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Introduction LightUp aims to provide SketchUp users with a fast workflow to explore spaces and lighting. The motivation for LightUp is based on the oft quoted observation that the more iteration that can be applied to a problem the higher the likelihood of achieving a high quality result. LightUp is about playing with light and shade in an environment that is tightly coupled to the underlying model that SketchUp provides. LightUp relies on some underlying physical basis for light transport but ultimately, like all software, it is a simulation which contains simplifying assumptions. IMPORTANT: The demonstration version of LightUp is time limited to 30 minutes usage after which time it will cease to work and only normal SketchUp functionality will be available. Restarting Sketchup will reset the timeout. System Requirements If youʼre already running Sketchup 6 or higher on your computer, youʼre 95% of the way there. LightUp extends the functionality of SketchUp in a number of ways “under the hood” and makes use of your OpenGL compliant video card. LightUp currently requires some OpenGL 2.0 functionality to operate correctly. What does that mean to you? Well, if your video card is less than a few years old (after 2004), youʼre probably good to go but weʼre all at the mercy of the quality of our video drivers. If your video card does not support the required OpenGL features, LightUp switches to a very simple rendering mode that should work on all cards (you can if necessary also force this mode from the LightUp menu). The acid test is to run the free demo and see if it works. If it doesnʼt work, check you have “Use Hardware acceleration” selected in Sketchup preferences, ensure you have the latest OpenGL driver for you card or ultimately go splash out on a less antique video card. Registration Key The first time you run SketchUp after installing LightUp you will be prompted for your 32 character Registration Key you were sent by email. You can reset the Key from the Tools->LightUp menu. Getting Started with LightUp v1.10 Copyright (C) 2010 Adam Billyard All rights reserved 1
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Page 1: Introduction - LightUp for SketchUp · PDF fileIntroduction LightUp aims to ... The demonstration version of LightUp is time limited to 30 ... because the example uses an older style

IntroductionLightUp aims to provide SketchUp users with a fast workflow to explore spaces and lighting. The motivation for LightUp is based on the oft quoted observation that the more iteration that can be applied to a problem the higher the likelihood of achieving a high quality result. LightUp is about playing with light and shade in an environment that is tightly coupled to the underlying model that SketchUp provides. LightUp relies on some underlying physical basis for light transport but ultimately, like all software, it is a simulation which contains simplifying assumptions. IMPORTANT: The demonstration version of LightUp is time limited to 30 minutes usage after which time it will cease to work and only normal SketchUp functionality will be available. Restarting Sketchup will reset the timeout.

System RequirementsIf youʼre already running Sketchup 6 or higher on your computer, youʼre 95% of the way there. LightUp extends the functionality of SketchUp in a number of ways “under the hood” and makes use of your OpenGL compliant video card. LightUp currently requires some OpenGL 2.0 functionality to operate correctly. What does that mean to you? Well, if your video card is less than a few years old (after 2004), youʼre probably good to go but weʼre all at the mercy of the quality of our video drivers. If your video card does not support the required OpenGL features, LightUp switches to a very simple rendering mode that should work on all cards (you can if necessary also force this mode from the LightUp menu).The acid test is to run the free demo and see if it works. If it doesnʼt work, check you have “Use Hardware acceleration” selected in Sketchup preferences, ensure you have the latest OpenGL driver for you card or ultimately go splash out on a less antique video card.

Registration KeyThe first time you run SketchUp after installing LightUp you will be prompted for your 32 character Registration Key you were sent by email. You can reset the Key from the Tools->LightUp menu.

Getting Started with LightUp v1.10

Copyright (C) 2010 Adam Billyard All rights reserved! 1

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ContentsSetting up 3

Example Walkthrough 3

Menu Items 11

Area Lights 11

Point Lights 12

Query Tool 12

Preferences 14

TourTool 18

Shading Parameters 19

Lightmeter 21

Exporting Stills 22

Exporting Movies 23

Exporting FBX files 23

Exporting LightUp Player files 23

Scenes 24

Caching 24

Masked Textures and Opacity 24

Materials 25

Material Markup 26

Skybox 27

Specularity and Reflections 28

Known Issues 31

Contacts 31

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Setting upLightUp requires minimal setup, however for completeness weʼll cover some of the settings and preferences. The LightUp toolbar consists of 3 buttons:

Bring up the Preferences dialog for the current model

Invoke the QueryTool which allows setting of light source parameters and lighting parameters. Alt/Apple + leftclick will add a new PointLight source to your model.

