I have been fascinated with SketchUp’s ‘Styles’ window. You can open it by clicking Window<Styles. When you open it, there will be 3 tabs, select, edit, and mix. Select the edit tab, and there is the background color, the sky color, and the ground color, and if you check the box, the item will be displayed. What I found perplexing is that SketchUp hasn’t made a “Sun” setting, or a bright circle in the sky. Usually, to get this, a rendering plugin is required, but those cost a lot of money. A solution that one of you might post is to draw a circle, then move it up to look like the sun, but I’ve tried this before, and it doesn’t quite look right. Can SketchUp update the app to have this feature, is it even possible?
Refer to the Shadows inspector panel, and it’s “Use sun for shading” checkbox.
I suppose it is doable. But SketchUp is designed to be a modeler, not a renderer. So this may be outside the core set of functions.
Perhaps use an watermark image (with the sun in it) as the background ?
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Do you know how to do watermarks? Is this for background images?
It is in the Style settings. (4th icon on the Edit tab.)
Refer to the online User Guide.
I think there is also an extension for a wrap around background image cylinder. Search the Extension Warehouse.
Also, for your info there are free HDRi sky images (but SketchUp cannot load these file formats.)
there are a few sun position ruby scripts around…
@jim_foltz made one called MapSun …
will play havoc on zoom extents and may need updating for v17…
john
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I already tried the watermark thing, but the sun followed the camera, and the image got in the way of my models. I’m talking about a sun built into the sky, so SketchUp doesn’t tell the main model to be “small” or when you can’t get too close without going through if I have a giant circle placed thousands of feet away. One where the sun is fixed in one spot and doesn’t move unless you change the shadow positions.
Yea, I know. I am not against it. In fact I think it has been requested before. Along with some various selections of clouds.
Also I think someone had requested nighttime with moonlight.