TreeLocate Drawing Office Enhancing Design & Build Support To Customers

TreeLocate have provided Design & Build services for artificial tree and topiary projects to customers for many years.  Lately projects have been increasing in complexity with greater demand for accurately recorded design details and a drawing office has been created.

Over the last couple of years, a strong artistic and technical drawing service has been growing out of the skills of several TreeLocate employees, which was recently referred to informally as “the drawing office”.  Resident “draftsman” Garry HJ provides all the CAD, engineering, and technical drawings generated on computer, with graphics illustrator Roy Morris providing the pencil and paper artist’s renderings.  Together with input and sketches from other staff, they provide fabrication designs and visualisations to clients.  Garry also creates visualisations from digital photograph editing and manipulation.

What began primarily as a support service, to give clients images of how their built shrubs and trees would look, now also creates and illustrates briefing documents for major projects, fabrication plans for internal and external engineering, structural plans for certification by structural surveyors, planting plans, and more.  Architects, designers, and project managers now have a go-to contact to discuss the technical details of their product realisation discussions.

Example Drawing Office Projects

Click on any of the example pictures below to see them larger.

Set 1.  Sample extrapolation of variants from a single photo, which were used in first stage technical discussions with a client who placed an order for a dozen and a half preserved-trunk / faux canopy Olive trees between five and seven metres tall.

(Left-to-right – Original 4-metre sample tree built for customer viewing.  Same 4-metre tree with background cleaned away.  Same tree with canopy filled out to 5-metre and rounded crown.)

Set 2.  Mixed-disciplines’ images set for customer presentation – also a customer looking for a large quantity of preserved-trunk Olive trees with artificial branches and canopies.

(Left-to-right – Pre-assembly artist’s visualisation of a preserved-trunk Olive tree with sparse canopy supplied in large square planter, to a total height of 4-metres.  Finished tree fabricated to drawing and specification.  Engineering cutaway drawing of planter assembly.)

Set 3.  Silver Birch tree images set and final sales briefing extract.

(Left-to-right (top) – Original full-canopy young silver birch artificial coppice in our showroom.  Same photo with background and lower canopy cleaned away to give a more ball-like canopy shape, plus main stems re-detailed to show typical bark.  Example coppice built with Copper Birch stems and customer’s required canopy shape.  (Bottom) Sales briefing picture sheet of live Silver Birch and artificial stems detail, plus artist’s visualisations of coppices with differing stem counts.)

Set 4.  A major project for for an overseas client required far more than just artificial trees built.  In order to mount the trees in-situ, significant steel stands and base-plates had to be designed and fabricated to fine tolerances.  Some were to be mounted onto assemblies built into place by the structural contractor on behalf of other contractors such as the HVAC designer and lighting designer/contractor.  Months of direct collaborative discussions with the client, architects, contractors, and designers, resulted in TreeLocate’s drawing office creating and promulgating the engineering fabrication plans, which were passed to external engineers who produced the stands without further queries.

(Left-to-right – (top left)  Fabrication plans for one of the tree stand sizes shown in the lower photos, further detail was included on an additional drawing.  (Top right)  Site installation levels sectional elevation for illustrating to architects and client the height variances of “trunk roots” due to mounting point elevations and “above floor” elevations of trunk roots required by the interior landscape designers.  (Bottom left)  Assorted size tree stands fabricated from the drawings produced by the TreeLocate drawing office.  (Bottom centre)  One of the taller stands with upper and lower sections lowered into each other.  (Bottom right)  Lower stand sections showing the locking bolts to hold the two sections together.)

Set 5.  The individually largest fully faux tree we’ve built to date was completed in record time at the start of 2014.  Designed in-house from an architect’s outline based off a concept sketch, the internal steel frame had to be accurately drawn and submitted for structural surveyor’s testing and approval, with strength certificates supplied to the customer before installation.  The finished tree was displayed at the stand of a global manufacturer at a major mobile communications exhibition and used as a delivery prop for daily promotions during the event.

(Left-to-right – (top left)  Original visualisation concept sketch by TreeLocate.  (Top right)  One of the structural engineering drawings submitted to surveyors for strength calculations and certification – created by the TreeLocate drawing office.  (Bottom left)  The almost built tree in situ at the telecoms exhibition venue.  (Bottom right)  One of the main branches during installation assembly.)

Can we help you to win more contracts?

The skills and facilities of our drawing office team are available to our B2B customers to assist you in winning contracts and successfully tendering for bespoke and custom-made artificial landscaping and tree projects.

The TreeLocate drawing office can assist with or provide for you:

• concept and visualisation imagery
• photo manipulation and montaging
• design and drafting of technical briefings
• architectural plans extrapolation and simplification, for designer & landscaper planning
• technical liaison with architects, engineers, main contractors, and surveyors
• creation and supply of assembly, engineering, fabrication, site-installation, and technical drawings

In all cases, your first contact point should be your regular account manager at TreeLocate, inform them that you require drawing office support.

(Below – Extract from an architectural drawing reworked during technical discussions with a client’s engineers.)