Getting Started with LightUp v1.

10

Introduction
LightUp aims to provide SketchUp users with a fast workflow to explore
spaces and lighting. The motivation for LightUp is based on the oft quoted
observation that the more iteration that can be applied to a problem the
higher the likelihood of achieving a high quality result. LightUp is about
playing with light and shade in an environment that is tightly coupled to the
underlying model that SketchUp provides. LightUp relies on some
underlying physical basis for light transport but ultimately, like all software,
it is a simulation which contains simplifying assumptions.
IMPORTANT: The demonstration version of LightUp is time limited to 30
minutes usage after which time it will cease to work and only normal
SketchUp functionality will be available. Restarting Sketchup will reset the
timeout.

System Requirements
If youʼre already running Sketchup 6 or higher on your computer, youʼre
95% of the way there. LightUp extends the functionality of SketchUp in a
number of ways “under the hood” and makes use of your OpenGL
compliant video card. LightUp currently requires some OpenGL 2.0
functionality to operate correctly. What does that mean to you? Well, if
your video card is less than a few years old (after 2004), youʼre probably
good to go but weʼre all at the mercy of the quality of our video drivers. If
your video card does not support the required OpenGL features, LightUp
switches to a very simple rendering mode that should work on all cards
(you can if necessary also force this mode from the LightUp menu).
The acid test is to run the free demo and see if it works. If it doesnʼt work,
check you have “Use Hardware acceleration” selected in Sketchup
preferences, ensure you have the latest OpenGL driver for you card or
ultimately go splash out on a less antique video card.

Registration Key
The first time you run SketchUp after installing LightUp you will be
prompted for your 32 character Registration Key you were sent by email.
You can reset the Key from the Tools->LightUp menu.

Copyright (C) 2010 Adam Billyard All rights reserved! 1

 Getting Started with LightUp v1.10

Contents
Setting up 3

Example Walkthrough 3

Menu Items 11

Area Lights 11

Point Lights 12

Query Tool 12

Preferences 14

TourTool 18

Shading Parameters 19

Lightmeter 21

Exporting Stills 22

Exporting Movies 23

Exporting FBX files 23

Exporting LightUp Player files 23

Scenes 24

Caching 24

Masked Textures and Opacity 24

Materials 25

Material Markup 26

Skybox 27

Specularity and Reflections 28

Known Issues 31

Contacts 31

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Setting up
LightUp requires minimal setup, however for completeness weʼll cover
some of the settings and preferences. The LightUp toolbar consists of 3
buttons:

Bring up the Preferences dialog for the current model

Invoke the QueryTool which allows setting of light source

parameters and lighting parameters. Alt/Apple + leftclick
will add a new PointLight source to your model.

Go! Update lighting and switch to realtime lit rendering of

the current model using the TourTool - the fun one!

Example Walkthrough
Download this very simple model of 2 rooms from the website:
http://light-up.co.uk/resources/examples/example0.skp
Open the model in SketchUp and you should see something like this:

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Circled in red on the left is a large 2m x 2m area emitter of 3000 lx that will
act like a window letting in daylight. In the righthand room are 2 SketchUp
Components representing PointLightSources and a small recessed fixture
with a narrow beam.
LightUp marks the location of point lights using specially named SketchUp
Components. Any Component with a Definition name starting with
“PointLightSource” will be treated as marking where you wish to place a
light source.
Open the SketchUp Component dialog, click the “Home” icon to show
what components you have in your Model and drag a new
PointLightSource into your model. A default PointLightSource Component
is automatically added to your model by LightUp. It looks like this:

NB Youʼll notice it is not the same as the ones in the example. This is
because the example uses an older style of Component with a Definition
name starting with “PointLightSource” also. Any component can be used
to mark the location of a point light as long as the Definition name begins
with “PointLightSource”
TIP: Query tool has a shortcut which allows you to place light
sources using Apple/Alt + mouseclick on any part of your
model without having to open the Component browser. Try it.

Press Tourtool to perform the lighting calculations and switch to realtime

rendering mode.

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Now return to SketchUp by selecting a regular SketchUp tool from the tool
palette (eg the Select arrow).

