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Adona. Part 1 in this series can be found here. Also for additional help V-Ray for
SketchUp User Manual Version 1.48 .
Nomer continues his great collection of lighting tutorials to help you get to grips with
and simplify this often complex process, with some easy solutions to this often
frustrating and confusing aspect to rendering. In this guide Nomer checks out Emissve
materials to help light your SketchUp models. You will need a reasonable knowledge of
SketchUp, rendering and the use of Photoshop for this tutorial.
1. What is Emissive Material?
Emissive Material is actually a special material layer of V-Ray for SketchUp used for
producing self-illuminated surfaces. It also allows a plane, a face or an object applied
with this material to turn into an actual light source. In other rendering engines, they call
this a self-illuminating material or in V-Ray Max it is equivalent to V-Ray Light
Material. When I first used V-Ray for SketchUp, I was not encouraged to use pure
Emissive Material to light up my model. The reason was blotchiness. is this the case
though? Can I possibly produce quality rendering just by using Emissive lighting?
In this 2nd Part of my tutorial, I will try my best to share my knowledge and my
experience in using Emissive material. But before that, let me reintroduce the basic
function of it and how you can access this in V-Ray for SketchUp. Emissive material is
normally used as self illuminating material for glow sticks, neons, bulbs and LED lights.
I will be using this simple scene to show you how to access this material easily. Again,
just like my part 1 tutorial in this series, the Camera and Physical Sky are turned off.
This means I will be relying totally on Emissive materials to light up my scene.
SketchUp Scene
The parameters of the Emissive Layer are: Color will be the color of your Emissive
Light/ Transparency, Intensity controls the power of your Emissive material. Check
Double-Sided, which means both negative and positive faces will have an Emissive
Layer. You can load bitmaps on both Color and Transparency boxes, by clicking the
lower case m on the boxes.
Parameters
Here is a quick render without using V-Ray for SketchUp default Visopt (Sun, Physical
Camera turned off).
Intensity = 5
Intensity = 10
There is a way on how to remove blotchiness. I basically increase the HSph Subdivs of
my Irradiance map.
HSph Subdivs = 50
Reflection Layer
Bitmaps
Below is a simple scene that I will use to demonstrate how to place a TV screen map
and how to create fire to effectively light my fireplace.
SketchUp Scene
For this TV, I need to apply the map correctly to the TV screen. Again this is very easy
to achieve in Google SketchUp. I wont go into details on how to do this, instead I will
focus on the TV material in this tutorial.
Note: Bear in mind that any UV tiling with bump, displacement, dirt, transparency etc.
V-Ray for SketchUp follows the UV tiling of the diffuse map.
Now, all we need to do now is to apply the Emissive map. This time instead of using
Emissive Color, we will load the same Diffuse map on to the Emissive Layer. The
Intensity will control the power of this map. See image below.
Settings
Here is the render with multiplier = 1.0. No Physical Camera, no Sun, no IBL.
Intensity 1.0
Intensity 2.0
For the fireplace, I will be using the material shown below. I downloaded this material
from the Internet. I repainted the background and cropped it.
Fire Image
To create the fire material, create a rectangular face inside the fire place. Here is a
sample below.
Now we will create the Transparency map in Photoshop, to remove the black area.
Alternatively you can create a PNG file with Transparency click Use Color Texture for
Transparency. But me I like the old way.
a. I open my fire Diffuse map in Photoshop.
d. Highlight Layer 0 and click Select>Color Range (make sure Selection is chosen).
Use the Eyedropper Tool and select the black area in the actual image and adjust
Fuzziness. Then click ok.
Note: the good thing with adding a mask is you are doing non-destructive editing and
at the same time you can always use an array of options in manipulating the mask. You
can actually do this, but I will invert in now, so that later you wont have to invert this
map in V-Ray for SketchUp.
f. Select the Mask option and click Invert or go to Image>Adjustments>Invert.
Invert
g. You may want to refine the edge of the mask by clicking Refine Mask Edge. Here
you can avoid the halos you can get and smoothen and feather the mask and even
availing the edge detection. This is cool of you are using a lot of 2D transparencies like
plants, people etc.
h. Now right click on the Mask, click Add Mask to Selection. Once selected, create a
new Layer and Fill the selection with black.
Settings
Render 1
Now I added some more planes, re-sized and rotated. Its better to have different
maps, but for this particular tutorial, I will leave it like this.
Render 2
So here is the TV and fireplace together. Not the greatest combination though.
TV and Fire
Render 1
Render 2
Render 3