There’s something wrong with shadows in the last release 6.5.2
Dates and hours are wrong and so are the shadows projected.
It seems like Europe is excluded and we have plenty of 
No it’s not geolocated. I though that if you set UTC you are assuming a specific place for shadows, It shouldn’t depend on geolocation.
I geolocated it and it works almost fine. It set Madrid as UTC + 0 and it’s wrong but shadows are working.
My question now should be?..
What location do the shadows correspond to? To Madrid? To UTC+0?
Come to Spain…
1 Like
You appear to be confusing location with time zone. It is 09:00 UTC+0 at the same moment worldwide. The shadows will be correct only if UTC+0 is the correct current time zone for the location. Is that the right zone for Madrid in summer?
well Spain has summertime so right now it’s +2 like most of western europe
I also get confused regularly. I thought the UTC were time zones. I need the simplest instructions on how to get accurate shadows with the fewest steps, and understanding exactly what UTC and geo locating do differently and with each other.
UTC (Universal Coordinated Time - in French) is the modern alternative to GMT. It is the base time from which time zones are offset. So, for example, standard time in the eastern US (EST) is UTC-5, meaning you subtract 5 hours from the current UTC to get EST. It gets confusing at the International Date Line, where a new calendar day starts at 12:00 UTC, so it is midnight but a different day on the east and west sides of the line!
Although the system divides the world into 24 nominal 15 degree wide longitude zones, the actual time zone boundaries have been tweaked to fit geographic and governmental needs. Each locality can choose what time zone they want to use (within reason) and whether or not they will adopt “daylight saving time” in the summer. So, you need to look up the current UTC equivalent for your geolocation’s time zone.
So if I just select -5 from the dropdown, am I getting accurate shadows for the US east or do I also have to geo locate? The OP selected the correct offset but failed to get the desired results. It’s not very clear.
Look at where your model template is geo-located already. By default supplied SketchUp templates on Desktop (I presume on iPad, too) are geo-located to Boulder, Colorado. It’s been that way for years. At least since SketchUp first started using Google Earth for geo-location in version 4 or 5. SketchUp 3 and 3.1 have geo-location set to New York.
The UTC offset is set for that location. If you use Add Location to your model the UTC offset will be adjusted to the standard time offset. It won’t include DST.
If shadows accurate shadows are important but you don’t want to geo-located every model, set a suitable location and save it with your template.
huh, I thought that for a long time, but su 23 and 24, when installed in french / on a french machine, will give me the coordinates of Paris (both PC and mac) when adding a manual location.
I wonder if other language packs have a similar effect, german version in Berlin and so on
That could be. I wonder if it changed at some point. I’ve never installed SketchUp in France or Germany, or anywhere else.
pretty sure it did, I remember seeing colorado in that window, but I couldn’t tell you when.
I just looked at SU17 make, it also says Paris… go figure.
1 Like
Thank you all for your contributions. It seems that each of us is in a different part of the world. Perhaps @MikeTadros can clarify something about the matter.
This is the time zone of Madrid. I don’t know why, in the Google search I did, it shows me the difference with Minneapolis. That same difference is the one that the SketchUp template for iPad takes by default.
You have to geolocate because SketchUp has a default location at Boulder CO (for US installs). The right time but wrong location will produce incorrect shadows. And vice-versa.
1 Like
We include a file called i18n.dat (i18n means internationalization, or i-then-18-letters-then-n… it was a Google thing, don’t ask). For each language version, we put a different geolocation. For our Spanish version, the defaults are UTC+1:
DEFAULT_CITY=Barcelona
DEFAULT_COUNTRY=España
DEFAULT_LATITUDE=41.383
DEFAULT_LONGITUDE=2.183
DEFAULT_TIMEZONE=1.00
2 Likes
Thanks @Barry
It seems that the iPad version is not working like this. By default, the template places you at UTC-7.
If I place it in Madrid (Capital of Spain ) it is located in UTC + 0. The same thing happens if it is located in Barelona.
Perhaps summer time saving time is subtracting instead of adding.
that’s an odd choice… I guess Sketchup supports the independence of Cataluña 
1 Like
Can the file be edited? I would like to create one for Finland.
I don’t know where they are located in the Windows version, but on Mac they are in the
/Applications/SketchUp 2024/SketchUp.app/Contents/Resources
folder for each language and appear to be editable.
Edit: OTOH, editing it doesn’t seem to have changed the default location.