Next try using the Querytool to hover over light sources to see the tooltip
information about the light source. LightUp will show light source
information in a tooltip and give an indication how far light will travel from
the light based on its power.
You can mouse click on the PointLightSources and area light sources to
alter the power. Try moving some lights around or change their color
using the SketchUp color picker:
- Select Querytool
- Click on a PointLightSource to show the edit dialog:

- Click on the color selector to change the light color.

- Change the Lumen rating in the text box. 1200 Lumen is the default
value which is very approximately the brightness of a 75 Watt
incandescent bulb.
TIP:Shift + mouse click to select multiple LightSources and
apply edits simultaneously.

The simple Lumen rating will shine equally in all directions. These kinds of
lights are often called Omnilights.
Real world light sources do not emit light equally in all directions. They
have openings for power, they have enclosures that shield lighting in
certain directions, reflect in others etc. In order to capture this detail, all
manufacturers of lights provide, for each of their products, a (free to
download) file that exactly captures how light is emitted in each direction.
“IES files” are produced in testing laboratories and contain exact readings
for each light, so by using these IES files, you get not only more accurate
lighting in LightUp, but often times more “interesting” lighting effects
because of the umbra that real lights produce.
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So setting an IES file on a PointLight can make it behave like a spotlight, a

stadium light, an LED light rather than a constant value in all directions.
Download and save this IES file from the website to experiment:
http://light-up.co.uk/resources/examples/GDL002-200-XPW-001N.IES
Using the Query tool you can click on a PointLight and set it to use the IES
file for lighting by clicking on the yellow “...” file Chooser button on the
righthand side:

LightUp has a built-in IES file browser which shows all the key information
contained in the IES files without having to render them.

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TIP: You can use the mouse wheel to scroll through files or
just hold down the mouse button on the lefthand panel and
drag up or down.

Navigate to a IES file of your choice (or the IES file you downloaded) and
press “OK”.
Now when you hover with Query tool over this light source, youʼll get a
yellow mesh showing the profile and power of your light source.

Pressing Tourtool shows the dramatic effect of using IES files for simple
light sources:

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:TIP: Keeping your IES files together with your SketchUp files
can be error-prone if you copy files around but forget the IES
files. LightUp always checks for a folder called “Lights”
where your model is stored so you can keep the IES files you
need for the model all together in one place.

Here is another simple scene modeled in SketchUp with the LightUp

toolbar ready for use. You can download the model:
http://light-up.co.uk/resources/examples/lobby.skp

Open the model in SketchUp and you should see something like this:

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In Preferences we choose “Direct Lighting” and “Blend with AO” and check
“Use Sun”.
Click on the TourTool button will perform any lighting calculations and
switch to realtime rendering mode.
Because weʼre using AO + Direct Lighting, youʼll get a lack of definition
with everything too bright. Open Preferences and in the AO section and
change the Multiplier to 0.5 to reduce the amount of AO. Press Tourtool
and LightUp will rescale the results
without the need for relighting.

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By pressing RETURN youʼll bring up the capture dialog from which you
can export images, skybox, movies, model files as well as export directly
to the LightUp Player format.

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Menu Items
The Sketchup menu Tools->LightUp contains a number of controls for
using LightUp.
Export Preferences: Saves your current model preferences to a file so
you can share with others.
Import Preferences: Loads preferences from a file overwriting your current
settings.
Remove All LightUp Info: Strips out any additional information that
LightUp has added to your Sketchup file such as Area light settings,
Material settings.
OpenGL Info: Opens the Ruby console and prints technical details of your
graphics card. This is used primarily for fault finding.
Reset Registration Key: Resets your key and allows you to re-enter it.
Force Simple Rendering: LightUp automatically choose which mode to
use based on your graphics card capabilities. However, you can force
LightUp to use a simple mode using this menu item.
Default is Doublesided: Sets the doublesided Preferences for all newly
created documents.
Removed Unused Hierarchy: Many Sketchup objects are constructed of
Groups and Component Instances that while useful for editing, are not
used during Tourtool. LightUp can removed these hierarchies to increase
performance.

