How do I automate Shadow Analysis?

[ajalloul]

Hello,

I am trying to export shadows at 1 hour intervals at a set date of the year as JPEGs. Is there a way to automate this rather than manually changing the hour and then exporting the scene as a JPEG?

Thank you!

[Box]

You can do it with 2 scenes, set the first scene with the beginning time and the second with the end time. Set the scene transition to 1sec, set the export frame rate to 8 per sec, you may need to do 10 per sec and remove top and tail.
I did a quick version of that and got this in the export.

[eric-s]

You can also look into this extension: Extension | SketchUp Extension Warehouse

I’ve used it in the past and it works pretty well. It shows the summary by hour or month or all combined.

You can also automatically export every hour for the entire year (=146 images).

[technomagus]

Revisiting this: I’m trying to create a dawn-to-dusk shadow animation from a fixed pov that runs through every daylight hour for a whole year. I’ve created two scenes, the first at sunrise on 1 jan, the second at sunset on 31 dec. I’m now stumped as to how to run through the animation either live or to export as an MP4 - it just doesn’t seem to do what’s needed, as I end up with a very short video on which of course it’s not apparent what I’m looking at.

So I’m looking for output of shadow movements across every day for a full year, with an overlay (especially in the saved video) of day and time.

I’m mostly Mac-based but also have a 24-vcore AMD Windows 10 machine (the Win machine has more RAM, but the Mac is faster). Sketchup Pro 2025.

TIA…

[eric-s]

You can’t really do that. And I’m not sure you need to. Let’s think about it for a second, each day’s shadow is slightly different so you’d need to export a full days shadow movement across an entire day, times 365. But then how do you display it?

When I’ve done shadow studies in the past, I’ve narrowed it down to 3 key days: Winter Solstice (sun’s lowest point in the sky), Summer Solstice (sun’s highest point in the sky), and Equinox (only one needed since they’re the same).

Here’s a test exporting three shadow path animations overlaid on top of one another (using Photoshop). You could get more creative in the editing…perhaps showing them one at a time and then showing them all combined. Or pausing at key points…noon at least might be nice to see when sun is highest in the sky. All depends on what you’re really after.