Use the SketchUp built-in gelocation feature to locate a project's site and transfer its GPS coordinates and satellite imagery to SketchUp.
- [Instructor] Now that we understand the big picture, let's bring it down to earth and consider a specific building site. And let's keep these dates in mind. Because these are the limiting cases that we need to analyze. So, let's create a new SketchUp model, and it comes with a human figure that I don't need at this time so, I'll just select and delete that. And then go up to the File menu and choose Geo-location, Add Location. I'm going to type in my project site which is in San Luis Obispo, California + Enter.
So that brings up this town. I'll zoom in. And you could pinpoint a specific building, but, in this project, we're going to determine the location of a cafe based on the shadow study that we're going to do. So, I don't exactly know where that site is precisely, so I'll just stay at this zoom magnification level and just select the whole town, more or less. And then I'll click Select Region and then Grab. And that will transfer the satellite imagery into SketchUp.
Go up to the Window menu now and open up Layers. And you'll see that two new layers were automatically generated during this geo-location process. The Snapshot is flat and the Terrain has topography. Although the town itself is more or less level. So, I'll just go back to the Snapshot, and let's also open up the Model Info window. Go the Geo-location page and here you can see that we have very detailed latitude and longitude coordinates that were passed to SketchUp from that geo-location dialogue.
Let's use this information to calculate some solar azimuths. The term azimuth refers to the compass bearing where the sun is coming from. And I'm most interested in summer-solstice sunrise and sunset and winter-solstice sunrise and sunset. Because these are the limiting cases that will help me to make some sunlight and shadow decisions later on. So let's go ahead and open up a browser and go to the NOAA sun calculator.
NOAA stands for the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration in the United States and it's just a very convenient calculator that I like to use to calculate azimuths. In the next video, we'll go ahead and input the data here, and get the azimuths that we need for this specific project site.
- Obtaining sunlight angles
- Geolocating a project site
- Geolocating a massing model
- Saving scenes at key times of day and year
- Analyzing shadows cast by trees
- Designing an awning using the solar tool
- Animating time-lapse shadows