Area Lights
Area lights are identified by LightUp through some markup on each
SketchUp materials. This extra information is added interactively using
the QueryTool by clicking on a face with a material. NB You must add a
material to a face in order to edit it - you cannot edit the Default
material.
This material can then be marked as an emitter material along with
parameters for power, spread and sampling density. Power is in units of
lux (lumen/m2), Spread is in degrees from the face normal and lastly
Density allows control of how much sampling of the emitter LightUp should
perform. Generally this parameter should be left at 1.0 but if you find
some “hotspots” on surfaces near the area emitter you might want to
increase this. Conversely, it is sometimes desirable to set density=0.0 to
have a single sample in the center of the area emitting face.
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The power of an area light is derived both from the material parameters
and the area of the face. A large area emitter introduces more energy into
the scene than a small one.

Point Lights
Point lights are identified by LightUp using a custom Component which
can be dragged into your model. The position, color and power of the light
can all be adjusted. It can be found in the Components browser (go to
Windows -> Components) and is called “PointLightSource”.
In fact any component whose Definition begins with the name
“PointLightSource” will be treated as a Point Light by LightUp. This allows
you to create custom geometry that will be a placeholder for your light
sources if you so desire.
A shortcut for adding PointLights is to select the QueryTool shown below
and hold Alt/Apple and left mouse button to place a PointLightSource on
the surface youʼre current hovering over.

Query Tool
The settings of an area light material or a point light can be adjusted
using the QueryTool as well as various other lighting attributes. Select the
query tool and click on a light source to pop-up a dialog of parameters to
edit. Shift-click will add/remove items to the current selection for editing
multiple items. NB the color of a light source is derived from the color it is
assigned in SketchUp so all the normal SketchUp tools can be used for
this.
Clicking on a PointLight will bring up a
dialog to edit its parameters. You can enter
a simple Lumen value for the light to give
even distribution of light (an Omni light); a
75-watt incandescent bulb produces around
1200 Lumen. Or select an IES photometric
data file for more control over the direction
and power the light source provides.

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Clicking on a face with a (non-default)

material will bring up the Material dialog
where you can set a variety of parameters
which will apply to all faces using this
material. Check “Emitter” to make all faces
using this material Area Emitters as
described earlier.
In addition there are a number of other
useful settings.
“Always fully lit” will force drawing the face with no shading which is useful
to create “fake emitters”. Faces that are bright like emitters but are not
area light sources.
“Donʼt cast shadows” ensures faces using this material donʼt block light.
You may have an opaque texture of a window but still want sunlight to be
able to pass through the faces. NB If you wish a whole object to not block
light, you must use the “cast shadows” setting in SketchUpʼs “Entity Info”.
TIP: Set “Donʼt cast shadow” / uncheck ʻcast shadowsʼ on
Dynamic Components that will be moving to avoid leaving a
“phantom” shadow when they move.

“Low density” is useful in situations where you have a large area that
doesnʼt need high resolution lighting and can thus benefit lighting times by
being marked for low resolution lighting.
“High density” conversely increases the lighting just for those faces using
this ,material. If you need more shadow clarity in just a small area but do
not wish to increase Resolution generally, this is a useful setting.
“Additive glow” effects how the geometry is rendered. It is lit in the same
way but rather than being blended into the scene with the other geometry
it is “added” to the pixels increasing their brightness.

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Preferences
LightUp preferences are
divided into 3 panels (Quality,
Lighting and Viewing) along with
a Resources panel containing
links to web resources for
convenience. (Tip: Clicking on
the Panel titles will collapse it to
reduce the size of the window).

The first panel is Quality and

simply controls the resolution of
the lighting data. More resolution
takes longer to calculate.
Doublesided Do you wish
LightUp to light and draw both
the front and back material of
each face. For realtime
applications, models are
commonly created just using the
front material. Just using the
front material will reduce
lighting time and increase
Tourtool framerate, however the
model needs to have been
constructed with this in mind.
The Default for this option is
ʻcheckedʼ ie process both front and
back of each face. This default can be set from the Tools->LightUp menu.
Use Selection By default LightUp will just light the part of your model
currently selected - or the entire model if nothing is selected. Unchecking
this box will make LightUp ignore any selection and always light your
whole model. The question of which to choose is down to your own
personal workflow.
Resolution. LightUp calculates how much resolution your model requires
using some basic heuristics. The Resolution field works very like the
SketchUp value input field; it accepts input of the form “Nx” meaning “N
times whatever resolution LightUp came up with for your model”. As a rule
of thumb, leave it at 1x or 2x while checking things are working and raise it
to 4x or 5x if you need (often the result you get with the default will be just
fine).
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Once youʼre more comfortable with LightUp, it is often easier to enter an

exact value for Resolution. This value (in units of your choice) will be used
to control the smallest light sample. For example, if youʼre lighting a
average sized room, you may want to calculate the lighting at 6” intervals
so youʼd enter 6” (or 15cm or 0.5ʼ) in the input box.
Ignore cache forces LightUp to regenerate all data irrespective of the
existence of cached results.

