[Josephus Holt]

well, I feel like a pretty dumb architect today...just made a great presentation to a client having done a 21 view sun study only to discover (by the client's wife) that my ground orientation was wrong. I had assumed (CAD industry standard???) North being straight up, when looking at the top view, and adjusted the ground rotation accordingly, but I just confirmed by checking the scene in Studio that north in my scene is to the left!!! So I was 90 degree off....and having lost credibility .

Anyway, this model was done in Rhino and exported to C4D for scene compositing where it was exported to Maxwell for rendering. I can not find anyway in C4D to verify which way the cardinal points are as they quite helpfully show in Studio.

Today's experience is one more reason to eliminate one more program (C4D) in the workflow and work with Rhino via the plugin, and Maxwell Studio for larger scenes which bog Rhino (v4) down.

[JDHill]

In Rhino, north lies along the positive y-axis, while in Cinema, it lies along the positive z-axis. If, in Cinema, you go to the Scene Object's Environment tab, second group from the bottom (the 'Sun Indicator' group), you can enable a viewport indicator which will show you the location/direction of the sun as it will appear in your Maxwell rendering. The indicator is updated in real time as you adjust the time/date/location of the scene.

Hopefully that helps...

[Josephus Holt]

I saw that earlier but I don't see anything in the viewport to indicate the sun. At this point it probably doesn't matter anymore...I'm going to spend a couple of days this week to see if Studio can adequately replace C4D for that purpose....so if Studio works for met thatn I will use Rhino, the MW plugin for smaller renders, and Studio for larger scenes where Rhino bogs down. Studio seems to graphically handle the geometry very well, even better than c4d.

OT question...I find a great similarity between Studio and Cinema4D....did NL use C4D as their "model" for Studio?

[JDHill]

I've really no clue there, maybe they had that in mind, but it's also just a pretty smart way to deal with a hierarchical set of objects, so who knows. About the sun indicator, depending on the scene size, you might have to adjust it scale factor - it might be enclosed entirely inside one of your objects.

[macray]

If you give a presentation about a sun study...isn't the sun the main thing to check before rendering as it is known that different applications handle the sun differently? Just a few minutes of checking if the sun is fine would have made sure that you're not doing anything wrong...

[Josephus Holt]

If you give a presentation about a sun study...isn't the sun the main thing to check before rendering as it is known that different applications handle the sun differently? Just a few minutes of checking if the sun is fine would have made sure that you're not doing anything wrong...

well, I sure know it now...that "different applications handle the sun differently" I think in Archicad we would rotate the app North arrow to match the scenes north orientation...hence my oft desire to reduce the number of active apps in the workflow.

Actually now that by setting the sun scale to 1000% I can see the sun direction. I see now where my confusion was...I was thinking that the value rotated the Maxwell North, but it's the opposite, Maxwell North stays stationary, and it's the scene that has to be rotated so that the scene's North matches C4D/Maxwell's north along the y positive. Never was good at directions Got it right now...like I said, "sometimes I feel like a dumb architect" (emphasis on "dumb").

[jc4d]

Reading this topic, I can suggest (don´t know if it´s possible) if we can get a compass indicator like the one in Maxwell Studio here in C4D.

I´m taking this opportunity too to ask if is possible in the sun indicator put a non renderable omni light with hard shadows to use the Enhanced OpenGL feature to see with more accuracy the shadow position, I know this is not going to be very perfect solution but can give us an idea about the shadows that we are going to get in the render.

Cheers
JC

[Josephus Holt]

Reading this topic, I can suggest (don´t know if it´s possible) if we can get a compass indicator like the one in Maxwell Studio here in C4D.

Cheers
JC

I was thinking about that request as well...to have the compass widget in C4D as well as a shadow preview based on the Maxwell sun setting.

[JDHill]

put a non renderable omni light with hard shadows to use the Enhanced OpenGL feature to see with more accuracy the shadow position,

In the next versions, the plugin will perform a scan during export, looking for any light with a sun expression tag - if it finds one, it will use that to set the sun direction, instead of whatever is specified in the Scene object. So, if you end up liking how that works, we can talk about how we might extend or change it. It will always be less error-prone to do things this way, because the plugin is just using information from objects which are managed by Cinema, rather than trying to control objects in the document itself (as it must do, for exemple, with the image-based lighting display, which requires a very complicated routine).