Landmark Special Interest Group February 2020

In this session, we covered how to insert a Heliodon into your project, how to set up a Renderworks Camera and run a solar study, how to create a viewport from a camera view, and how to work with multiple camera views and heliodons.

Topics Covered:

• 00:44    We started the session by adding a Heliodon to a project. I opened a file that had no light source and, frankly, it looked rather dull. We added a Heliodon, showing how to adjust the latitude and longitude so that it shows the sunlight that matches your project. If Vectorworks doesn’t show a location near enough to your project’s location, you can go on Google Maps and look up the latitude and longitude. We demonstrated clicking on the Solar Animation button and creating a solar study, which you can employ with simple massing models at the beginning of your project so that you improve the quality of your design. The animation shows how sunlight will interact with your design and how surrounding structures might interfere with your project’s natural lighting.
• 11:10    With the Renderworks Camera tool, we clicked to place the camera and clicked to indicate the focus of the camera. You can use the Send to Surface command to quickly put your camera at about the right height. Remember that if the Activate Camera View button is pressed and you navigate around your design layer, your camera view is changing. I prefer to put cameras on a separate class so that I can easily make them disappear from a drawing.
• 18:32    Once we had our camera view adjusted, we turned it into a viewport, covering the important settings as we went through the steps. An easy way to get viewports with other camera views is to copy and paste the viewport on the sheet layer. For some reason, you can’t stretch a viewport, but the weird thing is that you can stretch a group—a pretty cool trick! Once you have a copy, you can click on the Edit Camera command and change the view. You can use the Walkthrough tool to adjust the view. Sometimes cutting away part of a building with the Clip Cube is a helpful way to help your clients understand the flow of your design. You add multiple Heliodons and, from the Visualization palette, control which one is used for each viewport, allowing your client to see not only different camera views of the project but also the quality of the sunlight at different times during the day.

Landmark February 2020

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