Today’s tutorial will teach you the basics of interior lighting in your SketchUp renderings.
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In today’s rendering tutorial, I want to give you an introduction to the different types of lights available in your rendering software. As always, we’re going to be using Twilight Render’s free hobby version, but the principles that we’re going to use will apply to other rendering softwares as well.
You can download the hobby version for free at www.twilightrender.com.
We’re going to start with a very simple scene that I’ve created. It’s a pair of chairs in a room without a window. This may not be the most realistic space, but it will allow me to illustrate some of these principles a bit better.
Note that I had to adjust my camera FOV using the zoom tool to get more of the room in my camera shot. To do this, activate the zoom tool, then click and drag while holding the shift key to adjust your FOV. Once you have your camera where you like it, make sure to add a scene to save your viewpoint.
Now we’re going to start off by simply adding a light. To do this, go up to the Twilight Render toolbar and select the option for “Create Light.” When you click the add light button, it should also pop up the edit light window.
Start off and just click somewhere in your model. You’ll have to click 3 times – once to set a reference point for the light. This is basically a base point, but not the location of your light. Click again to click the actual location – what’s nice about this is that you can use it to inference off an object, like a wall. Finally, click a third time to set a target, or what a light is pointing at.
Now that we’ve got a light in our model, we can edit it. I’m going to talk about a couple basic kinds of lights in this model, but I’m also going to skip over a couple of the more complex ones.
The first kind of light is a point light. A point light is a light that eminates light in all different directions. If you put this in the very center of your room, it will light up all parts of the room equally. It doesn’t matter where this kind of light is targeted.
The second kind of light is a spot-light. A spotlight is a light that actually points at a location. This is the kind of light that is affected by where you targeted it.
You can re-target this light by right clicking on it, finding the Twilight Render menu, and clicking on a new location.
The final kind of light I want to talk about is an emitter. An emitter is a material that emits light. You can set the amount of light emitted by a material in the material editor.
Let’s talk just a bit about the settings over here in the edit light toolbar.
We’ll get into these more in-depth later, but generally, here’s what they do –
The size adjusts the size of your light.
Attenuation affects the way the light loses intensity as it moves away from the source.
Power affects how bright the lights are. One note – don’t adjust the brightness of your image by adjusting the power of the light. Use realistic brightnesses for best results. You can use the exposure and gamma post-processing options to affect the brightness of the overall image.
You can select the type of light by selecting the box next to the efficacy.
You can change the color of the light with the box off to the side.
We already talked about the type of light.
Finally, at the bottom, you can affect the type of scene that your preview shows.
Now let’s go through and run our render.
Let’s start by running a render with two point lights. As always, you want to run your render on the preliminary preset first just to make sure that your render is doing what you want it to.
Now let’s change this to a render with a spotlight.
Finally, we’ve got a light that I downloaded from the 3D warehouse. I’ve changed the light color to something realistic, like 3500 K, and I changed the lampshade to a translucent color.
You can see how this translucent color affects the way the colors look in your render.
Finally, you can adjust your brightness by changing your exposure and gamma in the post-process options below.
That’s where I’m going to end todays video. This was a quick runthrough of the way interior lighting works in the rendering process. As always, leave a comment below and let me know what you thought.
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