Nova Landscape

What Nova Landscape does

Real sites are never flat, and SketchUp has never made terrain easy. Reshaping ground by hand is slow and destructive, building a believable landscape takes hours of component hunting, and the moment a client asks “how many cubic metres are we digging out?” you’re back in a spreadsheet guessing. Nova Landscape closes all of it — it turns SketchUp into a complete terrain, landscape and groundworks tool.

Start from a flat plot or real fetched terrain and sculpt hills, valleys and slopes with brushes that follow every stroke. Then build the site the way it actually looks: scatter boulders that settle naturally into the slope, expose bedrock where the mountain breaks through, plant forest, cut gravel roads across the terrain, and let water fill the low points. Every element follows the ground and stays editable.

Then the serious part. Set the building, and Landscape digs the excavation pit for you — correct side slopes, clean bottom, ready for concrete. Cut and fill show up as a colour-coded heat map, and the quantity report gives you the masses in cubic metres, in and out — the numbers that drive groundworks pricing, straight from the model.

Paired with Nova Geo, you’re doing all of this on the real terrain of the real site — so every grading study, every pit and every volume figure lines up with what the crew meets on site.

Key features

• Terrain sculpting brushes — Sculpt, erode, steps, rake and grade. Pull hills and valleys straight out of the ground; the terrain follows every stroke, non-destructively.
• Rocks & bedrock — Scatter boulder fields with a choice of stone types, and expose bedrock — smooth outcrops or blasted rock — where the terrain breaks open.
• Nature and vegetation — Plant forest and ground cover that follow the terrain, turning a bare surface into a believable site in minutes.
• Roads and paths — Cut a road across the site; it follows the terrain, grades itself in, and stays editable.
• Water — Add ponds and streams that find the low points of your terrain naturally.
• Excavation with correct slopes — Set the building and Landscape digs the pit: proper side slopes, clean bottom, ready for the groundworks plan.
• Cut & fill heat map — See exactly where ground is added and removed, colour-coded on the terrain — a grading decision anyone can read instantly.
• Quantity report — Masses in cubic metres, in and out, broken down by material type — ready for the contractor and the price.
• Building pad — Flatten the platform the house sits on, graded into the surrounding terrain.
• English and Norwegian — the whole panel switches language with one click.

Use cases

• Site grading studies — Test how a building sits on sloping ground, balance cut against fill, and present clear before/after terrain to clients and authorities.
• Excavation and groundworks pricing — Read the dig volume in cubic metres from the quantity report and price earthworks on real numbers instead of rough estimates.
• Building-pit planning — Lay out the excavation with correct side slopes so the dig is understood before a single machine arrives on site.
• Landscape and outdoor design — Shape gardens, slopes and embankments, then dress them with rock, forest, roads and water — a full site presentation inside SketchUp.
• Planning and building applications — Show the project in believable terrain with realistic surroundings, the way authorities and neighbours expect to see it.
• Drainage and level coordination — See where the ground falls, where water will sit, and where levels need to change — early, not on site.
• Client presentation — A sculpted, dressed site turns a bare massing model into something a client immediately recognises and trusts.

Who it’s for

Nova Landscape is built for architects, designers, engineers and builders who work with real sites in SketchUp — anyone who needs ground that behaves like ground, excavation they can trust, and a dig-volume they can put a price on. It’s made by a Norwegian building design company, and it’s at its best paired with Nova Geo.

What you get

• nova-landskap.rbz (works in SketchUp 2023+)
• User guide (PDF) — installation, every brush and tool, excavation and quantity reports
• 12 months of free updates
• Email support
• Perpetual licence — use forever
• Best paired with Nova Geo

System requirements

• SketchUp 2023, 2024, 2025, or 2026
• Windows 10/11 or macOS 12+ (macOS support is in beta — e-mail us if anything misbehaves and we’ll fix it fast)
• Nova Geo recommended for real-terrain fetch (not required for manual shaping)

License

Free 7-day trial, then a one-time purchase: perpetual licence, machine-activated for one computer (one free self-service transfer if you switch machines). Activation is one step — paste the token from your purchase e-mail into the plugin’s licence dialog. Works offline once activated.