Exploring Shadows and Fog Effects in SketchUp

Next we want to open up the shadows dialog box. So let's go to window, hover over default tray, slide to the right, and let's click shadows. We will also open the fog.

Go to click window, default tray, hover over fog, and then click fog. Now if I was to close each of these little windows we have more space, we brought in the shadows dialog box and the fog dialog box. So in our shadows dialog box you will see this icon right here, show hide shadows.

When we click this, this will create the shadows that appear on our site. You can also turn that on and off by going to view and shadows and unchecking that from here. There's two different ways to do it.

I prefer this way, my dialog box is a lot more convenient. We can also add a shadows thing at our menu bar up here. Click shadows and we can create this little toolbar at the top, which is helpful to have quick access to turn that on and off from the top up here.

And also with our sliders for adjusting the days and months and time. So here, just what I mentioned, in our dialog box we have multiple sliders. This first slider right here adjusts the time of day that these shadows are being cast from.

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So right now it's being cast from 1 30 p.m. We can physically type in a time, 9 30, which is obviously in the middle of the night so there won't be any shadows, but I can change this to a.m. and there we have the morning shadows. Or I can actually just drag this across and I can see what happens with the sun across the day. So this is a time of day.

This right here, the slider below it is the date. So whether it's November 8th or it's March 22nd, right? And based off of our geolocation, these shadows will change throughout the time of year as well at the time of day. During the summer solstice in June 21st, the sun will be highest in the sky.

You can see that at noon there's very minimal shadows. It's almost directly above, right? And then as it goes across the sky, it's not as dramatic. Versus in the winter solstice, which is December 21st, you can see I'm going to orbit around the backside, right? The sun will be much lower in the side in the South that when I go across that these shadows became a lot deeper.

So this is really good to play with how the building on the site was affected by the sun in different times of the year. I'm going to move this back towards kind of more afternoon. And the next sliders are light and dark.

This is going to edit the highlights and lowlights of our model using these sliders. If I slide over this over to the dark, you can see that this is going to adjust the majority of my model. And then dark is going to adjust the low lights, specifically the shadows and other sorts of features.

We kind of can play with, you know, high on the lights and kind of create how dark you want these shadows to be versus how light. So it gives you some flexibility. These next button right here, this button for use sun for shading, is when I deselect the shadows button, but I still want to have the same lighting effects that the shadow brings.

In the same time, I can click use sun for shading, and it'll bring back those same shadows, like as how it reflects onto our surfaces. So, you know, dragging across this is going to change the way that the sun moves across the sky, but it's not going to produce the shadows. I can click here and I'll bring back my shadows.

And then checking this and unchecking this with my shadows on won't do anything. The fourth section here is your display. This tells you which faces are showing shadows.

So shadows are right now are displayed, checked on faces, checked on ground, and not checked from edges. So faces is any sort of surface and face around. So that would be all this topography and the carousel and the fountain.

And then on ground is anywhere that's at the origin. So this whole gray area right here is the ground plane. If I uncheck the ground, this topography that we created will not be casting a shadow down there.

So I typically turn on ground off unless I specifically want whatever I have here to be casting a shadow. And then from edges will cast actually shadows from specific edges or lines. Because the lines are so thin and all of our lines are actually a part of a 3D model, we can't see anything.

However, if I was to draw a vertical line from right here going up, you can see that this line, it has a slight thickness to it. So it's able to cast a shadow. We can decide whether or not you want your lines to cast a shadow.

Say, for example, you are modeling a window and you have window panes and you want instead of modeling specific, you know, joints in between the panes, you can just draw lines and that'll cast these lines. So it really depends on your modeling style and the look and feel you're going from. I will undo that and I will deselect from edges.

The final thing I want to look at is the fog section. I'm going to pan down here so we can see what happens. If I click fog, you can see that all of a sudden there is a fog bank.

The further away I get, you can see I'm kind of, there's a cloud covering my building and the closer we get, we're able to kind of be within that cloud. So this creates depth to our images, especially for wanting to create perspectives or any sort of kind of different imagery. So these sliders affect where the fog starts and stops.

If I drag to the left, this little toggle here, this is going to move my fog around. And then this distance is going to be how aggressive this fog is going to start. If I kind of can zoom out above and I can kind of move this, you can kind of start seeing that there's this this haziness is moving, whether it's very far away or it's really close to me.

And then this affects, does kind of the same thing, but less aggressively. You can kind of see once I get like really close to each other, it almost becomes a line. So this gives you more flexibility in creating this depth.

And now that I'm kind of in this in this foggy space down here, and if I start bringing in my distance, you can start seeing that now almost half of my carousel was within fog and I can't see anything behind it. We can also change the background color. So right now this check mark is basically assuming that whatever I have is my existing background color, which is found under your styles tag, which we'll talk about later.

We can uncheck this and we can physically click this button and we can change the color of our fog to be different than our background color. That'll give you a bit more flexibility to the design and the style that you want of your image. Feel free to play around with your sliders so you can get more comfortable with how they work.

And also you can get your model to look exactly how you would like. I'm going to save my model now. And in the next video, we are going to rebuild our community park one final time.

But this time we will use from contours option in the sandbox toolbar. I will see you in the next video.