By showing the impact of natural light and shadows on your project, solar studies yield valuable information that can help support effective passive solar design. Use solar studies to visualize how shadows from terrain and surrounding buildings affect the site, and where natural light penetrates a building during specific times of the day and year.
Create solar studies using the sun path or the Sun Settings dialog, or a combination of both. Each method of creating solar studies offers benefits:
Sun path
The sun path is a visual representation of the sun's range of movement across the sky at the geographic location you specify for a project. The sun path displays in the context of your project and includes on-screen controls for positioning the sun at any point within its range of movement, between sunrise and sunset, throughout the year.
Sun Settings dialog
The Sun Settings dialog provides access to preset sun positions, shared sun settings, view-specific lighting settings, time intervals, and ground plane settings.
Using the sun path and Sun Settings dialog together
To experience the full potential of solar studies, display the sun path, and then use the sun path's context menu to access the Sun Settings dialog whenever you need it. Using the sun path and Sun Settings dialog together gives you the combined advantage of the sun path’s highly visual, interactive controls and the dialog’s presets and shared settings.