Product Environment Properties Tab
The Product Environment Properties tab presents the functions used to prepare environments by adjusting their orientation or by defining the specific settings for the use of a real-time sun.
It contains four boxes: Environments, Orientation , Real-Time Sun and Environment’s Brightest Point.
Environments Box
This box lists the environments that are globally allocated in the product or specifically allocated to certain product surfaces. Selecting an environment from this list gives access to its orientation settings, to the real-time sun settings, and to the settings for the definition of its brightest point. The settings for the selected environment are modifiable when the environment is the product’s active environment. Otherwise, they are visible as read-only.
Orientation Box
The Orientation box is designed to modify the two following types of orientation:
Environment orientation in the product. This orientation can also be modified by activating the Environment Orientation mode
and moving the environment directly using the mouse. The global orientation of the visible environment under the mouse is modified, even when the environment is a surface-specific environment affected to multiple surfaces.Surface-specific orientation, typically used to reorient reflections on a given surface. This operation is also performed by activating the Environment Orientation mode
and moving the environment by using the mouse to click and drag while holding the Shift key, or from the Surface Properties.
This orientation feature does not impact the environment’s default orientation stored in the environment properties, which is used for initializing the environment orientation in the product upon allocation.
In order to change the selected environment’s orientation from the Environments box, enter the desired value for the orientation with regard to the X, Y, and Z axis in the corresponding fields.
You can reload the default orientation at any time by clicking the Use default orientation button.
In order to save an environment orientation as the default, click on the Set as default orientation button.
Real-Time Sun Box
The settings in this box are used to adjust the real-time sun specific to the selected environment.
Parameters defined in the editor Real-time sun can be ignored in favor of the parameters defined specifically for the selected environment by checking the box Use the following sun settings when using this environment . These correspond to those in the box Sun setting from the editor Real-time sun .
If no real-time sun is active for the product as a whole, it is still possible to use a specific real-time sun in an environment by ticking the checkboxes Apply the following sun settings when using this environment and On.
Environment’s Brightest Point Box
This box is used to specify the brightest point of an environment in order to position the real-time sun with the help of the positioning option Extracted from Environment. This can be set up either manually or by an automatically search.
To run the automatic identification of the position of the brightest point in the environment, select the environment in the Environments box, then click Find automatically. The brightest point of the current environment is then identified by a square on the displayed environment.
It is also possible to click directly on the displayed environment to pinpoint the desired direction of the real-time sun.
The sun remains fixed relative to the environment when the environment Orientation feature is used.