SketchUp FAQ - Lighting

Owned by Systems Next Limit (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 27 Jul, 2022 by Next Limit
2 min read



There are two main types of lighting used in Maxwell Render: Environmental and Physical.

Environmental Lighting

This type of lighting, which contributes globally to lighting the rendered image, may use one of four types: Sky Dome, Physical Sky, Image Based, and None. Environmental lighting is set up in the plugin using the Environment tab in the plugin's Scene Manager window.

Physical Lighting

This type of lighting is concerned with the creation and use of individual emitters; in Maxwell, emitters consist of geometry which has been assigned an emitter material.

The plugin offers 6 ready-made lighting object types on the toolbar (you can find more information about them here) but you can also create your own light-emitting objects.

The basic steps involved in creating a custom rectangular light, then, are these:

  1. Draw a plane.

  2. Select a material, as described here.

  3. Set the material to use an emitter Character type.

  4. Assign this material to the plane.

  5. Render the scene.

The geometry determines the physical position and directionality of the light, while the emitter material determines the nature of the light that is emitted from that geometry. Besides for these creation steps, there are two main factors to consider:

Surface Normals

In Maxwell, light is emitted according to the normals of the mesh in question. In SketchUp, the normals point in the direction of a face's front material, so use SketchUp's right-click > Reverse Faces command if necessary. Since this alters the geometry physically, it is necessary to use the Re-export Scene function in Maxwell Fire, before changes will be reflected in the rendering.

Emitter Power

Since Maxwell is physically correct, it is necessary to ensure that you provide it with realistic model. This includes both the overall scale of the scene, and the values given to the power-related parameters of emitter materials. Since the output of an emitter is spread across the surface of the mesh to which it is assigned, modeling at too-large or too-small of a scale will result in lights which shine too weakly or too strongly.

IES, Spotlights and Projectors Emitters

As these lights require the SketchUp provides directionality information in order to point them, the geometry used to apply the corresponding material has to be grouped (the ready-made lights created from the toolbar are already created as components, so do not require this). In all the cases, the geometry used will be replaced at render time by some hidden to camera geometry that will generate the desired effect so it is not really important the geometry you apply it to (it will work as a gizmo).

The IES and Projector types will require you to provide a IES or an image in their corresponding material characters section in order to work correctly.

The ready-made lighting objects from the toolbar provide a quick way of adding these light types saving all the hassle that involves creating them from scratch.