Bloody wonderful. Agreed, that is much closer. That did, indeed fix the location issue (doesn't still say Boulder, CO any more). I'm still having to manually change the time zone from -7 to +0 but I can certainly live w/ that! Thanks a ton, glad we finally figured this out.

Only thing I'd suggest is adding a caveat in the text of your script and maybe in that other post as well to folks, that if the screen goes dark after running the script to go to Window -> Model Info -> Location -> Custom Location button and change time zone to UTC-0

Thanks again!

-Brodie

an image to reiterate what I'm saying

Very interesting. Here's what I'm finding. Using your plugin does indeed change the location in terms of latitude and longitude. What it doesn't change is the name (still Boulder instead of Elevations 45 Shadows or whatever) or (here's the important part) the time zone. Time zone stays at -7 (Boulder's time zone) rather than switching to +0 (the time zone in the skp file you posted).

Starting a new drawing, using your script and then manually changing the time zone produced results identical to the results of your sketchup file.

HOWEVER, when I open your SU file the shadows aren't truely 45 degrees. Well, I take that back. They are 45 degrees, however the shadows aren't as long as I'd expect them. For example, if a block is protruding out 1 foot you'd expect the shadow to travel 45 degrees and to stop 1' down and 1' to the right. W/ your script it travels 45 degrees but not quite the full 1' down and 1' over. Check out the example below. On my screen the shadow stops just before the purple face. I'd expect it to travel to the far end of the purple face.

I think we're getting close here. On your screen does the shadow cover up the purple face in my example because on mine it doesn't.

-Brodie

45test 1.skp

TIG, could you post a skp file w/ a saved scene using your ruby so I can open it and see what happens?

-Brodie

I took a quick crack at it. This file has 3 scenes. I created the first 2 w/ shadows on at different times of the day, then created the 3rd one using the ruby (which turned everything dark as it has been). Going back to my other scenes did indeed change the time range back to normal however everything was still dark, weird.

-Brodie

shadow test.skp

@wo3dan said:

@al hart said:

I would like to add a section plane perpendicular to the current view.

I think this is not precisely possible in a perspective view, but it still might come close.
Does anyone know how to do this?
and/or how to add geometry or constructions lines perpendicular to the current view
(which could then be used to create the section in another view)

Tough question.

The way I see this question is:
There is a certain view needed (for whatever reason), let's say just found by orbiting. But there is no geometry (face) aligned to the screen in that particular view. How to create a section plane aligned to the screen? So the answers given by Brodie and Jean fail.
I would also like to know the answer that Al Hart is after. For now I don't know.

Wo3Dan

Yeah, that would be the scenario that would be most difficult to solve. However, I'm having a difficult time envisioning that scenario.

Regardless, I wonder if there's some ruby script solution out there. Maybe something that draws a face perpendicular to the view that one could then use to take the section plane from.

-Brodie

@tig said:

The script forces a new place / country and north-angle, + sun=angle so that the shadows work at 45 degrees on that elevation. As I said I can't get it to reproduce here and It's fine on simialr set ups to yours... ???

.

hrm...guess I'll have to settle w/ my ol' 48 degree manual shadows

The other weird thing I've noticed is what your ruby does to the time settings in the shadow settings dialog box. Don't know if this is intentional or not. If you open the first skp file RV posted you'll see that it sets the time to go from 11:10am to 11:01pm. I'm not sure if it's always this range but it is always changed to a very odd range and as I recall this affects all other shadow settings. I'd have to go and verify but I think if you've already got a scene set up, say scene 1. and then you go into scene 2 and apply the ruby and go back to scene 1 the slider is in the same position but since the range changed what was, say 1pm, is now, say, 10pm.

Let me know if any of that make sense or if you need me to go and verify all that stuff. Don't know if it'll help you.

-Brodie

slap me if I'm misunderstanding the question but I can think of 2 solutions. 1) if you're view is aligned w/ a particular face of the model then take your section from there and it should align w/ that face which will then align w/ your view. But if you're asking this that probably isn't the case. So 2) don't forget that section planes can be rotated just like anything else. I'd think you could create a section plane and rotate it until it looks like it's as close as you can get it. If you can be a little flexible w/ your view, once it's close you can select the section plane, right click, and click "Align View" and your view will shift a bit to perfectly align w/ the plane.

-Brodie

My problem is, indeed, identical to RV's problem. I'm on Windows XP w/ SU6. What seems to happen is that the degree of the sun angle will change but from what you've said the location should also change, but it does not. It simply stays at Boulder, CO. I wonder if the script looks for something that it can't find on my computer (like the location of 45 Degree Shadow)? I don't know ruby so I'm just guessing. The script would come in really helpful though if it get's fixed. Let me know if there's any more info I can provide that would help you diagnose the problem.

Thanks,

-Brodie

I think so. The problem occurs in 2 situations. One is a totally opaque round tube. The other is on 3d cars which I've "painted" w/ a translucent white so they're sort of ghosty. I believe the cars do, indeed, have the white color on both sides of each face.