Go! Update lighting and switch to realtime lit rendering of the current model using the TourTool - the fun one!

Example WalkthroughDownload this very simple model of 2 rooms from the website: http://light-up.co.uk/resources/examples/example0.skpOpen the model in SketchUp and you should see something like this:

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Circled in red on the left is a large 2m x 2m area emitter of 3000 lx that will act like a window letting in daylight. In the righthand room are 2 SketchUp Components representing PointLightSources and a small recessed fixture with a narrow beam. LightUp marks the location of point lights using specially named SketchUp Components. Any Component with a Definition name starting with “PointLightSource” will be treated as marking where you wish to place a light source.Open the SketchUp Component dialog, click the “Home” icon to show what components you have in your Model and drag a new PointLightSource into your model. A default PointLightSource Component is automatically added to your model by LightUp. It looks like this:

NB Youʼll notice it is not the same as the ones in the example. This is because the example uses an older style of Component with a Definition name starting with “PointLightSource” also. Any component can be used to mark the location of a point light as long as the Definition name begins with “PointLightSource”

TIP: Query tool has a shortcut which allows you to place light sources using Apple/Alt + mouseclick on any part of your model without having to open the Component browser. Try it.

Press Tourtool to perform the lighting calculations and switch to realtime rendering mode.

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Now return to SketchUp by selecting a regular SketchUp tool from the tool palette (eg the Select arrow).

Next try using the Querytool to hover over light sources to see the tooltip information about the light source. LightUp will show light source information in a tooltip and give an indication how far light will travel from the light based on its power.You can mouse click on the PointLightSources and area light sources to alter the power. Try moving some lights around or change their color using the SketchUp color picker:- Select Querytool- Click on a PointLightSource to show the edit dialog:

- Click on the color selector to change the light color.- Change the Lumen rating in the text box. 1200 Lumen is the default

value which is very approximately the brightness of a 75 Watt incandescent bulb.

TIP:Shift + mouse click to select multiple LightSources and apply edits simultaneously.

The simple Lumen rating will shine equally in all directions. These kinds of lights are often called Omnilights.Real world light sources do not emit light equally in all directions. They have openings for power, they have enclosures that shield lighting in certain directions, reflect in others etc. In order to capture this detail, all manufacturers of lights provide, for each of their products, a (free to download) file that exactly captures how light is emitted in each direction. “IES files” are produced in testing laboratories and contain exact readings for each light, so by using these IES files, you get not only more accurate lighting in LightUp, but often times more “interesting” lighting effects because of the umbra that real lights produce.

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So setting an IES file on a PointLight can make it behave like a spotlight, a stadium light, an LED light rather than a constant value in all directions.Download and save this IES file from the website to experiment: http://light-up.co.uk/resources/examples/GDL002-200-XPW-001N.IESUsing the Query tool you can click on a PointLight and set it to use the IES file for lighting by clicking on the yellow “...” file Chooser button on the righthand side:

LightUp has a built-in IES file browser which shows all the key information contained in the IES files without having to render them.

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TIP: You can use the mouse wheel to scroll through files or just hold down the mouse button on the lefthand panel and drag up or down.

Navigate to a IES file of your choice (or the IES file you downloaded) and press “OK”.Now when you hover with Query tool over this light source, youʼll get a yellow mesh showing the profile and power of your light source.

Pressing Tourtool shows the dramatic effect of using IES files for simple light sources:

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:TIP: Keeping your IES files together with your SketchUp files can be error-prone if you copy files around but forget the IES files. LightUp always checks for a folder called “Lights” where your model is stored so you can keep the IES files you need for the model all together in one place.

Here is another simple scene modeled in SketchUp with the LightUp toolbar ready for use. You can download the model: http://light-up.co.uk/resources/examples/lobby.skp

Open the model in SketchUp and you should see something like this:

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In Preferences we choose “Direct Lighting” and “Blend with AO” and check “Use Sun”.Click on the TourTool button will perform any lighting calculations and switch to realtime rendering mode.Because weʼre using AO + Direct Lighting, youʼll get a lack of definition with everything too bright. Open Preferences and in the AO section and change the Multiplier to 0.5 to reduce the amount of AO. Press Tourtool and LightUp will rescale the results without the need for relighting.

