EASIER WAY TO POINT/POSITION SPOTLIGHT in sketchup

[liam_hardie]

One of the features I miss fromThea Render in V-Ray are the spotlight pointing tools that give a target helper that can be clicked to an object and therefore the light will be directed to that object, (along with cone and penumbre disc adjustments.) ( see Thea tool.gif)
In V-Ray I have found that a sketchup extension (Eneroth 3D rotate) makes spotlight pointing a lot easier.
When a spotlight is added it points down by default. If you invoke the 3D rotate tool and click on the spotlight origin (cone tip) then click below it (which is blue z axis) then with the 3rd click you select the item you wish for it to point at, this will direct the spotlight exactly to that 3rd click point. (see point one gif and point 2 gif)

The issue after having pointed a spotlight and that it needs re-positioning is that it will likely be off axis and so the first method using the second click wont work on that spotlight if you need to re-position it. There are a few ways to help with this, but the one shown in point 3.gif seems the best for me. Right click spotlight and "edit component", use the tape measure tool to click twice on the blue axis of the spotlight component axis, this will produce a dashed lie on the spotlight's axis. Then using the 3D rotate tool, you can click on that spotlights origin, the second click will inference to the dotted guide line, and then the 3rd click to the target.

Note: That while the "hide v-ray widgets" will work, the guide line remains, so if needed those guides can be dissabled on a scene by scene basis by hiding or adding them to a hidden tag.

Would be good to have a spotlight axis line as native.

tool download here

[Vizioen]

Sorry this won't help you one bit, but at some point you'll start hitting the limits of what a software can do. I said goodbye to SketchUp after using for 10+ years and switched to 3dsMax because of limits like this and I never looked back, that was 10 years ago. I recently had to install it to do some work on a model I received in SketchUp and I was amazed that basically nothing changed or was added in more than 10 years, and people still had to rely on the (thank god) huge amounts of scripts and plugins there are out there. I loved modelling in Sketchup but my god, out of the box it's way too basic and I hated that I had to pay more than my indie license for 3dsMax last year. It's a scam, shame though, could have been a very nice piece of software if they added some better tools out of the box. Just my two cents.

On topic though, you should post this in the SketchUp subforum. https://forums.chaos.com/forum/v-ray...tchup-wishlist

[liam_hardie]

I completely agree with your comment. It's certainly a love/hate relationship.
I stick with it as I'm working in the Film&TV industry production end where turnaround has to be so quick and it's commonly used in terms of file sharing. ( not post production - where 3DS, Maya etc are more likely used) So for me it's the fastest way to produce and render models at an acceptable level for pre-visualization.
Fortunately I don't pay the SU subscription as I've stayed with the 2020 version. Not just to avoid the subscription cost, but to stay more productive because if I upgrade to the newer versions of sketchup, many of the older plugins ( without which SU would be useless) wont work and so I'd be going backwards, as there are virtually no tool improvements in the native sketchup program.

As for posting this in the sketchup area, I thought I had, but thanks for chiming in, I'll see if I can move it.