No Shadows in "Final View with Shadows"

[Rich Winsor]

This one had me scratching my head. If you like generating a “Final View with Shadows” in your 3D views this may help you one day. I was having so much fun playing around with Ashlie’s castle with courtyard that I decided to put a proper parapet with crenels on the roof of the keep. I accomplished this by cobbling together some soffits and everything looked pretty good so I went ahead and generated a “Final View with Shadows” using default sun settings adjusted so the light would play nicely across the parapet. I was unpleasantly surprised when the rendering showed nothing in the way of shadows for the crenelation (see 1st thumbnail). This led to a session of double checking default settings, preferences and display options as well as trying different materials for the soffits. Nothing seemed to do the trick and waiting the requisite 30 seconds for the view to regenerate every time I tried something new had me going bonkers. When I finally stumbled upon the solution it took literally 3 mouse clicks to rectify the problem (see 2nd thumbnail). Anybody know what was wrong? It turned out that since the keep was already 3 stories high I had to generate the soffits for the parapet in the attic view of the floor plan. When I went to the “Perspective Full Overview” to generate the “Final View with Shadows” I had switched the “Change Floor/Reference” to floor 1. For some reason the software generated all the structure correctly but would not put the shadows generated by the objects drawn on the Attic level. I merely clicked on the “Up One Floor” icon 3 times to go to the Attic level and generated a “Final View with Shadows” and as David is wont to say, viola! There are all the shadows. It turns out that the only way to get all the shadows to generate is by generating the view from the attic floor. Views generated from floors 0, 1, 2 and 3 don’t display shadows for objects on the A floor. Go figure. I also took the opportunity to get the balky 3D flag poles and banners I imported to display their colors properly (see thumbnail 3).