I really like Smudge. It gives a lot of depth to the model!

Thank you so much Fredo! It's amazing and exactly what we need working with topography.

Thom,
This is an excellent plugin and one that is a part of my 3D printing workflow. Thank you for the time and know-how you put into making it!

Congratulations! Best to you and the team in the days ahead!

It's a great model with nice details everywhere you look. I have fond memories of going to the Standard Oil gas station in my town. It was a place to solve the world's (car's) problems.

Very nice Dave!

I like styles that show off the simplicity of the model (and SketchUp) and others that give a look so complex that people can't believe it can be done in SketchUp without post-processing.

Try one of these trees from the 3D Warehouse.
http://goo.gl/RKm5f
These have had the 2D tree "cut out" from the the image surface so they give a decent shadow. Try it and report back if the problem remains.

I have found some success by rotating the contours up by 45 degrees so that they do not overlap vertically. It unfortunately does not solve all of the cliff problems. I do wish the SU team would investigate what is going on with the Sandbox tools. There seems to be some loss of functionality since 7.1.

I took Paul Russam's write up on Dropbox with links and put my Plugins folder in the cloud:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=44852

I compared Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, and Dropbox.
They all executed at the same speed (Google Drive might be slightly faster).
So moving your Plugins to the cloud to better manage them is worth doing!
Here's my blog about this and it gives the steps needed to use Link Shell Extensions (for Windows only sorry to say):
http://sketchupland.posterous.com/sketchup-plugins-in-the-cloud

Thank you for sharing!

By any chance would this effort by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory work with your efforts?
http://openstudio.nrel.gov/
It looks like energy modeling using intelligent SketchUp models. I've not used it, but it looks intriguing.

Really great images! Do you have any tutorials or videos showing how you composite an image?

a fan of your work!

Trees from 3D Warehouse:
http://sketchupland.posterous.com/best-3d-trees-from-3d-warehouse

I have list of textures on my blog:
http://sketchupland.posterous.com/great-texture-websites-for-sketchup-and-photo
There are some repeats, but you may want to check out the ones from Flickr and DeviantArt...

Very nice work!! I like the details (material choices, ledge height, and enclosure). I would love to see photos of how it turns out!
John

I have a blog about SketchUp and landscape design called http://sketchupland.posterous.com/.
It's been more general stuff lately, but I'll have more landscape specific articles soon.
Here is a list of good 3D trees from 3D Warehouse: http://sketchupland.posterous.com/best-3d-trees-from-3d-warehouse.
There are a number of good landscape designers/architects on the forum. Hopefully they will showoff their inspiring work, and show you the ropes.

If you were interested in just creating your own texture, there is a program called brick'n'tiles. It will create a 2D texture with the criteria that you set up based on the textures that you give it.http://www.bricksntiles.com/creating-textures/

I've added an outline around the Deciduous plants so they cast shadows in SketchUp. They are all 2D Face Me plants now. They are in 3 packs in 3D warehouse. Thanks Earth Mover for posting these!
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=767b91245cb3c9eddd39584bc969fb96

The demonstration was incredible. Sculpting tools!

Go Dale Go!