Lighting Tutorials Location and changing lights by scene

[Bertensgrad]

I'm sorry if this has been asked somewhere before but I'm having problems searching and finding my way around the forum.

I was wondering if there was any more complex tutorials on lighting and how to turn on and off lights based on scenes in sketchup. I have seen the basic lighting tutorial on the site. I'm also wondering how to change the environment more by scene. I need to go for a exterior mid-day for most of my scenes to a moonlike exterior scene. I don't need this animated just wanted it to be the easiest to flip between them without changing settings. I been using kerkythea a long time and used to turning on and off the sun and lights easily. I'm about to just export the scene for night to kerkythea rendering to stop the conflicts haha.

[Fletch]

Bertensgrad,

You control visibility of everything in SketchUp via the Scene Manager/Scene Tabs.
So, if you want the same scene set up for day time, 12 noon, and then at 7pm, you create two tabs, one with the sun at noon, and one with the sun at 7pm.
To turn lights on and off, put the light objects on layers, which are all by default on the Twilight Lights layer, and control the visibility of layers in the scenes using the scene tabs. So you may have a scene called "outdoor lights" which turns off the "indoor lights" layer. And another scene which is called "indoor lights" which turns off all the "outdoor lights" on their own layer. Finally a layer called "no lights" which turns off both of those layers so that you are ready for a daytime exterior rendering, for instance.

So, in the scene manager you can specify for any scene what the scene tab controls. By default it controls everything including layer visibility, hidden objects, and camera position, sun/shadows, etc. You can UNcheck any of these from that scene, update the scene, and it will now only control whatever is checked for that scene.

I usually have scene tabs control only the camera position. Then I have a couple of scene tabs called "all furniture off" and "all furniture on" in order to control the visibility of the furniture, or the vegetation. Then I have a couple scene tabs called "summer noon" and "autumn morning" which will bring the date and time to the specified date and time.

So, essentially, you control everything with the power of the scene SU tabs, hidden geometry, hidden layers, and sun/shadow dialog.