[Josephus Holt]

THAT took a while to find! Any reason having that "on" should not be the default setting? Anyway, this is very good.

I would also like to see the actual sun sphere in the viewport as I'm working on some scenes where I'm using the sun and changing settings to get a fake moon...the actual position in the scene is very important. Right now have to run multiple test renders before I get it where I want it. Would save me a lot of time/work seeing it in the viewport.

Along the same subject, is the moon as an environmental illumination type in the works? I think many of us would LOVE that!

[ivox3]

Staring at the sun is not healthy.

[Josephus Holt]

Staring at the sun is not healthy.

Good for the heart . This is just a test to get the moonlight effect...I need to get more ambient light without the "sun/moon" or the sky getting brighter. Will try with some additional invisible lighting...maybe somebody have a better idea?

[ivox3]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Q6gw478bw


I'm a lotta help. lol..

[JDHill]

I can't put the sun in its actual position - I did that in very early versions of the plugin and it turns out that it is just much too far away from the scene for Rhino's display to deal with. It's not on by default because (a) it takes quite a bit of processing power, and (b) the default sky type in Rhino is Sky Dome, since Rhino is generally geared more toward product design than architecture. On the question of sun vs. moon, I couldn't comment on that as I really have nothing to do with development of the actual render engine - I wouldn't try too hard to coerce the sun into looking like the moon; you'd be better off using some night-sky HDRI, I think.

Here's what I'm working up for the viewport compass, btw:

[Josephus Holt]

JD, that's really clean looking.

[ivox3]

That's great ...

JD ... will the sun be shown in the Z direction too ? ...perspective viewport ?

[JDHill]

Yeah, I was trying a little bit to show that with the sun ray passing through the corner of that red cube...hard to tell in a static image though; here's a quick screengrab showing me changing the time of day and scene rotation.



Currently, it is saved in the file whether the compass is enabled, and what size it is - you pick the size using a command that prompts you for a diameter using a standard circle-pick. The only real problem so far is that the size of the 'N' seems to be controlled by some dimension text settings in the document; not sure yet how to scale that - not too big a deal though, since it's pretty easy to see which way is north even without the label.