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By pressing RETURN youʼll bring up the capture dialog from which you can export images, skybox, movies, model files as well as export directly to the LightUp Player format.

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Menu ItemsThe Sketchup menu Tools->LightUp contains a number of controls for using LightUp.Export Preferences: Saves your current model preferences to a file so you can share with others.Import Preferences: Loads preferences from a file overwriting your current settings.Remove All LightUp Info: Strips out any additional information that LightUp has added to your Sketchup file such as Area light settings, Material settings.OpenGL Info: Opens the Ruby console and prints technical details of your graphics card. This is used primarily for fault finding.Reset Registration Key: Resets your key and allows you to re-enter it.Force Simple Rendering: LightUp automatically choose which mode to use based on your graphics card capabilities. However, you can force LightUp to use a simple mode using this menu item.Default is Doublesided: Sets the doublesided Preferences for all newly created documents.Removed Unused Hierarchy: Many Sketchup objects are constructed of Groups and Component Instances that while useful for editing, are not used during Tourtool. LightUp can removed these hierarchies to increase performance.

Area LightsArea lights are identified by LightUp through some markup on each SketchUp materials. This extra information is added interactively using the QueryTool by clicking on a face with a material. NB You must add a material to a face in order to edit it - you cannot edit the Default material.This material can then be marked as an emitter material along with parameters for power, spread and sampling density. Power is in units of lux (lumen/m2), Spread is in degrees from the face normal and lastly Density allows control of how much sampling of the emitter LightUp should perform. Generally this parameter should be left at 1.0 but if you find some “hotspots” on surfaces near the area emitter you might want to increase this. Conversely, it is sometimes desirable to set density=0.0 to have a single sample in the center of the area emitting face.

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The power of an area light is derived both from the material parameters and the area of the face. A large area emitter introduces more energy into the scene than a small one.

Point LightsPoint lights are identified by LightUp using a custom Component which can be dragged into your model. The position, color and power of the light can all be adjusted. It can be found in the Components browser (go to Windows -> Components) and is called “PointLightSource”.In fact any component whose Definition begins with the name “PointLightSource” will be treated as a Point Light by LightUp. This allows you to create custom geometry that will be a placeholder for your light sources if you so desire.A shortcut for adding PointLights is to select the QueryTool shown below and hold Alt/Apple and left mouse button to place a PointLightSource on the surface youʼre current hovering over.

Query ToolThe settings of an area light material or a point light can be adjusted

using the QueryTool as well as various other lighting attributes. Select the query tool and click on a light source to pop-up a dialog of parameters to edit. Shift-click will add/remove items to the current selection for editing multiple items. NB the color of a light source is derived from the color it is assigned in SketchUp so all the normal SketchUp tools can be used for this.Clicking on a PointLight will bring up a dialog to edit its parameters. You can enter a simple Lumen value for the light to give even distribution of light (an Omni light); a 75-watt incandescent bulb produces around 1200 Lumen. Or select an IES photometric data file for more control over the direction and power the light source provides.

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Clicking on a face with a (non-default) material will bring up the Material dialog where you can set a variety of parameters which will apply to all faces using this material. Check “Emitter” to make all faces using this material Area Emitters as described earlier.In addition there are a number of other useful settings.

“Always fully lit” will force drawing the face with no shading which is useful to create “fake emitters”. Faces that are bright like emitters but are not area light sources.“Donʼt cast shadows” ensures faces using this material donʼt block light. You may have an opaque texture of a window but still want sunlight to be able to pass through the faces. NB If you wish a whole object to not block light, you must use the “cast shadows” setting in SketchUpʼs “Entity Info”.

TIP: Set “Donʼt cast shadow” / uncheck ʻcast shadowsʼ on Dynamic Components that will be moving to avoid leaving a “phantom” shadow when they move.

“Low density” is useful in situations where you have a large area that doesnʼt need high resolution lighting and can thus benefit lighting times by being marked for low resolution lighting.“High density” conversely increases the lighting just for those faces using this ,material. If you need more shadow clarity in just a small area but do not wish to increase Resolution generally, this is a useful setting.“Additive glow” effects how the geometry is rendered. It is lit in the same way but rather than being blended into the scene with the other geometry it is “added” to the pixels increasing their brightness.

