Plan Shadows

Plan shadows, also known as drop shadows, add a subtle but important element of depth to your landscaping plans and improve their appearance. Plan shadows are specific to the plan view and are not related to the accurate shadows created during a realtime walkthrough.

Important: Plan shadows involve extensive calculations and can significantly slow down performance, especially on computers with slower video cards. We recommend that you keep them turned off while designing your landscape, and only turn them on temporarily for printing and screen shots.

Enable shadows in Plan view
Check this option to enable drop shadows in the plan view. This only affects shadows in the plan view, not shadows during a realtime walkthrough or movie.

Shadow offset
Distance of the shadow from the edge of an object (in feet or meters).

Shadow darkness
Controls how dark the shadows are. Smaller values result in softer shadows.

Use time-of-day and compass settings
When this option is selected, the shadow direction is determined from the current location of the sun, which in turn is determined by the current compass direction and time of day.

Custom direction
Use this option to set a fixed shadow direction. 0 degrees is east, 90 degrees is north, and so forth, as shown below:

Shadow Fading

Plan shadows will fade out and eventually disappear when you zoom out from the landscape. This is normal and helps improve performance. The shadows will still appear normally when the plan is printed.

Controlling Shadows Per-Object

You can customize whether or not an object casts a shadow, as well as the shadow offset, using the Advanced Object Properties dialog.

Note: Some objects, such as fill regions and text, do not cast shadows in the plan view. In this case, the plan shadow-related options in the Advanced Object Properties dialog will be disabled.