Topics Covered:
Visualization Palette – When you start adding lights to the project, the Visualization palette becomes very useful. You can use this palette to see all the lights and cameras in the file, you can use it to select lights and cameras, and you can use it to edit them.
Image Prop Textures – By default most of the plant image prop textures have been set up so that their textures glow. For most of your daytime renderings this is fine, but for nighttime renderings the plants don’t really look natural.
Use Symbols – When you are creating outdoor lights, you might have several lights that are similar. In a case like this you should create these lights as symbols. Not only does it make it easy to place multiple copies of these lights in your design, but you can also use the lights on several projects.
Renderworks Styles – After all the hard work of setting up the lighting options and quality, Renderworks Styles allows you to save the settings. As well as that, Renderworks Styles are saved in the Resource Browser. This allows them to be copied from file to file, or saved in your library for use on all projects.
Lighting Options – Lighting options control the effects of the light in the scene and have a strong impact on how the light sources will light your project. It is easy to overlook these, but they have a very strong impact on the rendered view. The Lighting Options have subtle controls and need to be dealt with carefully.
Line Light – Line Lights can be used to replicate tube lighting and neon lighting. In the past they used to take a long time to render, but now they are as quick as any other light. Use a line light whenever you need a continous strip of light. There is no tool to use. You draw any shape you want and use a command to convert the shape to a line light.
Spot Light – Spot lights are directional lights that point at a particular Location. They have a controllable beam and spread. Spot lights are best placed in plan and then checked in elevation.
Point Light – A point light is like a bare light bulb. The light goes out in all directions. I often use this light to replicate the effect of light sources in fittings.
Heliodon – The Heliodon tool is similar to the Set Sun Position command. Vectorworks places a specific Heliodon object whose parameters can be adjusted in the Object Info palette. This makes it much more flexible than the Set Sun Position command, allowing you to change the time of the day or the day of the year directly from the Object Info palette.
Directional Lights – The directional light is like a sun, it is an outside light. The directional light is the type of light that is placed when you use the Set Sun Position from the View menu (only in Fundamentals).
This light source has a direction and casts shadows but its position in the file is not critical as it casts a light from a general direction rather than from a point.
Topics covered:
As you move away from a light source the intensity of the light falls off. The actual amount that falls off is another physics concept known as the inverse square law. In simple terms as you double the distance from the light, the intensity of the light goes down by the square of the distance. For more information check out the manual 1601 Outdoor Lighting.
Rendering is a fun art of using Vectorworks and in the past we have covered lighting (1502), but we covered it from the point of view of interior and architectural lighting. This manual is about exterior lighting, which suggests that we should be looking at nighttime lighting for architectural and landscape projects.
This means that we have to think about our rendering from a completely different point of view. Instead of trying to make sure that everything is visible, we’re trying to create a mood. We have to consider things like the moon, the night sky, the lights on the building, the lights inside the building, street lights, garden lights, et cetera.
When you create a light in Vectorworks you have the ability to change the colour. One of the settings is to use colour temperature. The colour temperature is physics concept that relates the colour of the light to the temperature of the surface radiating the light (in degrees Kelvin). In simple terms sunlight has a colour temperature of 5500. This is also known as daylight or cool light. For more information check out the manual 1601 Outdoor Lighting.
Rendering is a fun art of using Vectorworks and in the past we have covered lighting (1502), but we covered it from the point of view of interior and architectural lighting. This manual is about exterior lighting, which suggests that we should be looking at nighttime lighting for architectural and landscape projects.
This means that we have to think about our rendering from a completely different point of view. Instead of trying to make sure that everything is visible, we’re trying to create a mood. We have to consider things like the moon, the night sky, the lights on the building, the lights inside the building, street lights, garden lights, et cetera.
Visibility Palette
When you start adding lights to the project, the Visibility palette becomes very useful. You can use this palette to see all the lights and cameras in the file, you can use it to select lights and cameras, and you can use it to edit them.
How to create and edit Renderworks backgrounds.