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PreferencesLightUp preferences are

divided into 3 panels (Quality, Lighting and Viewing) along with a Resources panel containing links to web resources for convenience. (Tip: Clicking on the Panel titles will collapse it to reduce the size of the window).

The first panel is Quality and simply controls the resolution of the lighting data. More resolution takes longer to calculate.Doublesided Do you wish LightUp to light and draw both the front and back material of each face. For realtime applications, models are commonly created just using the front material. Just using the front material will reduce lighting time and increase Tourtool framerate, however the model needs to have been constructed with this in mind. The Default for this option is ʻcheckedʼ ie process both front and back of each face. This default can be set from the Tools->LightUp menu.Use Selection By default LightUp will just light the part of your model currently selected - or the entire model if nothing is selected. Unchecking this box will make LightUp ignore any selection and always light your whole model. The question of which to choose is down to your own personal workflow.Resolution. LightUp calculates how much resolution your model requires using some basic heuristics. The Resolution field works very like the SketchUp value input field; it accepts input of the form “Nx” meaning “N times whatever resolution LightUp came up with for your model”. As a rule of thumb, leave it at 1x or 2x while checking things are working and raise it to 4x or 5x if you need (often the result you get with the default will be just fine).

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Once youʼre more comfortable with LightUp, it is often easier to enter an exact value for Resolution. This value (in units of your choice) will be used to control the smallest light sample. For example, if youʼre lighting a average sized room, you may want to calculate the lighting at 6” intervals so youʼd enter 6” (or 15cm or 0.5ʼ) in the input box.Ignore cache forces LightUp to regenerate all data irrespective of the existence of cached results.

The second panel is Lighting.The drop down menu selects Ambient Occlusion (sometimes referred to as ʻclay renderingʼ), Direct Sources or Lux Contours.

Lighting mode: Ambient OcclusionAmbient occlusion (AO) is a common technique for approximating how much of the ambient light in the scene reaches a surface by examining the surrounding geometry. The result is a scalar value that can be used to control shading. The first control is how far to search for surrounding geometry. The choices are Interior, Exterior and Custom. Interior is a preset to be used inside, Exterior a preset for outside shots and Custom allows specifying a absolute distance.The reason for these cutoff distances is that inside a building all the surfaces are ʻnearʼ something which would result in a black image (try it using a closed room and choose ʻExteriorʼ), so it is common to provide a cutoff distance beyond which the surface is considered not occluded.The result of AO calculations are used to blend between 2 user-defined colors. “Bright” color and “Dark” color. You can edit these in Preferences.

LightUp offers 3 different ways this AO factor can be used to shade geometry:

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Normal Blend: The surface normal is used to blend between the current Bright & Dark colors and this is scaled by the AO result. An optional scale factor is also applied.

Linear Blend: The AO result is used to blend between linearly the current Bright & Dark colors. An optional scale factor is also applied. In the image weʼve used a bright green for the “Dark” color for demonstration purposes.

IBL Blend: The surface normal is used to lookup the HDR color in an image (so called Image Based Lighting or IBL) and this is scaled by the AO result. This technique gives lighting which exactly matches the skybox backdrop for very natural looking results.

Constant: The current Sky & Ground colors (or just the Background color if Sky is not enabled in Sketchup Style) is used. This is a fast way of getting some “fill-in” ambient. An optional scale factor is also applied.

Lighting mode; Direct SourcesThe (default) mode applies all light sources to your model Use Hidden Lights controls whether to ignore lights that are hidden. Useful for phantom lights.Use Sun controls whether to use the sun as a light source. A Sun Multiplier allows manual tweaking of the power of the sun along with a Turbidity control to alter the haziness of the sky.Here is the same model rendered with turbidity=0.1

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and turbidity=0.9

Screen with AO controls whether to combine Ambient Occlusion data with Direct Lighting data or just use a simple constant ambient term.