The second panel is Lighting.

The drop down menu selects Ambient
Occlusion (sometimes referred to as ʻclay
renderingʼ), Direct Sources or Lux Contours.

Lighting mode: Ambient Occlusion

Ambient occlusion (AO) is a common technique for approximating how
much of the ambient light in the scene reaches a surface by examining the
surrounding geometry. The result is a scalar value that can be used to
control shading.
The first control is how far to search for surrounding geometry. The
choices are Interior, Exterior and Custom. Interior is a preset to be used
inside, Exterior a preset for outside shots and Custom allows specifying a
absolute distance.
The reason for these cutoff distances is that inside a building all the
surfaces are ʻnearʼ something which would result in a black image (try it
using a closed room and choose ʻExteriorʼ), so it is common to provide a
cutoff distance beyond which the surface is considered not occluded.
The result of AO calculations are used to blend between 2 user-defined
colors. “Bright” color and “Dark” color. You can edit these in Preferences.

LightUp offers 3 different ways this AO factor can be used to shade

geometry:

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Normal Blend: The surface normal is used to

blend between the current Bright & Dark colors
and this is scaled by the AO result. An optional
scale factor is also applied.

Linear Blend: The AO

result is used to blend between linearly the
current Bright & Dark colors. An optional scale
factor is also applied. In the image weʼve used
a bright green for the “Dark” color for
demonstration purposes.

IBL Blend: The surface normal is used to

lookup the HDR color in an image (so called
Image Based Lighting or IBL) and this is scaled
by the AO result. This technique gives lighting
which exactly matches the skybox backdrop for
very natural looking results.

Constant: The current Sky & Ground colors (or

just the Background color if Sky is not enabled in Sketchup Style) is used.
This is a fast way of getting some “fill-in” ambient. An optional scale factor
is also applied.

Lighting mode; Direct Sources

The (default) mode applies all light sources to your model
Use Hidden Lights controls whether to ignore lights that are hidden. Useful
for phantom lights.
Use Sun controls whether to use the sun as a light source. A Sun
Multiplier allows manual tweaking of the power of the sun along with a
Turbidity control to alter the haziness of the sky.
Here is the same model rendered with turbidity=0.1

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and turbidity=0.9

Screen with AO controls whether to combine Ambient Occlusion data with

Direct Lighting data or just use a simple constant ambient term.

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Lighting mode: Lux Contour

Lighting is performed as normal but the results are displayed using a
logarithmic pseudo-color ramp which makes it easier to find and analyze
light distribution problems.
Two further modes are available here for light analysis work.
The Daylight mode is a simple overcast sky model with a lux scaling.
The Insolation mode provides realtime measuring of Kwh/m2/day along
with this value with respect to the current surface the lightmeter is over.
The third panel is Viewing
Lighting only controls whether to blend material colors and textures with
lighting data.
Pause Animation Halts any material animation and DC animations so you
can get precise Stills.
Show Skybox controls whether to draw an enclosing skybox which can
dramatically enhance the sense of presence as one navigates the scene.
Camera Collision enables collision in a very similar fashion to the
SketchUp Walk tool.
Apply Gravity enables applying gravity to the camera should you walk off a
ledge.
Apply Inertia enables allowing the camera to slowly come to rest rather
than stop immediately. It gives a softer experience for touring models.

