How to control Night view?

[Mainer]

At 3:30 PM Eastern time, when I do a final view of my main floor dollhouse view, it gives it to me as night time. It should not do that for this time of day, summer or winter, even though northern Maine is closer to the North Pole. Oddly, it doesn't do that with a dollhouse view of the basement? What setting do I need to change?
Thanks.

[daydreamer]

Phil,

Go into the program help and enter Sun Angle in the Search field.

[Mainer]

Thanks to both of you, however, I still have the problem. I recall the fix you are suggesting and I used to use that in Pro 7 but it doesn't cure the problem in Pro 8. Rick, when I go to the sun angle help, I'm basically being told to adjust the lighting by adjusting each individual light in the house, which is many, and all of them have been preset to about 80% intensity, which should not give me a dark house.

The puzzling thing is this only is happening when I ask for a final view of the upstairs dollhouse view. It doesn't do it with the downstairs ? With Pro 8 when you ask for a dollhouse view it shows you the backside (top) of all the ceiling light fixtures which takes away from the view (Pro 7 didn't do this) so I've deselected them and the night time problem occurs whether the light fixtures are there or not.

I think I'll be contacting tech support?
Thanks again.

[daydreamer]

You're welcome...

[Mainer]

Rick,
Tech support asked me to turn off my sun angle and turn it back on, which I did to no avail. So at their request, I've sent them a zipped copy of the plan.

[daydreamer]

I guess the other question I would ask is do you have you settings correct in Preferences?

Go to Edit>Preferences>Special CAD and make sure your Longitude, Latitude and Time Zone are set.

[Mainer]

Rick,
I entered my exact lat-long per my gps and the time and that didn't help.

Tech Support asked me to try turning off the sun angle, then while in 3d, select Adjust Lights and under these circumstances, the last light listed is the artificial sun, created because I turned off the sun angle. They asked me to set it at -90 degrees and as soon as I did, my dollhouse turned dark, which it should not have. I reported this to tech support and have not heard back in a day?

[Kilgore Trout]

You should post a picture of what you are seeing.

Regarding the sun angle of -90, assuming this is your tilt angle, all this does is point your sunlight straight down.

One thing to keep in mind, something that I have noticed with the doll house views in particular that can be really confusing, is that the lighting is based on where your camera is in plan view. If the camera is inside of a room, you will get room lighting and if it is outside of the building you will get sunlight instead. So what always seems to happen with doll house views is that you start the view with the camera outside of the house (which means you have sunlight shining in it), then when you tilt the camera up to look straight down in the house the program will switch to inside lighting. Most of the time the lighting doesn't change right away until you do something like move an object or try to make a final view. You can also force the lighting to update by just hitting the F5 key. See my pictures that show the difference.

To fix this problem, just tilt your camera down or up until you get the lighting you want.

[Mainer]

Technical support has replied to me that there is a problem and the program isn't working correctly when the dollhouse camera is straight up overhead. Their solution is to tilt the camera down slightly. I've tried their solution and the amount of tilt you have to add is minor to avoid the problem.