Setting the Date and Time for a Shadows study

KevinKarney

I am just starting on Ruby scripting, so there is probably an obvious answer to this...
I need to be able to change the date and time from within a script and can find nothing in the documentation of how to do this.
Any help would be most appreciated

Chris Fullmer

Welcome!, there lots of us just learning around here right now. Its a great time to learn ruby!

This shows the shadow info for the model.
model = Sketchup.active_model model.shadow_info.to_a.join(', ')

Here is an example of how to adjust the information:
model = Sketchup.active_model shadowinfo = model.shadow_info value = shadowinfo["City"] UI.messagebox value value = shadowinfo["City"]="Denver, CO" UI.messagebox value

And here is a link to the ShadowInfo class in the API:

http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/shadowinfo.html

the []= method is the one that shows how to set the values in the shadowinfo hash. Hope that helps, keep asking questions,

Chris

Jim

Welcome Kevin,

The time and date settings, among others, are stored in the ShadowInfo class.

It acts like an attribute array, so you get and set the values by name;


shadow_info = Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info
time = shadow_info["ShadowTime"]
shadow_info["Longitude"] = 105.2830

F u l l M E R ! (beat me to it.)

Matt666

Just one thing: To know all parameters of a shadow_info entity, you can use .keys
Exemple:

Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info.keys

will returns

["City", "Country", "Dark", "DayOfYear", "DaylightSavings", "DisplayNorth", "DisplayOnAllFaces", "DisplayOnGroundPlane", "DisplayShadows", "EdgesCastShadows", "Latitude", "Light", "Longitude", "NorthAngle", "ShadowTime", "ShadowTime_time_t", "SunDirection", "SunRise", "SunRise_time_t", "SunSet", "SunSet_time_t", "TZOffset", "UseSunForAllShading"]

If you want to know one of these parameters, just do like that:

Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["City"]

KevinKarney

Chris, Mat, Jim
Many thanks - each of your responses added that extra bit to my knowledge. I think I have all I need for the next step of my journey. I am trying to build a virtual sundial correct for any Latitude and Longitude - which may seem a bit of a strange task. But Stetchup has rather a good model of the Earth's movement around the Sun. It correctly distinguishes between solar time - as seen on a sundial - from civil time - as read from your watch. So, with its ability to cast shadows correctly, a sundial simulator should not be too difficult.

I'll keep you posted !