VRay for SketchUp New Features Guide

IES Light:    This V-Ray for SketchUp new light type can be used to load and render real-world light distribution profile files
(IES files - Illuminating Engineering Society). The icon is located in the V-Ray main toolbar.

Parameters

Enabled: Turns on or off the IES lights.

Shadows: Turns on or off the IES shadows.

Soft Shadow: This causes the light to take into account the information about the light shape in the IES file (if there is any shape defined) so that it produces proper soft shadows.

Shadow Color: Determines the color of the shadows.

Shadow Bias: Bias moves the shadow toward or away from the shadow-casting object (or objects). If the Bias value is too low, shadows can "leak" through places they shouldn’t, produce more patterns, or make out-of-place dark areas on meshes. If Bias is too high, shadows can "detach" from an object. If the Bias value is too extreme in either direction, shadows might not render at all.

Shadow Subdivs: This value controls the number of samples V-Ray takes to compute lighting (the quality of the shadows). Lower values mean more noisy results, but will render faster. Higher values produce smoother results but take more time. Note that the actual number of samples also depends on the DMC Sampler settings.

File (picker): Allows you to load the IES file that defines the light distribution.

Filter Color: This parameter determines the color of the light.

Photon Subdivs: This value is used by V-Ray when calculating the Global Photon Map. Lower values mean more noisy results, but will render faster. Higher values produce smoother results but take more time.

Affect Diffuse: This determines whether the light is affecting the diffuse properties of the materials.

Affect Specular: This determines whether the light is affecting the specular of the materials.

Area Speculars: When this option is Off, the particular light will be rendered as a point light in the specular reflections.

Power: Determines the intensity of the light in lumens. A typical 100W electric bulb emits about 1500 lumens of light.

Cutoff Threshold: This parameter specifies a threshold for the light intensity, below which the light will not be computed. This can be useful in scenes with many lights, where you want to limit the effect of the lights to some distance around them. Larger values cut away more from the light; lower values make the light range larger. If you specify 0.0, the light will be calculated for all surfaces.

Caustic Subdivs: This option controls the amount of photons that V-Ray will trace to estimate caustics (quality of the caustics). Large numbers slow down the calculation of the caustics photon map and may take more memory.

Bumped Below Surface: This is used for cases where the light shines on surfaces with extreme bump mapping. For such surfaces, it is possible that the bump map will turn the surface normal towards the light, even though the light shines on the back of the surface. The light option defines whether such portions of the material will be lit or not.

How to use IES Lights:

1. Click on the IES light icon to add a V-Ray IES light to your scene.
2. Click on the scene to select the location of the IES light.
3. Right click on the IES light, select V-Ray for SketchUp and then "Edit light".

4. Click on "File" to load an IES file from your hard drive.
5. At this point you can adjust the setting of the IES light to get your desired effect. For example, if you are using the Physical Camera you might have to increase the power to make the light visible. Also you can change the "Filter Color" to control the color of the light.

6. Render your scene.

Table of Contents

Lights: Spotlight

Rendering by Dario Dubinsky

V-Ray 1.6 for SketchUp is a massive upgrade to V-Ray for SketchUp which includes a series of new feature introductions that enhance visualization workflow and render quality such as V-Ray RT, V-Ray Dome Light and streamlining scene complexity with V-Ray Proxy.

Rendering by Dario Dubinsky

Click here for more information