Using Shadows primarily for illustration purposes
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At the preliminary design stage, I use shadows in my architectural models just to illustrate the building’s massing. I set up separate scenes viewing the different sides of the model at different angles. At this point, I’m not particularly concerned with the actual sun location.
Before the latest service release of SU7 each scene seemed to keep track of the model location or at least the orientation of north. Now everything is global and changing it means the shadows in all the views change.
I think something in the release notes indicated that the developers considered this a bug fix (only one geographic location per model). I don’t agree. I think the behavior should at least be toggle-able. I know the north side of a building isn’t going to get direct sunlight, but it’s helpful to be able to position shadows to highlight architectural features.
Fortunately, at this point Layout seems to retain the shadow information of what the scene looked like when it was updated in the “Scenes” dialog box (different location/north orientation) when you insert one from the model and doesn’t change it like SU does when you tab from scene to scene.
I prefer the behavior before the fix. Or is there something I'm missing?
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You can still change the date and time for every scene independently of eachother. What you can't do anymore is change the location of the model per scene. So if the model is in San Francisco in one scene, you can't put it in Delhi in the next scene. But you can definitely have a Jul11 9:00am scene and a Dec15th 8:00pm scene in the same model with no problems.
Chris
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But you can't change the north orientation like you could beforehand. If a rectilinear building is positioned squarely north, south, east, & west you're not going to have much in the way of shadowing options on the north elevation no matter how much you change the date and time. I used to just change the North orientation angle from 0 to 180.
I'll just have to see if setting it at 45 degrees (or some non-90 degree multiple) will give a little more flexibility.
Again, I wish there was something like a check box so one could opt for the old behavior...
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Oh yes, thats right. Changing the north direction was also allowed in the passed. That did in fact get "fixed".
Chris
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Not a very good workaround, but you could out each orientation on a separate layer then change the visibility of the layers with each scene.
Could get quite heavy but should be ok on a small model.
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As I said, I can bring scenes into Layout, and they retain the shadow positions that resulted after I changed the solar orientation (and saved/updated the scenes) even when I make changes to the geometry in the SU model and update it in Layout.
So that’s a workaround for me but it wouldn’t help somebody with the free version of SketchUp as it doesn’t come with Layout. I just hope the SU guys don’t decide to “fix” Layout so that this stops working. Then it would be back to making shadow changes and immediately exporting an image, going to the next scene and repeating, etc…. or trying something like your suggestion.
I’m still hoping a future service release will include an unfix to this change or at least make it an option.
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It might be possible to do in Ruby script. I'm not sure though, the system might just overwrite any changes made to the north orientation made by ruby.
Chris
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If one would update a Page/Scene with the non-standard location orientation, I guess one could later navigate to that page and when SU changes the shadows according to the standard, run a Ruby script that goes to the Pages collection, find the correct page, get its stored shadow_info, and set the Model’s differing shadow_info (probably just the North Arrow key) to the same value(s).
One might want to name the scene/page in such a way so one would remember that the shadows are non-standard and to run the routine before you export...
Richard
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RichH,
Assuming you still have V6 installed:
Saving your file to V6 from V7 will allow the desired shadow manipulation...but likely you knew that.What I did not know, and why I am posting, is that Layout 2 will permit SU V6 Import.
So having different shadow locales per scene is still possible via SU V6 & LO 2.Best,
C -
Charlie, Thanks. That’s another way that’ll work.
The info that comprises shadow information and the way it is stored suggests that unfixing the “fix” or making it optional shouldn’t be that hard to do. When one clicks on a different scene tab, SU should simply use the scene’s stored associated geographical/north arrow information as it did before rather than ignoring it.
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