TourTool
Switching to the TourTool, updates the lighting for your model and
then allows smooth navigation to examine the lighting youʼve set up.
Controls are:
Look Around## # Left Mouse Down + Drag
Pivot Around## # Left Mouse Down + Drag + Alt
Dolly # # # # Left Mouse Down + Drag + Shift
Move# # # # Arrow keys
Exit Tour Tool# # Escape key or choose another tool
Toggle SketchUp view# Middle Mouse Down + Drag

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NB When dollying the camera, LightUp will attempt to estimate the height
of the camera from the ground and show it in the lower right corner of the
Sketchup window so you can easily get a realistic placement of the
camera. If you have gravity enabled, this height is then maintained as you
tour around the model.

Shading Parameters
During Tourtool you can double-click on a
material to bring up the Shader editor. This
allows you to change some basic shading
parameters that will apply to the material you
clicked on. These will be saved inside your
Sketchup model.
The “Metal” checkbox controls whether the
reflections are effected by the material color.
A dielectric surface like plastic/wood reflects
the color of the source, whereas a metal
surface attenuates reflections by its own
color.
There are a number of common presets for
Index of Refraction (IOR) as well as
accepting absolute values in the input box.
By default LightUp will create a normalmap
automatically from the Material texture. This
can be overridden by loading a bumpmap
and/or specular map from a file using the file
chooser.
Alternatively, you can type in floating
point values into the Specular and
Fresnel edit boxes to set it to a
constant. (eg 0.25) or type a space to
reset to the original values.

The base color of the material can be adjusted in realtime using the
Red,Green,Blue sliders. NB These color tweaks are applied only while in
Tourtool mode. The Sketchup materials are not altered. Not only is it
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useful to change colors while in Tourtool for aesthetic reasons, its also
useful to turn down the material color to black so you can see just the
contribution of the specular bumpmaps to your image.

The second panel is Texture Animation. This controls how LightUp

animates the UV coordinates of your materials. You can choose the
waveform and how it is applied to the UVs.
Download this simple example from the website here. Youʼll need to unzip
it to create “texanim.skp” and a “Textures” folder. Press Tourtool and now
double-click on the tiled floor to bring up the Texture Animation dialog.
Choose “Ramp” as the waveform from the
first drop-down menu and the floor will start
ʻflowingʼ to the left. Try typing in a different
Angle (in degrees) to alter the direction.
Now drag left and right inside the waveform
window to change the frequency of the
waveform and thus the speed of the flowing texture. A frequency of 2Hz
means the texture will scroll its entire width 2 times each second.
Change Frequency## Drag left and right
Change Amplitude# # Drag up and down
Change Phase# # Shift + Drag left and right
Change Baseline# # Shift + Drag up and down
Now choose the “Sine” waveform from the dropdown menu for a different
effect.
The second dropdown menu allows control of what aspect of the UVs is
effected. It defaults to Translate, but you can choose Scale or Rotate.
Combining waveforms and different transforms can produces many
effects.
The last control to mention is “Steps”. Normally the waveforms are
smooth functions that vary over time, so choosing a Ramp waveform +
Translation causes the texture to flow smoothly. However sometimes it is
useful to have the animation move in distinct steps. A good use of Steps is
applying a texture that consists of 8 images side by side that form a short
ʻmovie loopʼ. You want the texture to jump from frame to frame not slide
smoothly between them. By choosing a Ramp waveform, Translation and
setting Steps=8 you can achieve this.
The second panel is Color Animation.. This works in a very similar way to
Texture Animation described above. To get started, from Tourtool mode
double click on a material and choose a “Square” wave from the dropdown
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menu. This will make the material flash on and off at 1 time a second
(1Hz). Choosing other waveforms and adjust them to get the effect you
want.

Lightmeter
During Tourtool you can get realtime illuminance readings by
holding down the Alt/Apple key and pressing the left mouse button.
The lux value at the point your mouse is over will be given allowing a fast
check on simulated lighting levels.

