SHADOWS AND REFLECTIONS

After taking some time to better acquaint myself with the tools and taskbars in Ecotect I read some of the program's help literature and briefly scanned some Autodesk forums. This helped me preview things a bit and get a better grasp on what difficulties I might be looking at and how to approach them. I found the tutorials and help guides from the Square1 website (posted in the second case study) to be the most straightforward. These made navigating the program pain-free and rather easy. My last post detailed my experience with various formats for importing and exporting models into Ecotect. The model I used in my following explorations was one of the models I imported from Sketchup. To do this, after exporting as an OBJ (*.obj) I simply had to go to file > import > 3D models and then select Wavefront(*.obj) as the file type. A preview of the model you select appears in a small window below this file type selection. Once I had the visual confirmation I clicked "Okay" and was on my way!


The readings recommended to change the date and time right away, though I found this was unnecessary. These were both correct upon my import. It is however, very important that before beginning any analysis or calculations that you adjust your longitude, latitude and time zones. This is because the path of the sun through the sky varies significantly for different locations around the world. Therefore it is important you configure these correctly to your site if you plan on generating shadows or working with incident solar radiation. This was also very easy to do. Ecotect has two tools, one that allows you to click on a world map, and another that allows you to search by typing in your desired location, that make this process very easy. I was able to set my location to Toledo, Ohio in a matter of minutes. Also, be sure the box is checked so that the time zone automatically updates with your change of place. My time zone was automatically set to New York. This feature is great. Additionally, when you go to the "Projects" tab there is a box with a compass-like feature to aid the placement/orientation of your model on site. This site configuration allows you to specify the North-Offset, as well as the altitude. Here you can also set your terrain to either exposed, rural, suburban or urban. This was already set to urban, so I simply fixed my North-Offset so it was oriented correctly and moved on. 


Assigning date, time, latitude, longitude and time zone was quick easy. I proceeded to follow and carry out on my own the task of assigning solar reflections using the model provided in the Ecotect teaching package. This was more practical to do because singular reflective surfaces such as bay windows, rather than whole 400 foot glazed facades, are used in the tutorial. Afterwards, I re-opened my imported Sketchup model and proceeded to use Ecotect to display shadows on selected buildings, the sun path, daily and annual sun paths and shadows and shadows from (created by) selected buildings (objects). 


I also learned how to highlight shadows and display shadow ranges. "Highlighting" allows you to highlight shadows from a particular object in a different color. Shadow range diagrams, which are also called butterfly diagrams, are used to visualize the shadows that occur over the range of a given day (or for a selected range of time during a given day). 




Pictures generated showing model with sun path and projected shadows for the months of February, July and October:


February:

July:

October:

Isolated Sun Path Diagram: Stereographic Diagram: