Hi guys, I found that a solution for sketchup’s too sharp light sources was to create panels with multiple sources to ensure a somehow almost even lighting with less light aray edges visible.
Still I had to put up there almost 50 of them so… i don’t know it fixes to problem for the render for the moment but working in sketchup at the same time becomes barely possible.
You can still see that its not optimal but, I feel that in a night scene or interior with no exterior light, the brightness does not spread smoothly. Even though playing with the beam angle and all. Maybe a diffuse option for sketchup would be cool, but you were right for the color applied to the source itself, it really changes the game for now.
Thats why we will introduce area lights for SketchUp soon. This will allow you to place rectangular or line shaped emitters, other than just points.
Will it be possible to have it on only one side of the rectangle?
I can’t say for sure if we will support that for SketchUp from the beginning, but yes that’s possible. For Revit at least, we support that. For SketchUp it might take a version longer because we have to implement the whole area light placement and modification ourselves.
I myself use Revit so I’m not know the latest possibilities, but are the area/rectangular lights already available in SketchUp?
The SketchUp plugin does not support area lights yet. We want to finish the SketchUp material editor before going on to area lights in SketchUp.
I miss making a texture a light source; it’s strange having a light bulb that emits light but doesn’t glow. (As a development idea, can a ‘glow’ or ‘bloom’ setting be applied to a surface emitter?.. when it is implemented.)
@Gadget_1 have you tried the emissive keyword (release version) or the emissive settings (preview version) yet?
Didn’t realise there was a way to do it: Is there a list of keywords somewhere?
(I used a small spotlight close to the source, pointing backwards. It works, but probably more intensive rendering required than just using an emitter.)
See https://enscape3d.com/knowledgebase/sketchup/ if you are using the release version with the keyword based material system.
So I started using IES profiles, instead of the default enscape lights. It has seem to help a lot. A can light, actually works like a can light and the edges of the array are a lot softer and diffused like a normal light.
I downloaded a zip of IES profiles from derekjenson.com/3d-blog/ies-light-profiles. and they plug right in. It’s helped me a lot.
