Advice needed: planning exterior illumination in SKP -BEFORE- rendering

[Nathank9000]

Challenge: create light plans for house & landscape exteriors, showing the placement of lights & approximate light-cone distributions.

I know I can simulate the placement & effect of lights in Twinmotion and other renderers, but is there any way to show the light coverage in black & white on a floorplan / elevation?

It doesn’t have to be super-accurate, just appropriate to the light type (i.e. a spotlight shoud project a narrower cone, and further, than an area light).

Does something like this exist for Sketchup?

[ateliernab]

uhhh someone recently did a sketchup model here where they made a physical object representing the light and applied a transparent gradient png to it.

I couldn’t find it, but I found this older thread showing how to use 2d cones, how to make a 2d gradient, how to use 3d cones and 3d shapes in general to simulate light.

Lighting Cones

Hi Does anyone know of any lighting effects to use within SU that doesnt require a rendering programme (im not at that level yet). Ive found a couple of ‘light cones’ on 3d Warehouse which do the job, but ideally I could find an effect that I can change the colour. Id love to give the ffect of light emmiting (immitting?) from a source… Thank You!

good reading !

[paul.millet]

hello, in vray you have different channels that can be rendered (they now call them render elements). One of them is called raw_light

here is an example :

normal render (RGB color channel)

raw_light “render element”

this is just a quick example, I just placed one single cone light but it allows you to see a black and white image with light coverage.

Note that sunlight will affect this channel, so you’d need to set the time for night or disable the sun.

you can do the same with any 2D view, including plan view

[Elmtec-Adam]

You could use option is to use the light view in enscape.
This gives typical luminance or lux heat map used in lighting design which shows where your lights are affecting.

Enscape

V-Ray has a lighting analysis also, which of course is more accurate and just as easy to turn on.

It will even display the calculated illuminance values on a surface

.

[Nathank9000]

Wow, thank you for doing the archaeological dig for me! Never would have found this - and yes, I did search the forum first.

This is definitely along the lines of what I needed, in terms of mapping out things before / without rendering them.

[Nathank9000]

Did not know this, and it will definitely come in handy for some things.

There’s nothing you’re aware of that can do these calculations without going into rendering?