Funny Shadow Business

Hi Sketchuppers,

Please see screen shot. Can you see the shadows are not complete on some of the faces? There are no duplicate faces. I used ThomThom’s Cleanup3 and it fixed a bunch of things, but it still is behaving funny. The shadows acutally behave the worst in this Hidden Line style, whereas in other styles such as Shaded, there are no problems.

The model came from an imported dwg and I wouldn’t bother asking this if it weren’t for the fact that when I export the shadows as an image file it shows up quite pronounced.

Can anybody help?

model : Component_3.skp (42.7 KB)

Have you changed Solar North?

I did on the model that this component was saved from yeah… What Should I do?

Hang on a minute. Due to the Solar North angle, I can’t get the shadows to show on those faces at all.

OK. I reset Solar North to run down the negative green axis instead of the default positive so I could get the shadow position to match your image.

I’m not getting the shadows on the faces like you show with the unshaded bits. I expect it’s a graphics card issue. The sun is so high overhead it’s on the verge of not casting the shadows.

It looks a little rough way in the back left on mine but that’s also graphics artifact. When zoomed in a little more, it goes away.

With Solar North angle and time set as in your screen shot, the sun isn’t high enough to cast shadows on those walls. What lat/long do you have set for the model? The SKP file you shared is not geo-located.

By the looks of it, to get the same orientation you would have to rotate the model 90 deg anti-clockwise, or Counter-clockwise as it’s said over the pond, I believe.

Hmm yeah right enough I have changed the shadows so they are not so slight on most of the affected faces and it goes away. It must be as you say a graphics card thang. Thanks again for your help. It’s not essential that the shadows are set exactly as I had them.

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I don’t geolocate these models normally. I find it easier to approximate the shadows cast, by looking up the address and look at it’s aspect, on Google Earth - just to get midday or afternoon shadows.

That’s a workable solution. If shadows are more important for certain projects, you can add a location. Then you can easily check shadows throughout the year if you need to.

It interesting that because the shadows were so slight that SU and the graphics card were working to try to figure it out as it did. It is actually an almost-correct way that the shadows would look on a surface that is just being touched by the sunlight - with the parts of the surface closest to the sun being affected. This should only really happen with a textured surface of course, where the texture effectively shades the rest of the face, and you’d get his kind of look. ISH.

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