Shadow Study of Winter sun angles

[Parkinson]

I attach a rendering of the Gr Floor of a house I am working on.

The idea is to show the amount of winter sun coming through the north windows (btw I am in the southern H-sphere) BUT what is happening is that the top clip plane has cut off the level above, thus ignoring it's shadowing affect. Hence it is a shadow plan of a living room with no roof!

I have tried fiddling with section boxes, cut-planes etc. for some time now and still haven't cracked the right combination. I hope Revit can do it because it would be an invaluable tool to study the solar passive efficiency
of spaces.

Any ideas :?:

Regards.

[LRaiz]

Most likely the solution is to make sure that "View Culling" check-box in Render Scene dialog is ON.

- LR

[Parkinson]

Thanks LR.

But I don't want to cull it. I want to NOT cull it, that is, allow all objects inside and outside the view to cast a shadow. I can get the casted shadows to work perfectly in perspective view (attached, North is left) just not in plan.

Regards,

MP

[LRaiz]

Right you are. I meant View Culling box should be OFF.

Since you can not render plan views I assume that you used the trick of making a 3d view and orienting it to plan view. Using this procedure will set a section box for 3d view which corresponds to cut plane of plan view and thus cuts off the roof. So your initial guess about section box might be the right one.

You can use Dyn View dialog to rotate your view and afterward move extents of the section box up to include the roof. Once section box is big enough use View | Orient | Top to set the correct direction of viewing and try to render again.

Hope this will work. Regards,
- LR

[Parkinson]

LR,

Thanks for the second tip but when I lifted the section box it ended up rendering the roof above (!)

Regards,
MP

[LRaiz]

Sorry to keep sending you on the wrong path.

Take 3 -

A) Set up another view with a section box big enough to include roof.
B) Do not change section box of your view but use section box of other view (or use a view w/o section box) to set up your rendering scene.

LR

[Parkinson]

LR,

Thanks for sending me on path no.3. I succeeded (Eureka etc.). Here is the path description for the record;

A) I set up the plan view that I wanted and left the section box as it was giving the cut plan view I wanted,

B) I set up a view using Siteplan and switched the section box OFF,

C) I went to Render Scene settings and set the "Use View's Section Box" to the plan view in B)

D) I rendered the Siteplan View and Hey Presto I got what is attached.

Many thanks and Regards.

[archjake]

Perhaps this should go under the tips catagory now.

Learning something new every day...

Jake

[archjake]

Does anyone know if this tip still works in 7.0? I was playing with it and it seems that they might have changed the way it works if the rendered view has an active section box.

[mmodernc]

What about when you are using the new shadows thingo in 7.0 If you want to set up an elevation of a building to see what shadows a building casts on it there is no shadow cast from the building upsun.

[Exar Kun]

Does anyone know if this tip still works in 7.0? I was playing with it and it seems that they might have changed the way it works if the rendered view has an active section box.

This does indeed appear to have changed.

Does anyone else have a work around to achieve the same result?

[mungenast]

Hi all

I'm looking for a way to show a rendered non-perspective plan view with light coming in the windows. The problem is that it renders like the top of the building is torn off, with light coming in from overhead. I was looking at the thread from a few years back (in the subject line) which had a hack for accomplishing this using multiple section boxes (different one for rendering vs for view visibility). It seems that a couple versions ago, revit no longer allows this to happen, probably to circumvent accidental errors when people picked the wrong section box from the render settings.

Is there a way in r9.1 to accomplish this?

thanks.
Chris Mungenast

[archjake]

Hi all

I'm looking for a way to show a rendered non-perspective plan view with light coming in the windows. The problem is that it renders like the top of the building is torn off, with light coming in from overhead. I was looking at the thread from a few years back (in the subject line) which had a hack for accomplishing this using multiple section boxes (different one for rendering vs for view visibility). It seems that a couple versions ago, revit no longer allows this to happen, probably to circumvent accidental errors when people picked the wrong section box from the render settings.

Is there a way in r9.1 to accomplish this?

thanks.
Chris Mungenast
I have not tried this is 9.1 but I bet its still broken. Anyone willing give it a go? Its been quite some time so I'd have to look up the method to try it again.