Creating Interior and Exterior Views with Shadows in Sketchup

And the next thing that I want to do is create some scenes in the interior. So let's zoom into this portion on the interior. Let's set a wide-angle lens because I'm getting kind of stuck in these walls.

So click our zoom and we'll type in 65, a little bit wider angle. Let's find a nice view that's in the corner that kind of looks into the interior. You can use our Walk tool to kind of set this up. We're like right at that wall, kind of position this around so we can see the overall clubhouse, people in here, and the furniture. You can always adjust the field of view.

Maybe it's not so wide-angle, a little more realistic just like this. And I'll go to my Camera, make sure I have two-point perspective, and then I will go to add, and I will rename this one Interior View One. And then I will spin around to the other side, right around over here, trying not to get stuck inside of the restrooms.

When you're orbiting around, you will orbit through walls and through windows. So being very careful to only just move slightly, kind of go to someplace right here, and then we can adjust our look to be kind of in the right perspective where we're looking outside a little bit. And then we have the right kind of viewpoint.

I'll go to View, Camera, two-point perspective, position this around to the right location, and we'll go to add, and then right-click, rename Interior View Two. So this has Camera Location saved, hidden objects, and Shadow Settings. It does not save the style or the tags or anything like that.

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All that's going to be controlled by other sorts of views. I do want Exterior View Two all the way through here to be included in an animation, so I will uncheck that. Now you can see there are no parentheses around each of these.

The final thing that I like to do for each of these setups is just to make sure that the geometry looks right. I can see here that there's a double layer between the ground and the concrete. If I were to click this, you can see that I have a concrete slab, but there's other layers from the center park or from the community park project.

So I will click into my community park, and I can see that I have a floor right here. I do not want this anymore, so I will delete that. And now if I were to go back into that interior view, I have a nice floor that isn't showing multiple layers on top of each other.

Because I have Shadow Settings saved, I can turn on shadows and I can adjust where I want these shadows to be for each specific view. Shadows will take a while to turn on because there's other sorts of geometry and trees and plants and lights, but you can see that it's casting shadow through the windows. So I can adjust the time of day.

This is coming in the afternoon, and I can also adjust it in the morning of where the sun is coming through based on your geolocation that you set. Also the time of year—in December when the sun is almost lowest in the sky, you're going to get very long shadows, versus in the summer in June when the sun is really high in the sky, you're going to get very short shadows. I like more of a dramatic effect, so I'll do somewhere kind of in between the October-November range.

There are not super long shadows, but still enough of that kind of light into the space. You can move your dial around to kind of play around what works best. I'll stick it kind of right here in this kind of morning time, where I get some nice light on the side over here, and then I will update the scene.

Then I'll go back into my Interior View One, and I will turn on shadows for this one. It does take a while for each scene if there are different shadows, as it has to regenerate for each time. I'll turn on shadows, and you can adjust the lightness of the outdoors and the darkness of actual shadows.

That'll create a lot more contrast in the space, or if you increase the dark, that'll decrease the contrast and make the shadows not very visible. I kind of like the lightness to be all the way up, and then the shadows to be in between the 40 and 50 range. And I will update, right-click update.

Now let's go to our exterior views and create some shadows. This is where the computer tends not to work so well when you're doing shadows on things. So bear with me, as things might go slowly, or if you're running into issues on your own computer, now would be a good time to save your file.

I'm going to save my file just in case, and as I start turning on shadows, you may realize that your model doesn't like that, and that's where I would recommend if you're having a hard time with these 3D plants and shadows, revert back to the 2D plants and 2D trees to use. So I'll turn on shadows here. In here, we can adjust the time of day.

I've got a nice shadow being cast on the wall from the palm tree. I've got some shadow cast on this wall right here. I can change it to the other direction where the sun is going to be coming this way.

That would make this entire building in shadow. So I like it more in the evening, where we get some longer shadows and this part of the building in daylight. Somewhere kind of right around here.

Great. I will right-click update. Make sure you want to move this to around 1 p.m. On October 27th.

I'm just eyeballing and playing around to see where I think things are good. I don't really like this shadow down in the foreground, so I'm trying to find a way where that's gone, but I do like this tree casting a shadow on this building. So I'm slowly tweaking this to get this.

And I'm going to turn my lightness all the way up and then move my dark to around this between 40 and 50 range. Now I will right-click update and I'll go to Exterior View Two. And again I can add some shadows here. This time I want to make it more noon so I can see some of the slats casting more of a shadow into this space.

And maybe more in the summertime, where the sun is more vertical. Something just like this. I'll increase my lightness.

Maybe make my darkness a little bit darker, and I'll go to update. And then I'll go back to my Exterior View Three, modify shadows for this scene, again using my same sort of settings to find the right time of day that works best.

Or get a nice shadow down on the trellis. So I will right-click update once you've found a good time of day for your shadows. Feel free to copy the same time I'm using.

I'm just playing around at this point. There's no fixed time of day that works best. Just try to find a good time of day that casts some unique shadows to this specific project.

And then finally on this view, we'll turn on our shadows. We'll change the time of day to maybe a little more on the morning side. Maybe the sun a little higher in the sky.

More summer. Turn up my light, turn down my dark slightly.

And I will update. Now the great thing is that I have these working styles. If I'm in this view right here, this Working Style is only going to change the style.

It will not change the Shadow Settings. If I were to go into Working Style, it'll change to get rid of all the trees, but I'll still keep the shadows on. If I would like the Working Style to not include the shadows, which is sometimes best, what I would do is I would check shadows, and then I would actually physically turn it off.

And sometimes I would like to use sun for shading because this would actually still use where the sun's at. It actually won't cast specific shadows. But for this case working, just unchecking that is the best.

You can still control other settings. Now I'll update this so we have that working file, and I can go back to my View Four that has the shadows on, and then Final has the landscape settings. And then now I'll go to my final Exterior View Five and I will turn on my shadows one last time.

I'll just be more in the morning so you get some nice shadows in this space. And then I will brighten it up, turn down the darkness slightly of shadows, and then right-click update. Then go back to Working Style, and I also would like to actually have my Working Style be a more generic location, so I want to actually have my Camera Location now saved.

So I'll check Camera Location, which is right here, then I can update this. So whenever I'm in the middle and I want to go back—like, "okay, things are too busy right now, the shadows are funky or throwing things off"—I can go back to this Working Style and it can back me right out into this scene where I have no shadows on, landscape elements hidden, and it should be very clean and fast to operate. And Final has all this stuff, and then Export would have all this plus the thickness.

If I'm in Exterior View One with Export, then this will show the various thicknesses of these plants, but if I go into Final, it'll remove the line thickness and it'll just show the thin lines. We're going to wait for it to reset and think—there we go. I will go back to my Working Style for when I save, so that way it's clean when I first open up the model. I will save this as final-dm in my SKP201 file Downloads folder.

I will save, and in the next video—which is going to be our final video of SKP201—we will show how to work with various styles and more artistic styles when you want to export something from SketchUp rather than taking it into a rendering program or Photoshop. There's a lot of powerful built-in tools that we can use to make some really beautiful images straight from SketchUp. I will see you in the next video!