Modeling a Light Cone - Skill Builder

[Music] hey guys it's aaron and i saw a couple posts on our forum go by talking about creating lighting cones if you remember uh it was a while ago maybe it was a year ago i made a video on using transparent imagery to emulate like uh lighting basically not rendering we're not talking about rendering we don't render in here this is just talking about representing light inside of your model so like a working representation so i thought this lighting cone thing was really cool so i went through and kind of developed that workflow and i'm not taking away from whoever posted it originally but i have a couple tips on if you do want to emulate a light cone inside of sketchup let's take a look okay so i have this little stage here and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna use these spotlights right here just to right now they're just pointing straight down so i'm just gonna have a cone of light just come right out of them straight down so uh one thing i did grab i actually just downloaded it which is a white to clear gradient image so i have that on my desktop i'm going to import that but other than that i'm just going to come in and do this thing so uh i'm going to go into one of these lights i'm just going to double click i am going to go up here and go to view component edit and hide similar components so as i do this to 1 it's going to do it to all of them but i only want to see one of them i only want to work in one of these all right so i need two things right now one is i need the cone of light that to come down out of the the light here and then i'm going to need a rectangular surface behind the cone that is at least as big as the cone so let's see let me show you what i'm talking about so i'm going to start right here i'm going to come up and grab a point right here in the middle this is not to be perfect i can adjust it afterwards but i'm going to come draw a line like this draw a line over and then back up there just that triangle right there perfect now i'm going to put in a circle so right below that just going to drop a circle i'm just dropping it straight down from this point it doesn't have to actually connect up doesn't doesn't matter i'm going to select it tools and say follow me and then click my triangle and that's going to create that going around like that okay perfect i'm going to delete that circle i'm actually going to delete this too i don't need that face right there all right um so that's coming i actually want that to be up in there so i'm gonna triple click that real quick and i'm gonna move it i'm gonna move it vertically so i'm just gonna hit the up arrow on the keyboard tell it to move vertically and something like a slide inside there till it's looks like it's coming out looks like the light coming out of there perfect all right now i'm going to come back here and i'm just going to inference off of this line i'm going to come over like that like that oop i did not inference off there very well did i have inferenced vertically i want to inference off of there they're off the green axis and now this does not have to be perfect but i want to draw a rectangle that is bigger than the cone i created again not exact but enough to cover it up right so it's it's wider and it's taller than this because what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a projected texture of my my semi-transparent image right here and i'm going to project it right on here so by starting with a surface that's bigger it just makes it so much easier you can do this with a smaller image but getting that projected texture onto larger surfaces takes a lot of tweaking so this is the easiest way i've found to do it so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go to file import and i'm going to grab my linear gradient import that and i'm going to so you can see it here as it floats it goes down to nothing but at the top it's it's full white so i'm going to drop it here in this corner like this click there and i'm going to pull it up all the way to here and then that's going to put it on that there we go look at that oops i i clicked out that's that's what we're looking for so it's pure white here drops down to see through at the end what i'm going to do right now is select this right click texture and make it projected now here's a simple part i'm going to go to my paint bucket i'm going to hold down my modifier key to sample and then just paint it on the cone look at that look how simple that was now obviously some things aren't perfect right now one i got this rectangle floating behind at this point i can get rid of it because it's part of the model i don't have to hold on to that surface the other thing is i got this ring down here on the bottom not awesome so i'm just going to actually shift erase and drag around like this um sometimes that's a pain right sometimes holding down shift and deleting a circle that's broken like that i'm not sure what happened to break it but that can be difficult so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna grab it grab all the pieces that are left rather than dragging and getting rid of all of them i'm just going to select them go to entity info and turn off their visibility same as leaving it okay if i click out now i come out here i got some lights coming out of there so you can see it's similar to what we did with the image remember i made a face me image before of a beam of light basically and shoved it up into a light very similar but this can actually uh well it's 3d for one thing and it can actually be seen from different sides you can see the light will stack up too so kind of a cool option if you want to create or emulate light falling especially something like this on a stage where seeing how that light's going to fall is going to be important pretty easy create the cone project the texture of a gradient onto the cone all right so i got to admit to you guys i did fumble on this the first time i did it um i started with a square that i imported my material to that was smaller than the actual size of the cone and i figured i'll just project it on there and then i'll stretch it and and use you know adjust texture it was rough i don't recommend doing that i do recommend it seems almost overly simple but like take that make that rectangle the reference rectangle for your projected material bigger than we're going to project it on put it on there line it up make sure it looks good then bring it over you don't if you get really good at it you can just do it off on the side but man lining it up like that made it very simple you can always readjust textures once they're put on any surface but especially a cone it can get kind of tricky and not easy and not very much fun so this was a much simpler way to do it um again i know some somebody in the comments gonna already i can already i can feel it so it's coming you know why don't you just take it into blah blah blah rendering software and make it a light and render it that's awesome if you're a renderer go for it the idea here is if you are doing something like this like a stage design and you need to see just where lights fall is this enough is this going to be wide enough that sort of thing this actually gives you something physical to interact with rather than having to jump off to render every time you make a change so by making a part of that light component you can actually see where does it fall off you can actually model that cone with a specific focus it's another way to see it before you jump off into rendering if you're going to render out something with lights and everything go for it use render engine rendering engine if not this is a way to represent that light without having to take that step if you liked that video go ahead and click like down below and if you haven't already please subscribe we create several videos every single week and you'll be notified of each and every one of them if you subscribe most importantly though please leave us a comment down below most if 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Channel: SketchUp

Views: 5,953

Rating: 4.9736843 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling, Light, Cone

Id: EzEI3um8vo8

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021