the real world use of shadows in the 3D window

[Karl Barker]

Shadows in 3D window, great, however what use are they?
Currently they are only static.
Some simple requests:
1. Make the shadows work when navigating the 3D window. we quite often take clients on a guided tour of their building within archicad directly.
2. easy way of turning shadows on and off.
3. And this one to me is the most important. The ability to adjust the time of day for the sun on a simple live slider bar. Have a look at Sketchup. they do it nicely. This way you can see live what happens during a day with the shadows instead of what only happens at one point in time.
Would be far more useful.

[Anonymous]

And the other good reason to add this stuff to AC: Revit has had all of this since... yikes! the fall of 2004! I think the AC community is more than ready to enjoy this feature!

One thing we've asked for from Autodesk is a way to turn shadows globally off as well as being able to do it view-by-view.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

metanoia wrote:
And the other good reason to add this stuff to AC: Revit has had all of this since... yikes! the fall of 2004! I think the AC community is more than ready to enjoy this feature!

To be fair he's referring to Shadows in the 3D Window via the OpenGL shading engine. That's new in ArchiCAD 14.

ArchiCAD has (almost) always had shadows (and somewhat interactive) in the 3D window through the native Internal rendering engine, which is unfortunately inferior in quality and performance to the OpenGL engine and considerably slower. Certainly they've been there since the late 90's, I believe, and before Revit even existed.

And also to be fair to Graphisoft's OpenGL engine which has only recently added shadows, it is vastly superior to Revit's 3D engine performance both in terms of quality (crispness of image) and speed (interactivity - especially of large complex models. This is coming from my own personal and recent experience (and thus opinion) from having to learn Revit 2011, where trying to design or model a similarly sized building or comparable complexity, exclusively in the 3D window, like you can do in ArchiCAD, is just a painstaking nightmare. Revit's uber-parametricity (is that a word?) and compounded element relationships might have had something to do with it getting progressively slower as the model grows and grew more and more complex.

metanoia wrote:
One thing we've asked for from Autodesk is a way to turn shadows globally off as well as being able to do it view-by-view.

Technically, you can (or rather should be able to, in AC14 - which I haven't used much) do this in ArchiCAD when saving views, where it also independently saves all the view conditions including Camera/Sun position, shadow on/off states, Layer combination states and marquee states. I could be wrong though, since I am more accustomed to working with the OpenGL engine which, prior to AC14 did not have the shadows feature. Perhaps somebody else might be able to confirm this.

[Anonymous]

Ya - I've noticed that AC's OGL was way better than OGL in Revit - but DirectX such as we have now in Revit is pretty good - still not as zippy as AC's OGL I suppose. But the view opens faster in Revit, doesn't it 😉

Also - have you tried the Realistic display mode yet in Revit 2011? It seems to work with DirectX display in Revit if your video card is less than a couple of years old. Our older cards won't show the Ambient Occlusion effect (in a 3D view's properties, see Graphic Display options - there's a checkbox for this feature - adds a cool extra bit of increased shadowing as you go into inside corners, etc)

I hear you on the slowness with large models. Using worksets and having a 64-bit machine will help