Section plane and cast shadows, is Ruby the answer?

Developers
1

Hi folks, I posted a question on the general forum over here: The section plane and cast shadows, 2017 regarding casting proper shadows while there is an active section plane. As I suspected, there don’t seem to be any quick fixes to this issue besides painting on a transparent .png material in front of the section plane.

There has to be a way. I imagine that way has something to do with Ruby. Has anyone here fought with this problem before? The whole purpose of the section plane is negated when it doesn’t reflect what an actual view inside the building would end up looking like.

I have a tiny bit of experience in C#, and I once was able to modify a bit of Ruby to match cameras with Rhino (Match Rhino and Sketchup Cameras — Deisher Studio), so I’m open to any and all suggestions.

2

SketchUp’s Ruby API allows to create and modify geometry, but rendering is done by SketchUp. There is no way Ruby can help here because Ruby can only do what the API provides.

While you can make drawing elements not cast shadow, you can unfortunately not make hidden drawing elements cast shadow. I tried grouping an object with section plane, and add a copy of the object in same place for casting shadow. When I set the copy’s material to full transparent (or set it to hidden), its shadow disappears.

3

The only way you can make an invisible object cast a shadow is to create a material that uses as a texture a 100% transparent PNG image but opacity set to over 70% and paint your object with that.