Trick for Creating Soft Shadows in SketchUp

[Abe Megahed]

Greetings,

Here's a little trick for creating soft shadows right in SketchUp.
http://www.hypercosm.com/support/how_to/modeling/creating_soft_shadows_using_sketchup/index.html

I've had a number of people ask me about shadow optimization techniques for web publishing SketchUp models using Hypercosm. I figured that the technique might be of general interest to the SketchUp community so I thought I'd post it.

This technique has two main benefits over the standard SketchUp shadowing algorithm:

Advantages:

1. it maintains a good frame rate and
2. the soft shadows lend an additional degree of realism.

There are also a few disadvantages:

1. it handles ground plane shadows only
2. it's not dynamic

-abe.

Abe Megahed
CTO, Hypercosm
megaheda@hypercosm.com
(608) 229-2829