Night scenes in SketchUp

I am new to sketchup and I was wondering if there is a way to effectively do night scenes with sketchup. By this I mean having a darkened background with the inside of the building showing illumination, without having to use a third party rendering software. I have tried changing the sky/ground colors to black, but this is not enough. Is there a way to give the apearence of illumination within a building with sketchup. I hope this makes sense. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Afraid not, Smitty. You will have to use a third party software for any illumination that doesn't simulate an outdoor sun.

By the way, welcome aboard the SU express!

Professor Bob

Smitty:

Here is an early attempt at interior lighting at night. Did not achieve what I wanted and ran out of time to play with it. I used several interior faces colored different shades of yellow/orange with different levels of transparency in an attempt to achieve a realistic or random interior appearence.

You might want to look at some architectural magazines that shoot their exterior photography in the evening with all the lights on and use special camera filters to achieve a unique saturated look. You could then take a digital file of what you want to appear inside the window and map it to the window. This could be somewhat time consuming but if you could pretty much have any effect appear inside the window.

Please post your results since I'm still interested in achieving this effect some day.

Mike White

I haven't got any examples to hand, but you can also try putting the building inside a cylinder, cutting a vantage point through the side and colouring the inside a very dark blue. You can then get illumination effects by turning off Receive Shadows in the surface Properties box for the parts that you want to glow.

If you are on a Windows system you can also apply a dark blue Fog via the debug menu (Ctrl+Shift+D). By doing this and tweaking the shadow values, you can get a 'day for night' moonlight effect.

[7/23/15 Note, the debug menu has been removed. And since version 6 a fog tool was added to SketchUp. Access it through the Window menu.]

This is Bob's house, from the post below, inside a cylinder with the shadows switched off on the interior surfaces.

If I have time this week I'll take it into artlantis to be the diff.

Alan,Pretty clever effect -- with that technique and an adjustment layer in Pshop, I bet you could do night scenes that are fairly convincing and quick. The technique is illustrated on the Wacom tips site for turning day to night. Make a brightness adjustment layer, turn the brightness down, then paint out (on the mask) the areas you want to stay bright. In your example, you could do the opposite -- turn the brightness up on the adjustment layer, then paint the areas dark on the mask.

Paul