I’m trying to create simple shadow study using directional lights in Rhino set up at various angles of the sun through the year. I’m having issues with the directional lights displaying differently based on what order you turn them on in. The first lights I turn on/create seem to produce the strongest shadows but they get progressively dimmer the more I turn on. Then at some point of turning them on/off they seem to reverse the power.
First lights created/turned on = strongest shadow
Last lights created/turned on = weakest shadow/no shadow at all
Adjusting the intensity of the lights seems to have no effect on this.
Is this supposed to happen? Am I incorrectly using a setting in the display views? Is it not possible to have many directional lights on at the same time?
I’m using the latest version of Rhino 8 SR12, the file attached is in Rhino 7. Shadow_Study.3dm (121.6 KB)
Directional lights are essentially suns. A couple of those at strength 1.0 will already mean you’re flooding the scene with light.
What display mode are you using? Rendered mode?
I’m not sure what you’re expecting here though. Having multiple lights from different directions will cause shadows to get dimmer where the lights overlap the shadows of other lights.
Are you aware of the SetOneDaySunSimulation and RecordAnimation commands?
With the following settings in SetOneDaySunSimulation:
Thanks for the response. I do understand the directional lights are like suns but I’ve ran the same tests with the strength being where each light is some fraction of 1/(# of current lights) so the total power is at 1. My confusion is that the order of the lights seems to affect the darkness of the shadows, I would’ve thought if I turned say 100 lights on at full blast, you wouldn’t see any shadows or you would see equal shadows from all objects. Yet, you can see in the screenshots the first light/shadow combo is the strongest and then they get weaker from there.
My main goal here is create a fast shadow study for architecture. I’m quite familiar with ladybug and it’s direct solar exposure/shadow study outputs but I don’t like how slow it can be for complex geometry and also how chunky the output image looks from the mesh quality you set. I was hoping that you could replicate this in rhino using it’s shadows/directional lights.