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Exporting Stills
While its all good wandering around
our creations and experimenting with
lighting, we need to be able to
generate images that can be used for
presentations. Simple screenshots
might suffice but at printed
resolutions they lack sufficient fidelity
and generally look poor.
An additional feature of LightUp is
the ability to generate very high
resolution anti-aliased images of
what youʼre seeing on screen. Press
the Return key while using Tour Tool
will pop-up the Capture dialog if it is
hidden.
Simply choose you resolution and
press “Still”. You will be prompted for
a Savefile name to use. LightUp
saves using the TIFF image format.
You can also choose to save the
depth information for the image at the
same time. This will be saved as a
floating point TIFF image with the
addition “_depth” added to your
filename. Depth images are
commonly used by post-processing
in applications such as Photoshop to
identify the depth of each pixel so
accurate montages can be created.
For example replacing the sky behind
a building.
Another option is to use the cubemap generator. It will produce 6 square
images centered on your current position from which you can easily create
a Quicktime VR file to allow others to get a sense of a space interactively
while retaining a small file size. Choose file naming to use appended
names or appended numbers and press “Cubic...” and youʼll be prompted
for a base filename/folder t which the six images will be saved.
Alternatively you can save the 6 images as a single vertical strip.
The demo version of LightUp will watermark your export.

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Exporting Movies
LightUp can generate high resolution anti-aliased movies too. Choose
your movie resolution and options and press “Movie..” to begin recording.
You will be prompted for a Savefile name to use. You can now navigate
manually, or use Scene animation to generate your movie. Recording will
continue until you press RETURN at which point the movie will be
processed into a standard AVI file or Image Sequence depending on your
options.
IMPORTANT The AVI file contains a full color, non-compressed 30Hz
movie that will need to be compressed down to a reasonable file size to
distribution and play smoothly.
The demo version of LightUp will watermark your export and limits
recording to 5 seconds.

Exporting FBX files

LightUp can generate an Autodesk FBX compliant file containing your
Tourtool geometry including all the lighting. The object hierarchy is
retained, all textures are exported and an optional stub name (default
“lmap-”) for lighting textures allows easy import into other applications.
The resulting FBX file can be imported into other applications that support
multiple UV coordinates and multitextures such as Maya or Unity.

Exporting LightUp Player files

LightUp can generate “.luca” files from you Tourtool results. These files
contain your geometry, lighting and Scenes youʼve defined and can be
given to other for viewing using the free to download LightUp Player (see
www.light-up.co.uk/player).

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Scenes
LightUp works well with SketchUp Scenes and these can be setup inside
Tourtool or beforehand. Animating between Scenes will all be honored
when recording movies.

Caching
LightUp is very fast at performing illumination calculations, however for a
complex model with many light sources it can take a few minutes. In order
to reduce the wait, LightUp automatically saves partial lighting results in a
file (called “lightup.cache”) so when you ask for the same lighting again, it
can pull out the partial results and very quickly re-create the lighting. This
happens automatically (unless you select “Ignore Cache” in Preferences)
and allows you to experiment with different lighting parameters quickly.
NB Remember to Save your model after lighting is complete as this will
ensure that LightUp can find your cached results next time you load that
model.

Masked Textures and Opacity

Light transport is effected by passing through non-opaque materials in
LightUp. The opacity of a material is determined by the texture map alpha
channel and by the material alpha as set in SketchUp.
You can download the model here that shows sunlight being filtered
though a texture.

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Materials

LightUp takes it material information from the SketchUp model, preferring

any primary source it can identify over embedded information. This
means that for a textured material, LightUp first tries to load the original
texture directly from the filepath provided by SketchUp. If this fails it will
look in the SketchUp Materials folder .skm files for the texture. If this fails
it will extract the texture information cached inside the SketchUp model
file.
Having acquired the base albedo texture, LightUp then checks to see
whether you have a specularmap/normalmap previously setup. If it does
not find one it will search the same folder it found the texture file for a
corresponding map by appends the word “_uvlmap” to the texture name to
load a combined normalmap and specularmap. If this doesnʼt exist, it
appends “_specmap” to load a grayscale specularity map.
During rendering, the normalmap and specularmap are used to add
specularity to surfaces. This involves calculating where rays emanating
from your eye-point would bounce off the surface into your scene - an
expensive operation - and one that largely contributes to why traditional
raytracing (which LightUp does not use) can be quite slow. In order to
keep things whipping along, LightUp uses multiple Irradiance Caches
which are probed instead. Irradiance caches are added in the same
manner as Point Light Sources. i.e. they are custom components that can
be dragged and positioned in your scene. They are processed
automatically and require no further intervention. If you have no Irradiance
caches in your model, LightUp will try and use your skybox as a cache,
which for exterior scenes will often be what you want.

