What’s happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations. Today I’m going to show you 10 lighting tips and tricks in Vray 3.6 for Sketchup. Let’s get started The first one is to use shortcuts For example let’s create a Rectangle Light, now look at the bottom left of the screen, it says Select first Point (Hold shift to control direction) If you’re not familiar with Rectangle Lights, by default, it only shines on the front face of the plane. So there are often times when you have to flip the light after it’s created to get it to point in the right direction. With this shortcut, you can just click on a point now hold down shift and click on the second point to create it. Now you will see a blue arrow which indicates the direction that the light is pointing to, just move the mouse to the other side to flip the light, then click again to finish. As you can see, it’s a lot faster to use that shortcut Similarly, there are also shortcuts for dome lights By default, it has a basic HDRI loaded when you create it But if you hold shift and click, then it will have no texture. And you can hold control and click to load the texture as you are placing the light. Another light that has shortcuts is the Spot Light. Normally you would click wherever you want to create a spot light, then move and rotate the light, and finally make adjustments here in the settings. But when you use the shortcut, you can hold shift and click on a starting point. Now you can move the mouse to adjust the direction of the spotlight. Then you have the option to adjust the cone angle. And finally you can choose the penumbra angle as well. With the shortcut, you can set the direction and preview the effect of the spotlight very easily. Number 2 - Create lights inside components If you have multiple instances of the same light fixtures in the scene, don’t add lights one by one like this. But rather, go into the light fixture component, and add the light in there. That way, when you add it to one instance, it will be added to all of the other instances as well. And you can use the light editor to adjust all 3 lights at the same time. 3. Mesh Light Tips There are times when you need the light to be in an odd shape. For example, in this scene, I have a mirror that I want to have LED strip lights all around the perimeter. To create this, I can go into the component, and select the geometry that represents the light, then make it into a group And use this button here to turn it into a mesh light. Now let’s render it again to see how it looks. Pretty cool huh? 4. Emissive Material Tips There are two ways to use emissive materials to simulate a lit light bulb. One is to apply an emissive material on the bulb itself. And the other way is to apply the emissive material to the wires inside the bulb. This way, you can see the glass material of the bulb and the inside wires, this makes the render more detailed and realistic There are also other ways to use emissive material, such as creating fire like I showed in this previous video. 5. Use Lens Flare To make the lights look even better, you can add some lens flare after you render it To do that, I’m going to click here to open up the lens effects settings, then click here to turn on the glare effect. Now I can make the adjustments here. Looks pretty good so far. If you want to take this to the next level, go to this location on your computer. Then open Filter Generator, which is a tool to compose filters for the Lens effects. Here you can experiment with the settings to create a lens flare you like. Once you’re happy with what you have, click here and export an HDR file, and choose a size here. Then go back to Sketchup, and change the Glare Type from camera parameters to From Image. Now you can click this button here and load that lens flare file we just saved. There we go, you can always switch back and forth between the two types here. Pretty cool huh? Once that’s done, I can save all the render elements with this button here. You can also watch this video here to see how to use the lens flare image as well as other render elements in Photoshop. 6. Isolate your Lights When you’re adding multiple lights to the model, sometimes the lights all blend together and it’s hard to see the effects of each one. So a good way to study your lights is by isolating them. With the interactive render running, you turn all the lights off except one, adjust the power of that light until you see fit, then repeat the process for the rest. After that, you can turn all of them back on to see how it looks. This is a back and forth process that you need to experiment with sometimes you don’t know which light to turn on or off because they have generic names like this. That’s why this next tip is just as important 7. Organize your lights The first part of this is Naming your lights To make it easier to find your light, use the Lights Editor to rename them I usually add the location of the light into the name of each one First I can right click the light, and click Select in Viewport. I can now see where it is in the model, in this case, it’s in the shower. So I can double click the name, and add the word Shower in place of the word Vray. I can just repeat this process for the other lights as well This makes it a lot easier to locate your lights in the editor so you can work more efficiently The second way to organize your lights is to Put them on layers If a model has a day time and a night time view, then I would add the appropriate time of day into the name of each light like so. Next, I would create separate layers for day time and night time lights. Then I can assign each of these lights to their appropriate layer. And finally I will set each layer to be turned on and off depending on their respective view. Now if I switch to the day time view, you can see the night lights have turned off, and only the day lights are on now. This way, I can easily switch back and forth between night time and day time render by just clicking these tabs here. This works perfectly even in interactive render. Pretty cool huh? 8. Use Correction Controls When you render, there are times when you get burnt out areas like this. If I click here on the force color clamping button, it will show me the areas that are too bright. To fix this, I can open up the correction controls, then click here to show the Exposure settings, turn it on, and turn down highlight burn until I can’t see the clamped colors anymore. Now we can turn the clamping off and there we go, it’s not so burnt anymore. This makes the image lose some contrast, so you can increase it here. There we go 9. Use Light Textures Using texture maps is a great way to enhance your lights. For example, you can also use light texture to create a TV screen effect. First, I’m going to use the rectangle light as the screen. And I will go to the light editor, and then add a bitmap texture for the light. I will choose this picture of Thanos here. Sometimes the light texture doesn’t have the right orientation, so you can fix it by flipping it or rotating it like so. Now I can increase the intensity here. I can also increase the directionality a bit to make the light beams more narrow and focus it in on direction. You can use this method here to create realistic light fixtures like this as well. This texture was downloaded on hdrlabs.com Which is a good resource for HDRI's This takes me to number 10, which is Lighting Resources. Here are a couple of resources to download free HDRI that you can use for lighting your scene. You can use these for lighting fixtures like this, or for dome lights like this. I will leave the links in the description box below. One really good site that I use is HDRI Haven, this has a ton of HDRI's for you to download. And it's all for free If you want to create your own HDRI instead, then check out this course on Skillshare.com, who is also the sponsor of today's video. Skillshare is a learning community that currently has over 22,000 classes in design, photography, and more. The premium membership will get you unlimited access for less than 10 dollars per month, But as part of this sponsorship, Skillshare has set up a 2-month trial for the first 500 people who sign up so you can watch all of their courses completely for free. If that’s something you’re interested in, then go to this link here. I will also leave the link to the course I mentioned earlier. Creating Realistic Lighting Using Your Own HDRI's. This course shows you how to create a simple HDRI using your only your phone and Photoshop. The author uses Cinema 4D to render but you can easily use the HDRI for Vray Another course I like is called Create Photorealistic Interior Renders with 3ds Max and Vray. This one shows you a step by step tutorial from modeling your scene, to lighting and editing in post production with Photoshop. That’s all for today guys, leave a like if you enjoyed the video and comment below what if you have any questions. Stay inspired guys, and I will see you, Next time.
