Shadows missing, wrong, or just plain wierd

[Anonymous]

Anybody have this problem, my shadows for my elevations are coming out all wrong. Many of the shadows cast by walls are non-existant, (ie wall jog at west elevationfrom the stone areas to the stucco areas, & shadow of wall cap at south elevation at the upper level niche) others are casting the shadows of the line work, not the solid mass(see north elevation). I have my shadows set to custom for each elevation and at an azimuth of 30 to 45 degrees, and and altitude of 30 degrees. I am having a hard time figuring out what could possibly be causing this, it appears to be completely random as to which shadow show properly and which do not. Anyone have any advice on how to fix this? I've attached 2 of the elevations to show the problem. (green lines show proper shadows, red = bad)

[Stephen Dolbee]

We have problems with shadows from time to time, too. Sometimes it seems Archicad doesn't like the way certain pieces of the model join, or when one element lies on top of another. At times we can figure out what it is, and other times it's almost impossible. We do like using shadows on our elevations, though. Nice final product-IF they aren't too far off.

Steve

[Chazz]

Yep. Shadow-casting with any sort of of complex underlying geometry tends to result in weird, unexpected results --at least that's been my experience. So much so that I have abandoned it as a feature. This is a real shame because shadow-casted elevations really make the drawings much more literate and communicative, something software should help and encourage.

[Rob]

Sometimes it seems Archicad doesn't like the way certain pieces of the model join

We are having the same problems and quite often...

or when one element lies on top of another.

typically, when you have a beam over and lined up with a wall but it seems to be a random 'feature'.

[Anonymous]

Interesting development in my shadow dilema, I fixed this one by creating a new file, and copying everything from the model into the new plan file. Magic the shadows are perfect now. wondering if there was something corrupted in the file or something?

[Karl Ottenstein]

The problem with strange shadows is a known bug. I hear that it will be fixed in a future release. 😉

Cheers,
Karl

[Rob]

just a bit more about this,

I have been recently working on a project where I used SEO operations to get rid of the mesh below slabs. It has messed up whole internal geometry somehow. When I have attempted to use the vectorial shadow option in the 3D windows settings it didn't work at all actually it did but only result I've got were strange shadow artifacts. So, I thought ok it's a known bug but then I've tried LW render and it went nuts as well like ignoring some walls beams and slabs. Well, I didn't have time to redo model from the scratch so I have desperately tried to fix that up and I did it.
some suggestions for frustrated people in the same situation:

Cancel SEO operations to all targets, operators and others and try to do new SEO in few steps as you can (perform operation with all operators on all relevant targets in one step as oppose to adding new operators/targets one by one)
Save the original file as new file
this one is strange but it helped: just delete the (suspicious) element like complicated slab with many holes etc and undo deletion afterwards.

However these are suggestions based on trial/error approach but hopefully that will help.