Sun Studies in ADT
You can export your model to Viz Render for detailed rendering, but more recent versions of ADT also provide good support for many rendering tasks directly in the ADT environment.
The following excercises assume you have a basic model in ADT to work from. This procedure only works in ADT2007 and above.
Overview
- Call up the sun palette by entering "sunproperties" at the command line.
- Set your geographic location and north direction.
- Set the date and time, and turn the sun on.
- Select for the proper shade mode and turn shadows on in the Dashboard.
- Do a quick Render using the controls on the Dashboard.
Use the command "sunproperties" to call up the sun properties palette if it isn't visible. At the bottom of the pallette is the information on your current location. Click the spyglass icon to bring up the "Geographic Location" dialog box to adjust your location. Usually selecting the nearest large town is sufficient, although you can get more exact by entering Lat-Long coordinates in the top left area ( these are easy to find using online map sites, such as maps.google.com). Also make sure to adjust the North direction by entering the angle from the World Y axis to true North in your drawing.
Also in the Sun Properties, be sure to turn the Sun and Shadows on under the "General" header. Under "Sun Angle Calculator" select for the appriate day and time.
Use the Dashboard to turn Shadows and Lights on and off, and to select for a different Visual Style. You can also use the Visual Styles Palette to enable and edit Visual Styles. How well a Visual Style can display shadows is controlled by the hardware (CPUÂ and video card) you're working with. At the bottom of the dashboard you can select for a preset render quality, and render the current scene. Click the blue teapot to the left to show or hide more advanced rendering options.
Once the scene has rendered, save the image file by the standard "Save" option under the file menu. For size and compatibilty .jpg and .png are the preferred formats. Note that the output size shown here (640x480)Â would work OKÂ for email or web images, but it will not print very well at even letter size. Select for a higher resolution in the expanded Render area at the bottom of the Dashboard.
