Drawing in the Shade


 


Overview


The ShadowTools Palette

The ShadowTools Palette has nine tools for creating and manipulating shadows and transparent objects.

Shadows as Transparencies. Shadows across the face of a building, say under the roof and eaves, are normally simple transparencies. They are nothing more that a darkening of the image behind. Thus, these can be achieved in PowerCADD by drawing a polygon or Bézier with a transparent pen and fill color, normally black for a grey effect. These could be with a hard edge or with a blurred edge.

Quartz Shadows. Quartz renders a shadow as a graduated, transparent and blurred copy of an image, and it can be offset from the original image or directly behind the image. Additionally the shadow has its own color, independent of the original image.

Move Shadow Tool
This tool allows you to click on an object with a shadow and then drag the shadow around.

North Arrow Tool
This tool allows you to click and drag to set the direction of North used in PowerCADD.

Shadow Line Tool
This is the Sketch Line tool of SketchTools with additional settings for transparencies and blur. When you change the brushes for this tool, you are changing the brushes of SketchTools.

Shadow Brush Tool
This is the Brush tool of SketchTools with additional setting for opacity and blur. When you change the brush for this tool, you are changing the brush of SketchTools.

Shadow Pen Tool
This is a specialized version of the WildTools Pen tool, and you have a choice of a stroke or solid shadow. The stroke (not filled) shadow works like the Shadow Line and Brush tools.

In the solid shadow, the tool uses the pen color and opacity for both the pen and fill of the object.

Shadow Polygon Tool
This a specialized versions of the WildTools Polygon tool, with the same choices as the Shadow Pen tool.

Shadow Offset Tool
This tool allows you to click on an object and add a shadow. You can locate the shadow interactively with the mouse or use a fixed shadow offset.

The tool has the capability of creating a shadow of the same color and opacity as the object you click on. For example, in a stained glass window, the shadows would be the same color as the glass pieces. If the object has a fill, then the object’s fill color and opacity are used for the shadow. If the object does not have a fill, then the pen color and opacity is used for the shadow.

If Copy Color and Opacity is not selected, then the shadow is placed in the pen color and opacity set for the tool.

You can press the Option key to adopt a shadow, just like the Shadow Needle tool.

Sun Shadow Tool
This tool allows you to do simple sun shadow studies.

In the tool's dialog, you set the height of the building (that is, the object in the PowerCADD drawing you will click on) and then the latitude and month.

To use the tool:

Click on an object in the drawing and then move the mouse around.

As you move the mouse, you will see the location of the sun for the time of day.

Release the mouse button and the shadow object will be placed in the drawing.

Shadow Needle Tool
This tool is like the WildTools Needle tool except that it only works with the shadow effects.


Go back to WildTools