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Lighting mode: Lux ContourLighting is performed as normal but the results are displayed using a logarithmic pseudo-color ramp which makes it easier to find and analyze light distribution problems.Two further modes are available here for light analysis work. The Daylight mode is a simple overcast sky model with a lux scaling.The Insolation mode provides realtime measuring of Kwh/m2/day along with this value with respect to the current surface the lightmeter is over.The third panel is ViewingLighting only controls whether to blend material colors and textures with lighting data.Pause Animation Halts any material animation and DC animations so you can get precise Stills.Show Skybox controls whether to draw an enclosing skybox which can dramatically enhance the sense of presence as one navigates the scene.Camera Collision enables collision in a very similar fashion to the SketchUp Walk tool.Apply Gravity enables applying gravity to the camera should you walk off a ledge.Apply Inertia enables allowing the camera to slowly come to rest rather than stop immediately. It gives a softer experience for touring models.

TourToolSwitching to the TourTool, updates the lighting for your model and

then allows smooth navigation to examine the lighting youʼve set up. Controls are:Look Around## # Left Mouse Down + DragPivot Around## # Left Mouse Down + Drag + AltDolly # # # # Left Mouse Down + Drag + ShiftMove# # # # Arrow keysExit Tour Tool# # Escape key or choose another toolToggle SketchUp view# Middle Mouse Down + Drag

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NB When dollying the camera, LightUp will attempt to estimate the height of the camera from the ground and show it in the lower right corner of the Sketchup window so you can easily get a realistic placement of the camera. If you have gravity enabled, this height is then maintained as you tour around the model.

Shading ParametersDuring Tourtool you can double-click on a material to bring up the Shader editor. This allows you to change some basic shading parameters that will apply to the material you clicked on. These will be saved inside your Sketchup model.The “Metal” checkbox controls whether the reflections are effected by the material color. A dielectric surface like plastic/wood reflects the color of the source, whereas a metal surface attenuates reflections by its own color.There are a number of common presets for Index of Refraction (IOR) as well as accepting absolute values in the input box.By default LightUp will create a normalmap automatically from the Material texture. This can be overridden by loading a bumpmap and/or specular map from a file using the file chooser.

Alternatively, you can type in floating point values into the Specular and Fresnel edit boxes to set it to a constant. (eg 0.25) or type a space to reset to the original values.

The base color of the material can be adjusted in realtime using the Red,Green,Blue sliders. NB These color tweaks are applied only while in Tourtool mode. The Sketchup materials are not altered. Not only is it

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useful to change colors while in Tourtool for aesthetic reasons, its also useful to turn down the material color to black so you can see just the contribution of the specular bumpmaps to your image.

The second panel is Texture Animation. This controls how LightUp animates the UV coordinates of your materials. You can choose the waveform and how it is applied to the UVs. Download this simple example from the website here. Youʼll need to unzip it to create “texanim.skp” and a “Textures” folder. Press Tourtool and now double-click on the tiled floor to bring up the Texture Animation dialog.Choose “Ramp” as the waveform from the first drop-down menu and the floor will start ʻflowingʼ to the left. Try typing in a different Angle (in degrees) to alter the direction.Now drag left and right inside the waveform window to change the frequency of the waveform and thus the speed of the flowing texture. A frequency of 2Hz means the texture will scroll its entire width 2 times each second.Change Frequency## Drag left and rightChange Amplitude# # Drag up and downChange Phase# # Shift + Drag left and rightChange Baseline# # Shift + Drag up and downNow choose the “Sine” waveform from the dropdown menu for a different effect.The second dropdown menu allows control of what aspect of the UVs is effected. It defaults to Translate, but you can choose Scale or Rotate. Combining waveforms and different transforms can produces many effects.The last control to mention is “Steps”. Normally the waveforms are smooth functions that vary over time, so choosing a Ramp waveform + Translation causes the texture to flow smoothly. However sometimes it is useful to have the animation move in distinct steps. A good use of Steps is applying a texture that consists of 8 images side by side that form a short ʻmovie loopʼ. You want the texture to jump from frame to frame not slide smoothly between them. By choosing a Ramp waveform, Translation and setting Steps=8 you can achieve this.The second panel is Color Animation.. This works in a very similar way to Texture Animation described above. To get started, from Tourtool mode double click on a material and choose a “Square” wave from the dropdown

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menu. This will make the material flash on and off at 1 time a second (1Hz). Choosing other waveforms and adjust them to get the effect you want.

LightmeterDuring Tourtool you can get realtime illuminance readings by

holding down the Alt/Apple key and pressing the left mouse button. The lux value at the point your mouse is over will be given allowing a fast check on simulated lighting levels.

