America’s most popular for-rent housing style by volume is by far Garden Apartments. Today we release a fully functional garden building editor, site plan configurator, manual edit tools, and exclusion zones. This is TestFit’s fourteenth configurator!
Garden Building Editor
- For the first time, we’ve taken a Kit-Of-Parts approach to building-level data with garden apartments. With the building editor approach, you can effectively nest units into buildings, and then replicate the buildings with units included.
![Unit picker garden apartments](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6490c2489d786f8a986670d1/64a4820a4e5ed4af99c207fe_Unit-picker-gif.gif)
- Intelligent parametric editor. Can reuse units, mitigate circulation space automatically, have stairways automatically move based on changes such as corridor width & more.
![Garden apartments inputs corridor and staircase](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6490c2489d786f8a986670d1/64a4820b4e5ed4af99c20833_Inputs-GIF.gif)
- We’ve added to our existing co-creation tools and have improved our site entry tools.
![Eay to move elements and intuitive edits in garden apartnements](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6490c2489d786f8a986670d1/64a4820b4e5ed4af99c2083c_Clubhouse-Garden-Style-4-Levels.gif)
Garden Site Solver
- Input building + site + parking = automatic allocation of buildings & parking across the site
- Automatic surface parking ratio solving
![Surface parking ratio changes garden apartments](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6490c2489d786f8a986670d1/64a4820a4e5ed4af99c207f1_Parking-Ratio-Flex-4-Levels.gif)
Garden Site Manual Mode
- Adjust your automatically-generated geometry on the fly.
![Manually rotate garden apartments](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6490c2489d786f8a986670d1/64a4820b4e5ed4af99c2083f_Manual-Rotate-Garden-Style-4-Levels.gif)
- More about Manual Mode.
Discover how to use all the new garden apartments features in our Knowledge Base article:
Introducing Exclusion Zones & Ponds
- Introduction of exclusion zones to cut garden and office sites, with custom color and labelling.
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6490c2489d786f8a986670d1/64e66cc1ea2e59efc6fed1f4_2-19-Garden-Easement-Dragging-Small.gif)
- Introduction of ponds for all site types
![Adding ponds to garden apartment site](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6490c2489d786f8a986670d1/64a4820b4e5ed4af99c20837_Pond-Feature.gif)
Surface Parking Improvements
- Added snaps to simplify drawing adjacent parallel parking rows for manual mode, site boundaries, and roads.
Other Improvements & Bug Fixes
- Added a preference to save to older SketchUp versions.
- Added a log out option to the menu bar.
- Improved map tile loading for high dpi screens.
- Fixed missing text showing setback distances in the plan view.
- Fixed outdated manual mode geometry when moving or rotating a site.
- Fixed undo/redo behavior for several manual mode operations.
- Fixed manual surface parking layouts when surrounded by massing.
- Fixed manual mode remove parking option deleting the wrong segments.
- Fixed GUI drag handle size for high-dpi screens.
- Fixed “apply to all edges” operation for site setbacks.
- Fixed over-counted street parking stalls in master plan parking tabulation.
- Fixed cent values in the deal editor for abbreviated inputs.
- Fixed some amenities being un-interactive after duplication.
- Fixed the color swatch button sometimes closing the amenity context menu.
- Fixed some duplicate walls in the Dynamo Parts node.
- Fixed townhouse driveway placement for units without a garage.
- Fixed missing stairs on short dead ends in high density sites.
- Fixed corner and dead end units being placed despite their mix set to 0.
- Fixed invalid gitf export data when certain road features were present.
- Fixed which fields are shown in the PDF tabulation for office sites.
- Fixed unit attachments disappearing when working with multiple sites.