Working with the sun path

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to look at an alternative way to manipulate our sun settings, and that is using the sun path tool. So the sun settings dialogue is a perfectly fine way to set the time of day, and the time of year, and configure all of your sun settings. But the sun path offers a more interactive way to do exactly the same thing. Let me show you how to set this up. Now I'm working in this site plan view, and I'm going to zoom out a little bit to give myself some room to see the sun path when we turn it on. And then down here on the view control bar, there's this little pop-up menu, and we previously used this to get to sun settings, but notice that there's these two options sun path on and off. So I'm going to choose sun path on, and you're going to see a couple numbers appear on my screen and this little cross right here, but we don't really see much else. And that's because this site plan is currently cropped. So let's disable the crop. We'll just use this, do not crop the view icon right there, and then zoom back out, and now we can start to see something. Now the entire object here is one thing that we can select. This is the sun path object. And if you click on it, it will select it. And on the properties palette, there is a single property sun path size. Now it's currently 150% of the model size. Now, if you look at my model, you're saying, I don't know, it looks a little bit larger than that. Well, remember that the linked file, the site plan in this case has this box going all the way around it. And so it's actually considering the extent of that box when it calculates what 150% is. So if you think this is too big, and you don't like it that large, or you think it's too small, and you want it bigger, you can change the percentage size here. So what I'm going to do is drop this down to a hundred percent instead, and that will make it a little bit smaller. Now I'm going to zoom in, and you can see some of the shadows being cast over there. But now notice that we've got all these different numbers appearing on screen. So right here, for example, the time is displayed. And if I put my mouse over it, it says, edit the time. This becomes a live temporary dimension. And I could use this little spinner here to change the time interactively. And if I just click away from that, it changes the time the shadows move, and notice that that little yellow sun ball moved as well. So I can click on there again, and maybe change it to the morning, go in the other direction, late afternoon. And it becomes this very interactive sort of thing. Now I've got the same thing right here with the date. So notice that when I click on that September, it turns into a date spinner, and I could change the date by typing in maybe eight right there, and it switches to August, or I could use the dropdown, and choose another date off the menu there, and then click from that, and it will move everything. So notice that this path here, this curved line, that's the path of the sun on that date. And this is very interactive as well, moving kind of up and down relative to the overall sun path as you change those dates and times. Now, in addition to being able to interact with these temporary dimensions here, these pieces of text, you can also click right on the sun ball and drag it. So I can drag it along its path, and that will interactively change the time of day. I can grab hold of the path and drag it, and that will interactively change the date in the year. And you can see on the side there that the dates are changing as I drag this. I can even grab the sun ball here, and begin to drag it along the analemma, which is that little figure eight looking shape right there, which is the path that the sun takes in that location of the sky. All of those make it a very interactive way to manipulate the position of the sun, and configure the shadows, and watch it in real time. Now this sun path can be turned on in any view. So we're looking at here in a site plan, which gives us a nice bird's eye look. But if you want, you can open up a different view. So I'm going to grab maybe this axon aerial front view shaded, let's open that up. And in this view, the crop is currently turned on. So why don't we turn that off just to make sure that we have enough room to see everything. And then I will go to sun path on, and you'll see the path appear. And again, it's a little bit large, so you could always select it here, and drop that size down. But now you can see the angle of the sun path in the sky relative to the 3D model. And I think that can be really handy to know as well. So you can kind of see the path that the sun will travel over that date. And then as I start to drag it, this yellow area kind of is the entire swoop of the sun over the course of the entire year. So very interactive. It's kind of a fun way to manipulate your sun settings. Of course, we probably want to turn the shadows on in this view so that we get that feedback. Now, if you try and turn this on in a view that doesn't have a lighting scheme turned on, so let me try this other crop 3D view here. It will display this message. So it's saying that the sun won't display because you don't have the right settings in the sun settings dialogue. In other words, if you recall the sun settings dialogue, we had that lighting scheme, which didn't use our location. So if I said continue with current settings, all I'm going to get is this compass. There isn't going to be any sun at all. And that's because in sun settings we're currently set to lighting. So in order to see something on the compass, I have to change to one of these other schemes, and maybe one of the presets, and then I'll click apply, and then notice that that enables the sun. So if you ever go to a view, and all you're seeing is the compass, that just means that in that view, you don't have a lighting scheme turned on. It's set to just that generic lighting option. You can use either the sun settings dialogue, or the sun path to configure your dates and times. And I welcome you to choose whichever one you prefer.