Hi SketchUp Community,
I’m Nam Nguyen, an architect and the developer behind the Febhouse / ArchiDiagram ecosystem.
Today, I’m very excited to introduce a major update to one of our core tools: Shadow Slice 2.0.2.
Shadow Slice: Interior Shadow & Section Tool for SketchUp
The plugin has 03 core features.
Forget tedious setups. Now, you just click the “+ Add Slice Tool” on the dashboard, click directly on the Group/Component you want to cut, and you’re done!
- Centralized Dashboard:
All your Shadow Slices are now managed visually within a single control panel. You can easily toggle visibility or change the color of your slices on the fly.
Minimize manual setups and streamline your workflow, letting you focus entirely on your design ideas.
How it Transforms Your Workflow:
Shadow Slice makes the ceiling transparent but keeps the shadows solid. This allows you to look inside and analyze natural light distribution throughout the entire house without changing the actual lighting conditions.
This tool reconstructs the parts of the building removed by the Section Plane. The compensated portion is transparent to the eye but still blocks sunlight (except for glass), ensuring that your interior lighting analysis remains physically accurate.
Specially designed to analyze interior shadow behavior directly within a section view. It is the perfect solution for documenting how sunlight penetrates a space for professional design reports.
Create perspective sections that help viewers easily visualize the entire architectural mass. It provides a perfect balance between maintaining the building context and revealing the interior space.
Why Choose Shadow Slice?
If you’ve ever done interior shadow or energy analysis, you’ve likely hit a major limitation in SketchUp: the default Section Plane does not block sunlight. When you use a section cut to hide the roof, the sun shines directly into the interior as if the roof doesn’t exist. This makes accurate natural lighting analysis nearly impossible.
Feb Shadow Slice automates the complex manual workflow required to fix this by creating an intelligent “Ghost Slice” copy of your model.
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Accurate Shadow Casting: Reconstructs the geometry removed by the Section Plane to ensure it continues to cast shadows accurately while remaining invisible to the camera.
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Non-Destructive Workflow: The tool is incredibly safe. Your original model remains completely untouched, ensuring your design process is never disrupted.
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Intelligent Entity Processing: Automatically handles materials and back-materials for nested groups and components to ensure consistent transparency without losing structural data.
How to use?
Watch Shadow Slice in action. See how to set up your first ghost slice for accurate interior analysis in under a minute.
A GIFT TO THE COMMUNITY
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We know how frustrating standard Section Planes can be for interior solar studies, so we wanted to share our solution with everyone. This version of Shadow Slice is completely free to use. We hope it saves you hours of manual work! If you have ideas or specific needs for more advanced tools down the road, drop a comment—we are always listening.
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Compatibility: Works smoothly with SketchUp’s standard workflow. -
Version 2.0.2 Standard: SketchUp Extension Warehouse -
Learn more, watch the quick start video: Shadow Slice: Interior Shadow Analysis & Sun Study Tool
I hope this tool helps streamline your workflow and makes your interior light analyses much easier. Please feel free to test it out and leave any feedback, questions, or bug reports in this thread.
Thanks for your time!
Cheers,
Nam Nguyen
Founder at Febhouse