Saving SunLight presets

[andy_smith]

Is the following item in point 9 possible?

1. I have a Sketchup scene of an exterior isometric view of a building.
2. I populate the scene and create “scenes” in Sketchup to control the camera orientation. One scene is called “west” and shows the building from the west.
3. I place objects in the scene from Cosmos (people, trees, street furniture, etc. I assign them to a layer in Sketchup called “objects-west”.
4. I light my scene with an HDRi and SunLight with an override on the direction of the HDRi and custom angle and elevation on the SunLight.
5. I render the scene, tweak the VFB settings, save them as a preset and am happy. I also save my Sketchup file and save my render settings.
6. I switch to the other Sketchup “scene” called “east” which just rotates the camera to view the building from the east.
7. I re-render the scene and am not happy with the placement of my Cosmos models or the lighting/shadows so I duplicate the objects and assign the duplicates to a new layer called “objects-east”. I then relocate the “objects-east” models to where they work better in the scene.
8. I duplicate the HDRi, turn the original one off and rotate the new one until it casts shadows that I’m happy with.

question:
9. how can I either
a. duplicate the sun, save one as Sun-east and one as Sun-west and give them individual angle/elevation values and switch them on and off depending on my current render view (east or west)? Or
b. Save presets for the SunLight settings so that I can just load a file that amends the SunLight settings?

Ideally you should be able to save/export all your lighting settings including SunLight settings (on/off, colour, angle, elevation, map, etc), Dome lights (on/off, maps, intensity, direction, etc).

I think I should be able to switch my view in Sketchup (either manually or with a camera preset or a scene) and then load files for Render Settings (which I can), VFB settings (which I can) and lighting settings (which I don’t think I can).

Thanks,
Andy

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi andy_smith ,

Sun Light:
The workflow you're after is only possible if you don't rely on the Custom Sun Orientation.
SketchUp's Sun orientation is by default stored in the Scenes.
Note that you should not try saving the Sun light as a vrmat file and then loading it back.
The resulting setup will not behave correctly.

Dome Light:
The Dome light texture orientation is not stored in the Scene but Layers/Tags visibility is.
This means you can just duplicate the Dome, rotate it or even change the texture, assign each dome to a separate Layer/Tag and then control Tags visibility when switching the scenes.

The bottom line is that none of the V-Ray specific settings and parameters are stored in the SketchUp Scenes/Pages.
Only SketchUp properties are.
You should try to achieve what you're after with that in mind.
Also note that storing V-Ray properties in the SketchUp Scenes is a top-trending request and something we'll look into soon.
The main challenge would be not implementing it but rather presenting it to the users in a sensible way (in the UI).

Regards,
Konstantin

[andy_smith]

Thanks Konstantin - this all makes sense.

I guess that, as most of us tend to use the VRay interface for making pretty much ALL tweaks/changes to the SunLight light source in our projects (intensity, size, albedo, model, angle, elevation, visibility, etc) I think of it as being a VRay object/asset rather than a Sketchup object. So, in the same way that I can create multiple dome lights and configure them independently and turn them on and off in the VRay interface, it feels like I should be able to create multiple SunLight instances too and toggle them on and off independently.

In an ideal world it would be possible to create multiple Sun lights and create multiple named groupings of lights in a single scene in VRay. Then I could have one group of lights called “East Elevation” and one called “West Elevation”. As long as I turned on and off the correct groups of lights when I change Scenes/camera positions, the lights will be correct for the scene.

Regarding your advice to put different Dome lights in different Sketchup layers/tags and turn them on and off and update the Sketchup scenes accordingly to store their individual visibility (which I do for many of the Cosmos assets I place in the scene so that the people face towards the camera, accessories face the right way, etc) presumably in the VRay asset editor, ALL of the Dome lights will appear to be “on” (ie their little toggle icon will be light grey rather than dark grey)? But even though they’re all “on” in the asset editor, VRay will only render the ones whose layer/tag is active in Sketchup at the time. Correct?

In terms of your comment about how the Sunlight orientation is stored within the scenes, I guess you mean that when I create or update each Sketchup scene tab, it’ll save the sun position based on the location of the model and the date/time set in the native Sketchup sun window? So scene 1 can have Jan 1st at 1pm and scene 2 can have July 10th at 8pm? If that’s right (and I think it is) what about the other settings for the sun? What if I want my east elevation scene to have a midday overhead July sun with intensity 1 and size 10 and model Hosek et al, and my west elevation scene to have a sunset sun with intensity 0.2, size 5 and model Clear? As far as I know, the native Sketchup Sun settings only save date/tim, not any of the other attributes that we routinely set in the VRay SunLight configuration rollouts.

Thanks again,
Andy