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Exporting StillsWhile its all good wandering around our creations and experimenting with lighting, we need to be able to generate images that can be used for presentations. Simple screenshots might suffice but at printed resolutions they lack sufficient fidelity and generally look poor.An additional feature of LightUp is the ability to generate very high resolution anti-aliased images of what youʼre seeing on screen. Press the Return key while using Tour Tool will pop-up the Capture dialog if it is hidden.Simply choose you resolution and press “Still”. You will be prompted for a Savefile name to use. LightUp saves using the TIFF image format.You can also choose to save the depth information for the image at the same time. This will be saved as a floating point TIFF image with the addition “_depth” added to your filename. Depth images are commonly used by post-processing in applications such as Photoshop to identify the depth of each pixel so accurate montages can be created. For example replacing the sky behind a building.Another option is to use the cubemap generator. It will produce 6 square images centered on your current position from which you can easily create a Quicktime VR file to allow others to get a sense of a space interactively while retaining a small file size. Choose file naming to use appended names or appended numbers and press “Cubic...” and youʼll be prompted for a base filename/folder t which the six images will be saved. Alternatively you can save the 6 images as a single vertical strip.The demo version of LightUp will watermark your export.

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Exporting MoviesLightUp can generate high resolution anti-aliased movies too. Choose your movie resolution and options and press “Movie..” to begin recording. You will be prompted for a Savefile name to use. You can now navigate manually, or use Scene animation to generate your movie. Recording will continue until you press RETURN at which point the movie will be processed into a standard AVI file or Image Sequence depending on your options.IMPORTANT The AVI file contains a full color, non-compressed 30Hz movie that will need to be compressed down to a reasonable file size to distribution and play smoothly.The demo version of LightUp will watermark your export and limits recording to 5 seconds.

Exporting FBX filesLightUp can generate an Autodesk FBX compliant file containing your Tourtool geometry including all the lighting. The object hierarchy is retained, all textures are exported and an optional stub name (default “lmap-”) for lighting textures allows easy import into other applications.The resulting FBX file can be imported into other applications that support multiple UV coordinates and multitextures such as Maya or Unity.

Exporting LightUp Player filesLightUp can generate “.luca” files from you Tourtool results. These files contain your geometry, lighting and Scenes youʼve defined and can be given to other for viewing using the free to download LightUp Player (see www.light-up.co.uk/player).

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ScenesLightUp works well with SketchUp Scenes and these can be setup inside Tourtool or beforehand. Animating between Scenes will all be honored when recording movies.

CachingLightUp is very fast at performing illumination calculations, however for a complex model with many light sources it can take a few minutes. In order to reduce the wait, LightUp automatically saves partial lighting results in a file (called “lightup.cache”) so when you ask for the same lighting again, it can pull out the partial results and very quickly re-create the lighting. This happens automatically (unless you select “Ignore Cache” in Preferences) and allows you to experiment with different lighting parameters quickly. NB Remember to Save your model after lighting is complete as this will ensure that LightUp can find your cached results next time you load that model.

Masked Textures and OpacityLight transport is effected by passing through non-opaque materials in LightUp. The opacity of a material is determined by the texture map alpha channel and by the material alpha as set in SketchUp.You can download the model here that shows sunlight being filtered though a texture.

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Materials

LightUp takes it material information from the SketchUp model, preferring any primary source it can identify over embedded information. This means that for a textured material, LightUp first tries to load the original texture directly from the filepath provided by SketchUp. If this fails it will look in the SketchUp Materials folder .skm files for the texture. If this fails it will extract the texture information cached inside the SketchUp model file.Having acquired the base albedo texture, LightUp then checks to see whether you have a specularmap/normalmap previously setup. If it does not find one it will search the same folder it found the texture file for a corresponding map by appends the word “_uvlmap” to the texture name to load a combined normalmap and specularmap. If this doesnʼt exist, it appends “_specmap” to load a grayscale specularity map.During rendering, the normalmap and specularmap are used to add specularity to surfaces. This involves calculating where rays emanating from your eye-point would bounce off the surface into your scene - an expensive operation - and one that largely contributes to why traditional raytracing (which LightUp does not use) can be quite slow. In order to keep things whipping along, LightUp uses multiple Irradiance Caches which are probed instead. Irradiance caches are added in the same manner as Point Light Sources. i.e. they are custom components that can be dragged and positioned in your scene. They are processed automatically and require no further intervention. If you have no Irradiance caches in your model, LightUp will try and use your skybox as a cache, which for exterior scenes will often be what you want.

