First off, kudos to you for making compelling, descriptive, and beautiful graphics part of your goals for Sketchup. Drawing (or 2d representation of 3D ideas I should say) is a language that is tasked with communicating complex concepts. Designers, engineers, and drafts-people should use every tool at their disposal to create a clear vision.
I actually have worked through, AutoCAD, VectorWorks, and Revit before getting to Sketchup and the arrival has been like coming home. Working in AutoCAD was a demoralizing and soul-crushing part of my career that was so removed from what I thought Architecture would be that I don’t know how anyone stays in the profession. No wonder the graphical quality of CAD-forward drawings left so much to be desired. Forget about shadows and depth, people don’t even use lineweight anymore!
Contrast that with the artful Beaux-Arts works that made something beautiful out of the act of communicating intent. Its a different world.
I think Sketchup helps to bring back at least a sense of that pride in one’s craft, making tools for compelling graphics withing the reach of all of us!
Secondly, I agree with your approach here. This was the basis of my question in
because I’d like to create a plugin where, regardless of where I’m looking, I can set the sun relative to the camera POV. In your case, you would set it to 45 degrees to achieve this effect. In Revit there was a similar feature where you could orient light source relative to view angle that did exactly that.
Hopefully, Trimble will unlock the vaults on this feature so the API can at least access the needed functionality under the hood with Ruby!