Use PNGs to add lighting and depth to your model - Skill Builder

[Music] hey guys it's Erin for this week's skill builder I want to pass along something I think I saw at a trade show I think this Daniel Brown did it and I think he showed me this like three years ago and it just recently resurfaced in my mind I saw something I hey that's like Dan's trick so I figured I'd share it with you the basic gist of it is the idea of using P and G's to simulate lighting inside of a space so I won't explain it I'm just gonna do it so let's go ahead and hop in and do just that all right so I have a hallway here it's kind of a dark hallway and just a disclaimer what we're about to do is not necessarily actually add lighting you only have one lighting source and Sketchup and that is the Sun so by doing we're about to do we're not going to add lights in here so I'm going to render differently but it's going to give us the effect of lighting in here so we're gonna do that by importing or start just by importing a PNG house I'll actually hop over here go to file and I'm going to import I'm gonna go to my desktop and grab this light dot PNG you'll see what it is my Bri and I'm gonna import it as an image I'm gonna say import and I'm just gonna drop it on the ground and I'll scale it up nice and big alright so here's what this image is this image is a transparent PNG with beams of light that's all it is that's all that's in here real simple I downloaded it simple model or simple image file real easy you could actually if you have any photos chop shops no Photoshop shops you could do this in just a few seconds pretty easy stuff I'm gonna take it right now and I'm gonna rotate it vertical so I'm going to come over here I'm gonna use my arrow keys right arrow key to rotate it up on red and then we use my blue arrow key to rotate it so it's facing me me the camera alright so that is what we're working with right now so at this point it's just an image nothing special about this in fact I could take it and see it's too big it's me too big to fit in here so first thing I might do is I might hit scale and scale this down so it's a little bit more reasonable size if I want I can actually use the scale keys to distort this make it wider or skinnier I could change that just an image right now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take it and move it I'm gonna grab it right about here in the middle of that light and I'm gonna go look into my hallway and I have these can lights in here so I'm gonna go this one right here I'm just gonna stick this right about in the middle that can light if I hop out here right now and see kind of have a little bit of a glow right there if I want I could actually scale it out a little bit more I could probably have it you know come down through the floor have the beams hit the floor or something like that you get the idea there's there's fine-tuning to be done always so I'm pleased right back where it was just right in the center there so that looks kind of cool it looks nice it's it's okay looking but there's some more things we can do one thing is as we rotate around we can start to see that it's flat so something I might do with this I want to move it back out here is change the file just a bit I'm gonna right now it's an image if we look at entity info tells us it is an image image we've talked about this before is kind of a special group it consists of a single texture on a face that faces a specific size and it has four edges around it and it's grouped together it's not a normal group it is just its own thing and image but just like a group I can right click and I can explode it I'm going to head and explode it and then I'm gonna right-click on it immediately and say make component so in the component I'm going to name it I'm just gonna call it light because I'm feeling creative today I'm gonna set my component axes I'm gonna put the component axes up here at the center or at the origin of the light I'm going to click once to place that now next thing it asks if you watch here pick the direction for the red axis I'm going to make sure the red axis goes across the edge the horizontal edge of the image this case for green axes and we can just put that perpendicular to the red axis it was important to put the red axes here because the next thing I'm gonna do is turn on always face camera always face camera says always make this beam face towards the red axis so the red axes will always face towards wherever I am looking at the model from so as long as that red is across the front this beam of light will always appear facing towards me so we'll go ahead and click on we have replace selection with component turned on that's very important a lot of people are missing this and wondering why when they create components it shows up in component library but there's drawing on the same screen is still the same this is why make sure you have this turned on and click create all right there we go so now as we spin around it always will face towards wherever we are cool all right one last thing actually two less things I'm going to double-click to enter the component and I'm gonna use the eraser along with the shift key to get rid of these boundaries we don't actually need to cut that out like that looking good alright so I'm going to go ahead and grab it and I'm gonna grab it by the origin I'm gonna come into this first light right here zoom in and just drop that right in the middle of that light alright that looks pretty good that's coming off there we take this just one step further one last step to tie it all together we're going to select the component go to edit and hit cut now I'm going to double click on this light this light is a component there are five of them in this model they were all the way down here at these views of the 5 if I double click into this component go to edit hit paste in place it's gonna paste that cut light in the exact same location but inside the component because it's inside the component that means now the poni consists of the light and the light beam so if I click out here who have lights coming off of all five spots so again just a disclaimer what we did isn't actually going to change the luminescence of the hallway it's not going to put more light in there it looks like it it put a bunch of bright pixels in there so it made it look a little bit brighter but what we're actually doing is just kind of simulating light beams it's something you may use more to visualize inside of Sketchup this makes for kind of nice especially with can lights or spotlights or something like that to just kind of give a little atmosphere show a little bit of you know depth to your model by actually having those beams of light it's a great way to do it it's it's pretty easy one of things you will want to rely on a little bit is Photoshop to do some editing to that image this one has a little bit of harsh edges right at the end of that light it probably could have been faded off a little bit more but like I said that's easy enough to do if you're inside a Photoshop there's also I mean it's actually a pretty intense light it probably would be good to actually den that down to about 50% especially with five lights in a row right now it kind of looks more like sprinklers are going off than lights but you still get the idea so hopefully like that hopefully that's a new tip to you something something new and I got it like I said I got a shout out to Dan Brown because I remember him showing me this so I was it's a pretty cool feature right there a pretty cool way to put lights into a model so if you did like this please click like down below and if you want to see more videos like this click subscribe we release videos a couple times a week and you'll be notified if you subscribe to our YouTube channel most importantly though please leave us a comment let us know what you thought about this if you thought we could have made it better anyway and if you have any ideas that you think would make good skillbuilders we like 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Channel: SketchUp

Views: 26,771

Rating: 4.8901601 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling, Light, Png, Image, skill builder

Id: pkr5vylrayk

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019