21 - Monastery of Realisminites and its vicinities [Pixie]

[- JO -]

Yes, one comment : you're doing a hell of a job ! You're very precise with the shading on the roofs ! I admire the way you find the limits of the shading, according to the inclinaison of the roof and the sun direction... !

[Pixie]

Thanks for the comment JO. It's motivating, specially as I realise all the shadows need to go and be redone. I had the Sun's altitude all wrong.

Also, I've read about your technique of drawing parallel lines to the light direction. I started with that and then came up with a better one (although slower to process). I resized the lightray drawing so that the circle has a radius equal to the shadow produced by a one-story tall building (roughly at 3m high). So, the entire circle covers the shadow of a 6m pole.
Having done that I then
- move the lightray about everytime I do a new building
- placing the intersection of the circle and the lightray at the tall points of the building (4 corners, roof vertex)
- marking with a point the extent of the shadows cast by a pole at that point (on a separate layer)
- and then tracing the area that doesn't "see" the sun

This is my geeky-lengthy-unhealthy way of doing things... but, you know, that's how they teach us at the Monastery

[Mouse]

Your shadows look fine to me. As I explained over on the Guild City thread just now - the global sun does not affect the length of the shadow [not in CC3 it doesn't anyway], but only the shading of the roof itself - and they were only meant for CC3 mappers

EDIT: I'm really sorry - I didn't realise that users of other software were going to adapt the CC3 settings to their own non-CC3 software settings or I would have made it clearer from the outset that the CC3 settings I showed were only ever intended for CC3 users. Now the problem has come to light I have put a note to that effect on the index item.

Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience?

Please do not go and re-do your shadows? As I said - they look fine to me

[Pixie]

Thanks for the positive talk, but they don't. And I actually think I'll be better off doing that now than carrying on with longer shadows - it makes shadowing easier and I am not even half way through the whole section.

[Mouse]

Ok then, but I'm sorry about the confusion I caused!

[Azélor]

That's a great technique for drawing shadows. I'm going to try it later.

[- JO -]

I think you found a very good idea !
Let me see if I understood you correctly :
After resizing the lightray drawing, you place the first intersection of the lightray with the circle on the highest points of the building (it's the intersection that is on the "upper left corner" of the lightray drawing ?)
and then you point the second intersection of the lightray with the circle on a separate layer (it's the intersection that is on the "lower right corner" of the lightray drawing ?)

That gives you the dot to connect to obtain the surface of the shadow

Am I correct ?

[Mouse]

Pixie - I'm not understanding something here - relating to something someone else said about roof shading on an entirely different thread just yesterday.

I'm a bit confused about why you split the shading diagonally across the rooftop. I'm my mind's eye a flat plane that is neither kinked nor curved, and which faces one direction only, would be shaded all the same... or would it? It's something I've never even thought about before because roof shading is automatic in CC3, but now that I've read that other thread I'm a bit confused about it all.

[Falconius]

It looks like Pixie is having the peak cast a shadow onto the roof, but that isn't how it actually works. You can test this yourself if you have one of those white square erasers because it's really easy to see the shade on them and bend them. Even if you tilt them so that one side is in extreme shadow the entire side is of the same value. I tried it out and the only way to get the peak to throw a shadow onto the roof was to bend the eraser and make it a non flat surface. Indeed the only way I was able to cast a shadow in that manner actually had the opposite effect from what Pixie is drawing With the leading edge (closet to the light) in shadow and the trailing edge brighter.

[- JO -]

I think we need a Shadows Police too !