Welcome to Day 9 of My 30 Days of Architectural Design In SketchUp Challenge! This is a series where I spend at least an hour every day working on architectural design in SketchUp for 30 days. Yesterday, on Day 8, we adjusted camera angles to prepare the model for rendering in V-Ray. Today was a continuation with an introduction to lighting.
Day 9 – Continuing To Set Up For Rendering
I am pretty happy we are progressing quickly in the Udemy course I have been working through. I feel like I’ve come pretty far from where I originally was. Once I learn more about applying materials and see what the final rendering looks like in this course, I’ll be ready to do my own exterior design and move into interior design afterward.
Playing Around With Natural Lighting
Today was all about natural lighting and how sunlight and environmental lights affect the rendering. If you look at the featured image, you’ll see the History tab on the left in the V-Ray Frame Buffer. Those three pictures are renderings I saved to show how my model progresses.
You’ll notice that the first image was very dark while the second image was very bright. This has to do with an adjustment with sunlight in the model. The original model faced East, meaning the front was getting no sunlight in the afternoons and evenings. Thus, we used the Solar North plugin to adjust the compass directions and made the front of the model face South.
To be clear, don’t just make your model face South as soon as you want sunlight in your rendering. In real life, we can’t change the sun’s direction on the spot, so we have to model our design with natural light in mind.
The Solar North plugin is helpful nonetheless because most models never directly face North, South, or any other perfect direction. To solve this issue, you can use the plugin to make the North point wherever you want, allowing you to put the sun in the perfect spot for a more accurate design.
This introduction to sunlight eventually led to how you can use various elements with the sun and other lights to create shadows and a more real design. Today was about using trees. As you can see in the image above, a couple of trees are placed outside the scene that cast a shadow onto the building and road.
Of course, it’s unrealistic to place a massive, fully-grown oak tree just because you want it there, but it’s essential to think about how your building fits in with nature and design with that in mind.
Catching Up To Where I Left Off
Things are getting pretty exciting at this point, though. Tomorrow, I’ll be stepping into artificial light sources and working on things like street lights and interior lights. That means we’ll finally be doing things like adding glass to my windows and really start flushing the model out. Until next time!