Different timezone per scene?
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We often set up sun studies, with top down perspektives, black&white, with shadows at different times of the day as well as well as different times of the year. That means some are within DST and some are not.
Previously we just set different timezone for each scene. Now I'm concerned these old scenes will be incorrect when we open them again. Something I will need to stress as it can have quite an impact on the project if the shadows are wrong.
For new ones I could just offset the time by one hour, but this whole change in SU7 really bothers me.
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I don't see how this should be a proble for you Thom, since the sun only rises for about 1 month out of the year up in your territory, yeah?
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...not that far away. this time of year, it's dark when I go to work and it's dark when I go home.
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@thomthom said:
We often set up sun studies, with top down perspektives, black&white, with shadows at different times of the day as well as well as different times of the year. That means some are within DST and some are not.
Previously we just set different timezone for each scene. Now I'm concerned these old scenes will be incorrect when we open them again. Something I will need to stress as it can have quite an impact on the project if the shadows are wrong.
For new ones I could just offset the time by one hour, but this whole change in SU7 really bothers me.
It would be interesting to open one up and we what happens (with a copy or autosave turned off of course). Seems like for a given scene there are two outcomes.
A. The shadow is shown properly but the time shown has been altered.
B. Or the time stays the same but the shadow shows incorrectlyI'd like A vs. B, but I guess there is an option C as well.
C. SU 7 while it doesn't allow you to change the time zone by scene does respect old files which already have scenes setup this way. However you wouldn't be able to make new files from scratch like this, and once you change the time zone in your new SU7 file, you may lose the ability to offset again (for that file). -
Will have to dig out one of the older projects when I get back at the office. Think I'd even set up a template with the common dates,shadow settings and scenes so I could just import any project.
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I had a request to animate the North Angle between scenes. This may be related since these similar attributes are stored in the ShadowInfo. I checked V6 and it remembers the North Angle between Scenes, where as the latest 7.1 does not.
Then I noticed a Page has it's own ShadowInfo (as well as the Model,) but setting the NorthAngle attribute for the page does not work either.
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Looks like the needs of Google earth have dictated SU progress, this was possible before, have never needed it but do remember having shadows set up for different locations for different scenes before (version 5 I think)
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I'm sure it worked as late as SU6, as that's the SU version I started using.
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Locking down the north angle and model location (including time zones apparently) on a per model basis (instead of a per-scene basis) was implemented in 7.0. I'm pretty sure it had to do with some desireable Google Earth workflows, and simplifying things on their end for G.E interaction.
I would guess they had to keep the placeholders in the scene info for old model compatability. But I think SU 7 ignores it. Maybe there is a possible workaround using a scenes observer Thom? Write a little Web Dialog that lets the user input angle and location and such and then store it in the scene info or wherever it gets stored (or wherever you want to put it). Then change the model location each time the user updates a scene. Well, i'm sure its more complex than my quick, shallow outline. But it might be possible if the scene observers are working well enough?
Chris
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Here is my current setup for showing shadows from different locations. Mainly want to do this to make North facing elevation look better.
For most project I generally break the project into a few major components that I can export to external files to save versions of the project.
- Building
- Site
- Landscaping (trees site furniture etc)
For one project in particular I saved all of these together as a master component. There was someone else working on a presentation, and I just had them swap out the master component when the needed it. Also the file had lots of high res photo matches and I was emailing across the country. So rather than re-sending the big file with the scenes, I sent the stripped down component without any scene info.
This same thing can apply to have the same model shown from different locations or orientations; The trick is I used a separate SU file for each one, and then just imported the master component. Every time I updated the model, I would then update the component instance.
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I am currently using two extra scenes for my sun study of two different dates. I import the main model into each of the other models which is set up to their own time/date/timezone.
Works. But it still bothers me that this change was made in regard to maintaining old models/projects.
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I can get a nice animation of the NorthAngle when clicking Scenes (using my plug-in,) but it doesn't work when playing the animation, nor does it export as video.
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So are we saying per-Scene Shadow Info is obsolete, and this is not a bug?
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No, scenes do have different settings for shadow - time and darkness lightness etc. but it appear that the timezone property for scenes are ignored. This is not mentioned in the manual at all.
I reported it as a but - still awaiting reply. (SU-0623)
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@thomthom said:
No, scenes do have different settings for shadow - time and darkness lightness etc. but it appear that the timezone property for scenes are ignored. This is not mentioned in the manual at all.
Actually - I'm not really sure. It's all confusing what's been changed.
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I said it above, but maybe got skipped over, I think those values are there for legacy support. I think that is probably where SU 6 kept them, and read them. But SU 7 does not, and its on purpose.
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hm... well, shadow info, time/date lightness, darkness on/off is set per page. But timezone is now dead except when it belongs to
Model. -
Which fits perfectly with my theory that they removed anything that might appear to change the location of a model from the scenes. The model still holds info there, but SU does not read it. It only reads location info from the model object. And time zone could be considered a location info.
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@chris fullmer said:
And time zone could be considered a location info.
This is where I disagree.
It'd be interesting to see what Google replies to my bug report though.
Probably be worth asking them to clarify the changes into the manual as well. -
@chris fullmer said:
Which fits perfectly with my theory that they removed anything that might appear to change the location of a model from the scenes. The model still holds info there, but SU does not read it. It only reads location info from the model object. And time zone could be considered a location info.
And yet - you can have different North direction per scene...
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