Sun Tool Preview

This is a plugin for sun studies. It's in the very early stages. Comments and suggested use cases are appreciated. Giver 'er a try.



sun_tool_0.1.rb

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jim,
This looks very usefull. I'm just working on some sunstudies with sketchup. Maybe you should make the sun round instead of cubic, or something that looks more like the sun? :) Thanks! JJ

J said...

Yep, a spherical Sun is better, and easy to do. Right now, I am more interested in making it do something useful for people. Can you tell me your ideas for functionality?

Anonymous said...

I want to use it to make a movie how much of the sun you would see on a certain position & day. It's about a discussion of some plans of building highrise and if it would cast too much shadow on a nearby neighborhood. Together with a movie from above showing the shadow, a movie from position itself would be very convincing, I think. JJ

Anonymous said...

my 2c - this would be good for complex models so you can get an idea of shadow direction without having to generate the shadows themselves, which can take a long time or even crash SU :)

Unknown said...

Is it possiable that the shadow spots will transform into surfaces?

bigstick said...

I think this is a great plugin. Very useful for creating area light geometry for a sun for a render engine!
Does the square sun geometry change its rotation and orientation so that it always points at the origin? If not - is it possible to modify the script to do this?

J said...

The "square sun" represents the phyical sun in the model. The square is always aligned to the view. The origin point can be set to anything; it is not tied to the model origin. Let me know if there's a feature you'd like to see.

bigstick said...

Could you possibly modify the script so that it creates a physical square aligned to face the origin?

The current script is cool, but the rectangle representing the sun is just a graphical rather than a physical (i.e. editable) object, and being aligned to the view isn't as useful, although easier to code I guess :)

This tool could be used to create geometry for an area light sun for a render engine, but it needs editable geometry aligned towards the origin to do this.

I looked at your Ruby code to see if I could do it, but I am a complete novice at this sort of thing. I don't know if I'm up to this though and I'm also still working out the trigonometry :P

If you are contemplating adding a spherical sun, would it be too much trouble to add the editable aligned square as an option?

Anonymous said...

Hi.

Does it run in SU 7? Great Plugin!

Unknown said...

Can you explicitly visualize the value for Solar height and Solar Azimuth?

Unknown said...

Would it be feasible to generate shadow "outlines" mapping out the shape of a shadow without actually having to generate the shadows themselves?
This would be great to use to study shadows in a model without grinding through the actual generation of same

Anonymous said...

Link to script doesn't work :(

Simon Lebon said...

Dear Jim,
Hope you feel good ;-)
It seems that your Sun Tool can't be downloaded anymore. Have you withdrawn it by decision or is it a dysfunction ?
Best regards, Simon le Bon

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