What’s happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations. Today, I’m going to show you some tips for exterior lighting in Enscape for Sketchup. Let’s get started. So the easiest way of setting up lighting in Enscape is by using the Sketchup Shadows Settings. The shadows settings toolbar allows you to quickly change the time of day in Sketchup, which will then affect the lighting in Enscape. You can also use the Shadows Settings in the Default Trays to adjust the shadows more accurately. There’s also this button here that you can use to show and hide the shadows in the Sketchup Viewport. This makes it easier to see how the sunlight is interacting with your scene. It’s important to know that Enscape also supports Sketchup’s geolocation. You can add a Geolocation by going to File Geo-location -> Add Location. If you add a location to your model, this will help Sketchup accurately replicate the lighting based on real world coordinates. But I don’t need it for this scene so I’m not going to add a geolocation. Once you’ve set up your lighting in Sketchup, you can go into the Enscape Settings to make more adjustments to the lighting. First, it’s the exposure brightness. By default, auto exposure is turned on, which automatically sets the optimal exposure for your scene. But you can also turn it off, and manually adjust the exposure. When adjusting the lighting, you can try using different rendering modes to see how the scene looks. The atmosphere tab has some useful settings as well. For example, this slider here let you adjust the Sun Brightness. Higher brightness will increase the contrast between light and shadows. While lower brightness will decrease the contrast Down here is the Shadow Sharpness slider, changing this to a higher value, will make the shadows sharper, and lower value make the shadows softer. You can also change the looks of the clouds using these sliders up here. The density slider also affects the lighting of the scene. Similar to how it is in the real world, if there are more clouds, then the sunlight will be blocked more. So increasing the clouds density while decreasing the sun brightness will create an overcast look. I like a little more light in my scene, so I’m going to adjust it like so. Next, if you go to the Image Tab, you can adjust the contrast here. You can either use the auto contrast option here. Or adjust the contrast for the Highlights and Shadows separately like so. Finally you can make some more adjustments to the image such as Saturation, Temperature, etc. These don’t affect the lighting directly, but they help stylize your image to make it look better Now I can adjust the output resolution and export the image, it’s also a good idea to save the settings as well. There we go, that looks pretty good. Now let's create the nighttime rendering Similar to before, I can easily change from day to night using the shadows settings here. But now we can’t see anything because it’s so dark. So let’s adjust the exposure to make it brighter. We’re starting to see some of the model here but it’s still too dark. Sometimes 100% Exposure Brightness is still not enough, but if you turn on Auto Exposure, then this will help brighten up the image a little. In the Atmosphere tab, you can use this slider to increase the Night Sky Brightness This will help brighten up the image even more. There’s also this slider, which let you increase the size of the moon. You can see that I already have some interior lighting but for this scene to look better, I need to add some lights for the exterior as well. The Enscape Asset Library has some lighting objects that you can use. I’m going to choose this Street Light here, and place it in the model. Now we need to add some light sources to illuminate the scene. I will try the Sphere Light first. That’s too bright, so I can adjust the intensity here. That looks better! Next, I will try using a Spot Light instead of the Sphere Light. Then the I’ll adjust the beam angle and intensity. It really depends on what looks better, but in this case, I like the look of the sphere light more. However, when using the Spot Light, you can load an IES profile using this button here. This can make the lighting look more realistic. There we go, that looks way better than the default Spot Light Now that I’m happy with this, I can group these two objects or make them into a component, and copy it over here. There we go, now just use this workflow to add more lights to your scene. Such as this lamp I have here to illuminate the tree. I also have these landscape lighting fixtures here. For this light, I will create a rectangular light, then adjust the size using these sliders here. Now I can place it in the middle and then copy it to all 4 faces like so. I also have a car here that I want to add lights. I will first find the material of the headlights in the list, and turn on Self-Illumination. This will make the material emissive. But you can see that it doesn’t output a lot of light. So I will also add a spotlight, and tilt it down a little like so. There we go, that looks good! Remember that you can always go back and adjust the lighting if needed. Again, remember to save your settings. So that when you need to switch between Day and Night scenes, you can adjust the settings accordingly with a click of a button like so. To make it easier, you can rename your settings to night and day time, accordingly Next, let’s talk about lighting up your scene using Skyboxes. A skybox is a 360 or spherical image that surrounds your project to create a realistic background and environment. Here are some free resources where you can download these images. Most of these sources are for HDR images, but it’s important to note that Enscape does not support Image Based Lighting (IBL) so some HDRIs may not work correctly. But the good thing about this is that you can also use non-HDR images such as normal 360 images in PNG and JPG formats. In this case, I will use these two images, which I downloaded from HDRIHaven.com After you’ve loaded the image, you can change the rotation of it here. But as you can see, this looks unrealistic because the lighting does not match the background and environment. So I will turn on Use Brightest Point as Sun Direction. This will allow you to use the background image as a way to light up our scene and change the sun direction by changing the rotation of the image. That looks better, but it’s still a bit dark, so I can increase the brightness here. There we go, pretty cool huh? Now I can repeat this process for another HDRI. Just load it in, adjust the brightness, and rotation to however I want You can also get different looks by adjusting the sun brightness like so. And there we go Those are the tips for exterior lighting in Enscape for Sketchup. Leave a like if you enjoyed the video, comment below if you have any questions. Stay inspired guys, and I will see you, next time ;)