I'll keep that in mind though to double check.

-Brodie

Yes and no. They aren't profile lines in the SU terminology sense (which are turned off), however they are lines along the profile of my curved surfaces (not along any straight surfaces).

I think I figured out a way around it. It also got me much crisper lines as well. I exported the dwg in hidden line mode to a DWG, printed the DWG to a pdf and then brought that into my image editor and erased the white background. viola!

-Brodie

I'm exporting some images for post-processing. One of those will be w/ edges OFF and shadows ON. But I'm still seeing some edges along curved surfaces (these show up even if shadows & edges are both turned off). It seems like this has been discussed before but I couldn't find any threads.

I can't turn off the layer the lines are showing on because I still need the objects to cast shadows. For example I've got some cars that I need the shadows to show underneath but they are showing edges on the top along the edge of the car.

Is there a way to get rid of these lines?

Thanks,

-Brodie

Yeah, I'd agree with that, there must be a better way. It's been a long time since I've used other modelers so I don't recall how they work but I don't think they suffer the same problem. Where I really run into this issue is in wireframe mode. I'd use it more often but you it's nigh impossible to do detail work in as your mouse has to hover over that 1 pixel wide line to zoom into it. I'm constantly zooming past the area I want.

I do work in AutoCAD a lot though, who's zoom is much better. Be nice to see that fixed for workability purposes. One way to make the whole process a bit faster w/o having to soup up performance by the SU crew.

-Brodie

Yeah, I think basically the way the zoom works on the scroll wheel is that it's relative to the object your mouse is hovering over. So if you're really far from the object your zoom will go faster, if you're close the increments are smaller. Usually you don't notice, but say you're working on a window and one of the frame pieces is missing. Well, naturally you are already pretty close to the model but you hover your mouse over the sliver of window frame that's missing and zoom in to get a better view. NO!!!!! I just zoomed like 30'! (do I sound bitter? )

Basically the issue is that since you're hovering over nothing SU assumes you want to zoom really fast. So in that situation what you want to do is hover over the adjacent glass or building zoom in and then pan down a bit to home in on the area you're working on.

As for panning freaking out, I'm not sure. I don't think I've had that problem before but it could be a similar issue.

-Brodie

Reporting back w/ my findings...

I've been using what seems to be the latest driver as of this writing (178.13) for a couple days now pretty intensively and it's been working great for me.

Basically the performance w/ AA enabled (I think I'm at x4) as my old driver was w/o AA. Beyond that I don't have the weird graphics issues I had before on my old driver w/ AA on.

-Brodie

Whenever I use elev45shadows.rb to try and get 45 degree shadows it basically sets the shadow settings so that my whole model is in shadow. It also causes a weird problem where the times of day along my time slider change. I can't remember the exact times but it's something like instead of say 6am-9pm it'll go to 5pm-8am.

Anyone have this problem w/ the script? Know of a fix?

-Brodie

Using components will cut down your file size. If you model 1 dohickey, make it a component, and use it 300 times, sketchup only has to remember the geometry from the 1 dohickey and all the locations. My understanding of "groups" is that they don't work the same way. SU will still have to remember the geometry for 300 dohickies as well as all of their locations. I actually don't use groups at all as I'm not sure what value they have over a component. The only thing that comes to mind is that groups don't show up in your component window which could get clogged up but I don't really use that window.

But here's the big distinction I haven't seen mentioned. Components help you when you save your file for that file to be smaller. But they don't help you when you're panning and zooming around your model, which seems to have been your original problem. When it comes time for SU to show you on the screen what 300 dohickies looks like, it still has to calculate all of the geometry from the 300 dohickies whether they're components or not. So you'll find the comments regarding simplifying your geometry will help the problem you were having w/ rotating your model. Bezier curves look cool and sometimes you have to use them but they aren't very efficient (lots of faces and edges = sketchup)

-Brodie

Hrm...looks like that's only for Vista, I'm running XP 32 bit. I think I'm going to try the latest one 178.13 and see what happens.

-Brodie

Anyone w/ an 8800GT happy w/ their driver? Right now I've got 6.14.11.7516 and it works ok w/o the Anti-Aliasing turned on. When I turn AA on in the OpenGL options the lines look much better but I often get an issue where as I'm working for a second the colors will shift around the screen and lock up for a second (sorry, I can't recall the name for it but I know it's a common graphics card issue).

I just tried the 169.02 which was the SU recommended one but had similar issues.

-Brodie

Just to add one more tip for anyone stumbling across this later on...I've occasionally had a weird issue where even purge won't take care of a massive file size. It's been awhile but I think it tends to occur when you sometimes when you delete big chunks of a model as I recall.

Anyway, the end-all be-all purge is to turn on all your layers, copy everything and paste into a fresh drawing. This has helped me a couple times in the past.

-Brodie