Plants - Classes and visibilites issue

[Playscape]

Hi all,

I am exporting VW sheets as PDFs to submit to clients (2D plans). Some of these plans have a large number of plants in them (anywhere from 200 - 700 plants). The sheer number of plants with all their constituent parts/classes (bloom, colour fill, outline, etc) really inflate the exported PDF (in the neighbourhood of 3MB with plants vs. 400KB without). I have played around with the Render Tab in Plant Settings but can only remove/adjust the shadow and outline, which doesn't affect the file size greatly. Does anyone know if there is any way to perhaps flatten the plant classes for export? Or another potential solution?

I have tried turning off some of the Plant sub-classes in the viewport but they don’t seem to be terribly consistent. I have a plant Grasses-01 (not sure if this is universal). While editing the 2D component of the plant, toggling the Plant-Component-Bloom class on & off does nothing (as I would expect given grass doesn’t bloom flowers). When I have the same plant in a Viewport, toggling the same Plant-Component-Bloom class off the entire plant disappears.

Any advice or thoughts would be appreciated

[kufuffin]

I have edited a lot of the plants that come with VW2016 to be much more simple shapes, lower opactiy, and less flashy colors. I don't know if that would help, but it does ease the eyes. I wonder if you simplified your symbols into just black linework it may be faster.

Sometimes I will use the landscape area tool with the plant line border style so it looks like plant material. Then I'll add a call out that says that area is 25% plant A, 25% plant B, etc. That's pretty vague though, so not recommended if you need precision.