In last week's post about Flux, I mentioned my own affinity towards the geolocation and shadow features in Sketchup. Even with a relatively large model, Sketchup can produce shadows immediately, and will let users drag the time and date sliders to study how the sun will change the geometry of cast shadows throughout the day and year. With a rendering program like V-Ray, shadows can be realistic and soft, but the geolocation is not nearly as intuitive, and quick shadows are in general much more cumbersome than the few steps involved with Sketchup.

What Sketchup does not do is produce clean, vector-based linework to manipulate later on in Illustrator. It's hard to argue with Rhino's Make2D on that front; it's just way more flexible to have vector lines when making a drawing. Together, Rhino's Make2D linework and Sketchup's accurate and fast shadows are enough data to make flexible, fast study drawings that reflect true solar conditions on a site. The issue is that when importing/exporting to and from Rhino to Sketchup, any "named views" (Rhino) or "scenes" (Sketchup) do not get carried over from one file to the next. This makes perfectly aligning perspective views between programs next to impossible, which means getting a drawing with both Rhino lines and Sketchup shadows is more trouble than it's worth.

*Rhino and Sketchup do both have some photomatching tools to align photographs with models, but neither of them are at all accurate or intuitive enough to match views between the two programs.

This workflow gets past that issue once and for all. I've broken it down into steps to make it more manageable. You'll want to use Flux to do this; while it's not absolutely crucial, it makes the process far easier. You will also need to have the Human plugin for Grasshopper, which I linked in an earlier post. The Rhino document must be in inches (open new doc from Large Objects - Inches) and the Sketchup one in feet & inches.

1. Start in Sketchup to set up location data. First, set up geolocation in Sketchup (File->Geo-location->Add location), search for and set your desired location. Draw some sort of marker (I drew a general footprint) to denote where on the site you want your geometry, and send that to Rhino using Flux. This determines where in relation to the origin you will want to draw your Rhino geometry.