density to limit the number of contour line objects imported.

Imported Data Replacement

You might have already used the Base Map Wizard and imported useful Base Map and Reference data, but now you are considering to choose a different contour line density. You can choose to delete individual reference images, or select all in your Base Map to delete. After that you can import with Base Map Wizard again while adjusting its settings.

Removals and Recycling in Base Map

Creating the Base Map is crucial to place our design correctly on it, but sometimes we can get caught in the detail of it. There might be areas that you might want to redevelop, redesign, demolish, or recycle the material into your project. Unless your project explores these changes or requires detailed instructions for the parties involved, we recommend not including objects in your Base Map that you are not sure about including in the future. Instead, you might note down the overall area, or conceptualise a new function for it in the Concept Design stage.

Site Sector Markers

Site analysis is the time to mark out important parts of the design. Sometimes it might be easy to get caught in the detail and lose sight of what will be truly relevant for our Concept Design. There are a few tips that we think might keep the number of objects low and improve the clarity of your design.

Wind Markers

Prevailing wind direction or a wind tunnel can be marked with an arrow and resized. If you find that you placed multiple arrows next to each other to symbolise an exposed windy area, you might want to change the arrow into a custom area instead.

Wet or Sunny Patch

Similar to the windy areas, you can change the wet and sun exposure markers to a custom shape to better represent larger areas on your design.

Unaddressed Observations

Not all observations will affect our design. If you are not planning to address an observation as an opportunity or an issue in your Concept Design overlay, marking these might not be necessary.

Balancing Old and New By Weighing Object Functions

If a large portion of the limit is used during the Base Map stage, it may indicate that the level of detail is obscuring the overall beneficial relationships in the drawing. You might have already placed multiple similar objects in the base map, but in the next overlays of site analysis and concept design, they might not individually connect through relationships, inputs, and outputs to other zones or observations. Such a lack of individual connection might help you identify that they would be better replaced with one productive area.

Optimised Guilds & Plantings in Base Map or Detailed Design

Sometimes we might want to capture more detail, especially when it comes to planting. Without compromising the quality of the information, we can declutter the design with the following tips.

• Areas instead of individual plants are particularly useful when it comes to self-seeding annuals. Even if we wanted to, we might have trouble placing individual plants on our design to capture the randomness of self-seeded plants.
• Guilds absorbed into the trees’ descriptions are a way to declutter design areas like orchards and food forests.
• Planting rows for complex systems are a way to make your design more readable and easier to change.
• Garden beds without planting inside could use a description to note down what has been planted or what will be planted in the future.

Reducing Repetition of Similar Objects in Detail Design

Another effective way to reduce the number of objects, while also making the design more readable, is to group rows of trees or garden beds. Especially when developing a design for a semi-commercial or commercial system, marking every individual repeating object is often unnecessary. During the design process, focusing on their overall function is often more productive. If you find that the primary functions of a group of objects are identical, it might be better to replace these with a single entity.