Artificial Lighting

These tutorials detail some lighting tricks that can be accomplished by exploiting basic SketchUp settings.

• • SketchUp in Night Shoot Wellhorse - A true mastering of basic SketchUp properties. In 3D modeling, faces are sided - front and back - due to mathematical normals defining face sidedness. This means each side can be assigned different properties by the user. Also, he manipulates the Shadow settings and used Fog (which used to be a plugin). Read the thread for details, it is as awesome today as it was when it was first published in the SketchUp forum during the @Last days.

• Brief, description and instructions on the Wellhorse method.

• Night scenes in SketchUp

  • • Turning day into night Photoshop tutorial by George Gruel.

• • Lighting Fake lighting effects. Alan Fraser shares a SKP tutorial on exploiting the effect you can have by assigning different material transparency on front and back faces to create a lighting effect.

• interior lighting?

• • Faked spotlight pattern in SU xx [missing some files/images]

  • material that glows in dark - fake night lighting effect.

  • Tip: Adjust shadow sliders to soften shadows: Light slider to a dark setting and Dark slider to a light setting

Mirror/Reflection effect

• • • Faking reflections

    • Easy Image Captures and Mirrors DigitalThumb

SketchUp is not designed to handle the math required to depict the appearance of realistic lighting. More realistic lighting effects need to be done with ray tracing renderers. Renderers can even use special files from lighting manufacturers to recreate specific light fixtures.

There are several renderers that work inside of SketchUp and other external rendering programs can import models made with SketchUp. See the Renderers section on this site's Resources page.