Using SketchUp For Live Lighting Demonstrations

Morning Folks!

Long time Sketchup Lurker, short time SketchUp user.

I am a lighting specialist based in the UK and we predominantly do addressable LED installations. The modelling software of choice for my industry appears to be Capture Sweden as it can accept lighting commands in realtime to demonstrate on the renders…BUT i want to use SketchUp.

I have created my first model (not finished!), i will post a pic shortly. It is essentially a room with lots of long bars in vertical and horizontal orientations on the wall.

The finished product will allow me to run the room as a giant equaliser or whatever else i chose to do with the bars.

I am working my way through various tutorials and i get stuck (latest win was learning Copy Array, nice function!) And i have some help from a colleague but i am reluctant to mither him constantly on a weekend.

Can anyone recommend any plug ins or other pieces of software which would allow me to control lighting on sketchup? The ideal situation would be being able to physically address all of the lighting within sketchup (artnet/dmx address) but this may be stretching it a bit far!.

Ill post a pic of my build shortly (super basic).

Any responses are much appreciated!!

You should look at LightUp:

https://light-up.co.uk

Cheers Colin i will check it out now,

This is one side of what i have made, the horizontal bars and the chevrons will be fully controlable to create chasing effects. i just want to be able to animate these on a render so i can show the client what is possible.

I’ve recently, (after many years of knowing about it) started using Enscape.
I would recommend it as it is -comparatively- cheap and is to my knowledge the only -ACTUAL- real-time rendering engine that produces such high quality results.
Also, it has the advantage that you can work on it from within sketchup which simplifies the workflow a lot.
Preparation for the image bellow: 10 secs. rendering: 0 secs


You can work in SU and it updates automatically (and fast!!!)

EDIT: it is not physically based. (I don’t know if that’s a prerequisite for your scope of work)