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Material Markup
LightUp uses markup on the material name to indicate attributes related to
processing and rendering. These attributes can be combined at will to
provide a large amount of control. All of these can be set by using the
QueryTool and clicking on a face with a material.
Hereʼs an example of using material markup to control lighting and
rendering of a very simple scene lit by sunlight:

Now we change the standard SketchUp material called Brick_Rough_Dark

to have the attribute “Cast no shadow”:
Notice the brick block now does not stop sunlight to the floor behind it,
however it continues to receive shadows. The attribute “Cast no shadows”
is exactly analogous to Sketchupʼs “Cast Shadows” in the Entity Info panel
but differs in that it is per material not per face

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.It is sometimes useful to have some faces not be shaded but still be part
of the rendering. An example would be a “fake emitters”; surfaces that
look bright but donʼt actually contribute to the illumination of the scene. If
we now change the material by checking “Always fully lit”, we get:

The brick block is now not shaded and casts no shadow.

Skybox
A skybox is, as implied by its name, a closed box rendered around the
camera and moving with the camera to give the impression of an
environment infinitely far away. Its common use is for sky, clouds and
distant (i.e. non-parallax) objects like mountains and buildings.
LightUp accepts a latitude/longitude panorama image in either LDR and
HDR format of any size or a traditional skybox set of 6 square, power of 2
sized images for each of the 6 faces of a box. This means the skybox
images must be one of 32x32,64x64,128x128,256x256,512x512 or
1024x1024.
The name of the skybox file to use is set in the preferences for the model
and should be the complete filepath to one of the face images. LightUp
will find the others from there if its skybox set.
TIP: Keeping your Skybox files together with your SketchUp
files can be error-prone if you copy files around but forget the
skybox files. LightUp always checks for a folder called
“Textures” where your model is stored so you can keep the
skybox files you need for the model all together in one place
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The filenames for each image of each face of the box are specially named.
They must end in “left”, “right”, “up”, “down”, “back” and “front”. A set of 6
images in .jpg format for a skybox called “my_skybox_image_” would
consists of:
my_skybox_image_left.jpg
my_skybox_image_right.jpg
my_skybox_image_up.jpg
my_skybox_image_down.jpg
my_skybox_image_back.jpg
my_skybox_image_front.jpg

You can create Skyboxes using LightUp itself by placing the camera at
your chosen viewpoint, starting Tourtool and choosing “Cubic...” and
“front,right,up...” format which will create 6 square renderings around the
current camera location. These can be used subsequently as a skybox
inside LightUp or converted to a Quicktime VR format.

Specularity and Reflections

Very broadly lighting effects can be classed as ʻView independent” and
“View dependent”. That is, lighting which doesnʼt change regardless of the
viewerʼs position and lighting which changes as the viewerʼs position
changes.
Diffuse lighting is due to light bouncing off a surface in a uniform
distribution (randomly scattered) and is thus view independent and can be
calculated once and is valid for any viewpoint.
Specular lighting is due to lighting bouncing off a surface in a more
coherent way and so is view dependent and cannot be precalculated.
LightUp renders the Diffuse lighting and the Specular lighting (if any)
together making use of the additional material textures to do so.
Consider the scene below with a platform with a simple ashwood texture
map called “ashwood.png” applied:

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A skybox is setup for the scene in LightUp Preferences, and Sunlit in

enabled and weʼre ready.
Switching into Tourtool and dropping the camera down for some more
detail and we get:

Now if we double click on the ashwood platform material and adjust the
specular slider we get this:

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NB This reflection is simply reflecting the skybox and is the simplest form
of reflections in LightUp.
Download this simple example from the website here. (It is the same
model as used for the Texture animation example). The concrete planter
is grouped as an object and just above the water surface an IrrCache is
placed. LightUp will search your model for IrrCache to bind to groups/
Component Instances and will find this IrrCache and use it in preference to
the simple skybox. The result is that the brick wall is reflected nicely in the
water.
Tip: Place IrrCaches as close as possible to where the
reflections are being generated to get accurate placement.

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Known Issues
Canʼt handle multiple open windows on Macintosh.
Objects with non-orthonormal local transformation give incorrect
reflections.

Contacts
website:# http://www.light-up.co.uk
forum:## http://www.light-up.co.uk/forum
email:## [email protected]

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