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Input

• 1 or more groups containing faces. The groups or faces should be painted with a material.
• 1 or more raw faces.

What Is Shade?

The Shade command paints your Landshape terrain with a special kind of dynamic material.

Shade can give your terrain more a more interesting look and feel.

When you Shade, Shade automatically imports a material, called a Landshade, into your Sketchup model, and then applies it to your terrain.

By selecting a Plot, you can shade the full Plot. To Shade selectively, first preselect control geometry groups or faces. Then run Shade. This will limit the Shading to the footprint of your selected input geometry.

Landshades are dynamic materials. They will adapt to the properties of your terrain. For instance, you can make

You may have several Shades in the same model.

You can edit your Shades in the Panel.

Why Use Shade?

Shaders let you visualize and analyze your terrain's local properties.

For instance, the Slope Shader enables you to immediately see if an area in your terrain has a slope higher than and lower than a certain threshold angle.

Also, the variation in color gives your terrain a more varied and visually attractive look.

Since you are in control if the breakpoint angles and colors, you can make the Shader work for you.

The Landshade System

Landshade is a system.

Landshades function like dynamic materials. These dynamic materials are purpose-built to be used on Landshape terrain.

Landshades enable you to work with a single material. Yet make Landshape dynamically apply parts of it, making your terrain come alive in a multitude of colour and shades.

Different Shader Types bring different Shade effects to your terrain. For instance, the Slope Shader will color each shaded terrain face by the local slope of that face.

Landshape's built-in commands, like Fill, Zone, and Zone Brush are designed to support the Shading system.

Landshade Limitations

Note that the Landshade system is intended to work on Landshape terrain only.

The Landshade system is not designed for non-Landshape terrain. Landshades will not work on non-Landshape terrain. However, Landshades are designed to be applied to faces in your Siteplan control group, which technically is non-terrain geometry.

Working with Shades in a Controlled way

The Shade command itself is primarily a quick way to bring in the active Landshade material and apply it to your terrain.

However, once you have the Landshade materials within your model, there is a more controlled and differentiated way to work with Landshades. Like this:

• Create a Siteplan control group
• Apply one or more Landshades to one or more Siteplan faces
• Make sure that your Siteplan's edges are embedded in the terrain
• Select your Siteplan
• run Zone

When Zone runs, it will automatically Shade the parts of the terrain that correspond to the Landshade-painted faces in your Siteplan.

Rebuilding Shades

After you have Shaded your terrain, you may go on and re-shape your terrain elevations.

After your terrain has been reshaped, it may sometimes happen that the edited terrain faces' Landshading gets out-of-sync. This mismatch is easy to fix.

To reapply correct Shading, run Rebuild View at any time. The Rebuild View command tries to automatically find all Landshaded terrain areas, and re-apply their shading by current conditions.

Alternatively, if you prefer to manualy sync Shading, you can preselect Landshaded control faces and either re-run Zone, or re-run Shade.

Edit Your Shaders in the Panel

You can control the behaviour of any particular Landshade in the Panel.

Open the Panel and go to tab "Shade". Here, you can edit your active Shade material.

You can also select and explore various Shader presets. You can edit every preset. Or, you may reset it to factory state.

In the Panel, you can preview your Landshades as you are editing them.

In the Panel, you can also apply your active Shade to all or parts of your terrain. To selectively Shade certain terrain areas, first preselect control geometry in your model. Then, open the the Panel, select a Shade. Apply the shade by going to the bottom of the Panel tab, and click the button "Shade".