interior lighting?

Hi all,

I just started to use SU and it's amazing how user-friendly this program is!! But I tried to add some artificial lights (ie: pot light) to an interior but I couldn't find anything function which would allow me to add light source in the interior... because I'm trying to create a model that shows how the interior would look like at night time with the pot lights....

Thanks for all your help and reply in advance!!!

Ken,

sorry to inform you, but SketchUp does not have any additional light sources - just the sun.

If you need extra lights for an interior rendering you should use some other rendering software like Vue, Bryce, Artlantis or some other similar.

Markus

Depending on the light source, you can create a poor man's simulation by creating a yellow colored cone, setting the opacity quite low. Where the cone hits a surface, you may want to add some extra color to the surface itself. In some cases, you could even create a cut to give the surface a lighter color in that area. You should probably postpone that kind of operations until your model is complete - while lamps, walls and everything else are still being pushed around, maintaining light cones could be a great hassle.

Drawing yellow, transparent cones will certainly not ligth up any surrounding objects, and if the lamp shade is not a cone or something rougly similar, it will not work. But in some cases, the thin yellowish color can give a more lifelike impression, in spite of its simplicity. It certainly does't always work well, though - consider it an ermegency solution.

Ketil - can you post a jpg example of your yellow cone idea?

Regards, Ross

I think this is what he was talking about. Make cones, paint them transparent.

It works for light pattern study, but doesn't make shadows. Put this on a "lighting" layer and build your own lighting look.

Attachment 350kB

SketchUp is not built to perform interior light or even soft light studies. There's a bunch'o software already to do this for you. If you really need this capability, there's another bunch'o recomendations on this forum about some of the software.

OTOH there are workarounds. They can be satisfying if you want sketches and aren't trying to make photoreal stuff. One is to make ceilings transparent on the topside (outside) only and have soft light with low contrast. Another is to make blocks of "etherous light" and insert some of those.

Light.skp

Thanks guys!!!!!

Jim - the model that u attached looks pretty good! I'm trying to figure out how u achieved that exactly...

Wouldn't it be easier if I export the sketch to other program like 3DS and then add in light sources and etc? I still haven't tried that so I need some opinions....

I showed SketchUp to my friend who's proficient in 3D modeling... he's using Maya Unlimited... he didn't like SketchUp... but I don't agree with him because when he does his 3Ds... the dimensions aren't even accurate!!! What do you guys think of that? What would be the fastest way to do 3D render? (SketchUp then export to 3DS maybe?)

Ken - The questions about "Wouldn't it be easier?" (quicker, better...) are meaningless without defining what you want in the end; your end result. Since "render" means "to visually present" or "make a visual presentation" that isn't any more helpful.

If you want realistic (photoreal, aka PR) images then SketchUp isn't the software to produce it. SketchUp is a non-photoreal (NPR) renderer. For photoreal there's Maya, Lighwave, Viz are some big names that can do PR very well; and there's at least dozens of others.

The light rays I posted are just multiple surfaces with transparent material. Then the shadow dialog was adjusted. Nothing fancy, but it gives a good SKETCH of what the light would be like.

If you want the ease of modelling in SketchUp combined with the possibility of adding artificial lighting, then it might be worth considering getting another app to do that. 3ds export from SU is pretty good and the exported model will generally drop straight into another application without too much bother; you can then add lights.

Here is Jim's model exported into Vue d'Esprit - it could just as easily have been Bryce, Cinema 4D or Art*lantis, to mention but a few. Some of these applications are very reasonably priced and the lighting is basically drag and drop.

Alan

Thanks Jim~

I understand now... so from your opinion, which of the PR software is good when using with SketchUp?... I'm thinking of exporting whatever I draw to a PR software and touch-up from there... because SkethUp is really time-saving... please advise~ Thanks!

Ken - before you ask about it, use the 'Search' to look at the dozens (nundreds?) of posts about that. I'm the last one to ask, my recommendation is to dump PR ! <G> But seriously, there's been a lot of very good discussions --merits and disadvantages-- about different software packages, especially in the Gallery forum.

Several people mentions that there are other applications which are probably better suited for creating photorealism. If you really need that as a tool for a professional, they are probably worth their price, but that's not my situation - I use SU for private tasks and for creating fairly simple illustrations in technical reports. Lighting effects would be nice, but certainly not a necessity.

Ok, since I was asket for it, I made up a quick and dirty example. I never tried it before - haven't gotten that far with my model yet, so it was just an idea I had. But honestly: For a first try, I think the results are accceptable. I learned a few things in the process that can lead to better results next time, but this time I did't spend the time doing everything over again...

This is what I did:

Draw a construction line through the axis of the lamp shade (usually: vertical, "blue" direction). Draw a circle on the floor, tabletop or whatever, with the center where the construction line hits the surface. (Hide or move away any furniture that is in the way!) Draw a triangle from the circle to the edge of the lamp shade, back down to the circle, with an epsilon baseline. Pull it around the cirle in a Follow Me. Paint this cone in a pure yellow color, with an opaqueness of 6-8. There are two surfaces, one inside the other; you may paint both.

If you want to be more fancy, use Intersect With Model on the light cone to identify edges where the light hits the wall, furniture etc., and create new materials (if necessary) with higher lightness for painting the areas within these edges. On flat surfaces which are part of your model, this is fairly simple, but for complex shapes imported as components (like sofas in my example), it might not be worth the effort. I did lighten up the cirle under the table lamp - and learned that lighting up dark, photographic texture images doesn't always look very nice. It works much better with monocrome materials, or at least materials where most of the color is added in the material definition, not part of the texture image.

I also had to fake it a little: If you simply paint the circle on the table underneath the table lamp in a lighter color, you'll get that nasty shimmering effect from the interference between the table material and the circle material. So I pulled the cirle a millimeter up from the table. Nobody will notice (but if you forget that you did this, you might run into problems e.g. with construction lines in the table surface plane disappearing under the circle etc.).

For the size of the circle you draw on the floor or table: You probably should draw a construction line line through the lamp shade axis, the upper rim and the lower rim (in other words: the line along the shade should be in plane with the axis). The rim of the light cone should lie where this line hits the floor/table. For my example, I simply picked a size that looked reasonable, but the light cones turned out too narrow for the shades. Also, they look like they do not meet the rim of the shade - most likely, the triangle I used for the Follow Me wasn't in plane with the axis.

I never expected this to be any sort of replacement for a decent multiple light source facility in SU. It *is* a poor man's solution, and the results are correspondingly. But as long as we don't have any "lamp support" in SU, this may be better than nothing - at least in some cases!

See thread for Vue (cheap lighting)

http://www.sketchup.com/forum/read.php?f=4&i=29094&t=29094 [broken link. Search for Vue]

Regards

Scaifee