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Material MarkupLightUp uses markup on the material name to indicate attributes related to processing and rendering. These attributes can be combined at will to provide a large amount of control. All of these can be set by using the QueryTool and clicking on a face with a material.Hereʼs an example of using material markup to control lighting and rendering of a very simple scene lit by sunlight:

Now we change the standard SketchUp material called Brick_Rough_Dark to have the attribute “Cast no shadow”:Notice the brick block now does not stop sunlight to the floor behind it, however it continues to receive shadows. The attribute “Cast no shadows” is exactly analogous to Sketchupʼs “Cast Shadows” in the Entity Info panel but differs in that it is per material not per face

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.It is sometimes useful to have some faces not be shaded but still be part of the rendering. An example would be a “fake emitters”; surfaces that look bright but donʼt actually contribute to the illumination of the scene. If we now change the material by checking “Always fully lit”, we get:

The brick block is now not shaded and casts no shadow.

SkyboxA skybox is, as implied by its name, a closed box rendered around the camera and moving with the camera to give the impression of an environment infinitely far away. Its common use is for sky, clouds and distant (i.e. non-parallax) objects like mountains and buildings. LightUp accepts a latitude/longitude panorama image in either LDR and HDR format of any size or a traditional skybox set of 6 square, power of 2 sized images for each of the 6 faces of a box. This means the skybox images must be one of 32x32,64x64,128x128,256x256,512x512 or 1024x1024.The name of the skybox file to use is set in the preferences for the model and should be the complete filepath to one of the face images. LightUp will find the others from there if its skybox set.

TIP: Keeping your Skybox files together with your SketchUp files can be error-prone if you copy files around but forget the skybox files. LightUp always checks for a folder called “Textures” where your model is stored so you can keep the skybox files you need for the model all together in one place

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The filenames for each image of each face of the box are specially named. They must end in “left”, “right”, “up”, “down”, “back” and “front”. A set of 6 images in .jpg format for a skybox called “my_skybox_image_” would consists of:my_skybox_image_left.jpgmy_skybox_image_right.jpgmy_skybox_image_up.jpgmy_skybox_image_down.jpgmy_skybox_image_back.jpgmy_skybox_image_front.jpg

You can create Skyboxes using LightUp itself by placing the camera at your chosen viewpoint, starting Tourtool and choosing “Cubic...” and “front,right,up...” format which will create 6 square renderings around the current camera location. These can be used subsequently as a skybox inside LightUp or converted to a Quicktime VR format.

Specularity and ReflectionsVery broadly lighting effects can be classed as ʻView independent” and “View dependent”. That is, lighting which doesnʼt change regardless of the viewerʼs position and lighting which changes as the viewerʼs position changes.Diffuse lighting is due to light bouncing off a surface in a uniform distribution (randomly scattered) and is thus view independent and can be calculated once and is valid for any viewpoint.Specular lighting is due to lighting bouncing off a surface in a more coherent way and so is view dependent and cannot be precalculated. LightUp renders the Diffuse lighting and the Specular lighting (if any) together making use of the additional material textures to do so.Consider the scene below with a platform with a simple ashwood texture map called “ashwood.png” applied:

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A skybox is setup for the scene in LightUp Preferences, and Sunlit in enabled and weʼre ready.Switching into Tourtool and dropping the camera down for some more detail and we get:

Now if we double click on the ashwood platform material and adjust the specular slider we get this:

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NB This reflection is simply reflecting the skybox and is the simplest form of reflections in LightUp.Download this simple example from the website here. (It is the same model as used for the Texture animation example). The concrete planter is grouped as an object and just above the water surface an IrrCache is placed. LightUp will search your model for IrrCache to bind to groups/Component Instances and will find this IrrCache and use it in preference to the simple skybox. The result is that the brick wall is reflected nicely in the water.

Tip: Place IrrCaches as close as possible to where the reflections are being generated to get accurate placement.

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Known IssuesCanʼt handle multiple open windows on Macintosh.Objects with non-orthonormal local transformation give incorrect reflections.

Contactswebsite:# http://www.light-up.co.uk forum:## http://www.light-up.co.uk/forumemail:## [email protected]

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