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TestFit 2.19: Garden Apartments & Exclusion Zones

written by
Clifton Harness

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
  • 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
  • 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

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

Garden Site Manual Mode

  • Adjust your automatically-generated geometry on the fly.
Manually rotate garden apartments

Discover how to use all the new garden apartments features in our Knowledge Base article:

Knowledge Base article

Introducing Exclusion Zones & Ponds

  • Introduction of exclusion zones to cut garden and office sites, with custom color and labelling.
  • Introduction of ponds for all site types
Adding ponds to garden apartment site

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  • Fixed outdated manual mode geometry when moving or rotating a site.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.

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