Christmas Lights

I'm creating a new post for this question which related to my previous question about lighting so that others might find it.

I'm trying to reproduce Christmas Tree lights in a fairly dark room so that they show. The lights and material they are made with are red, green and blue and I thought it might be best to create a glow in the material but I found that the number of light sources jumped to over 4000 even thought there were only a relatively few instances of that material being used. Is that the way it should react?

Am I better off creating lamps on the object that is the bulb? I noticed that you can't choose a color for the light when you create the lamp(I think I chose "omni"} but have to then go back in and re-edit lamp where a custom color option shows up. Is that correct?

Which of the above two options do you think might be the best for this project.

thanks

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Permalink Reply by Albert Hart on November 19, 2017 at 9:03am

When you create a lamp from an object, the color is a color it finds in the object.

For some geometry we wind up creating too many individual lights. We try to combine adjacent Sketchup faces into a single light, but sometimes this fails because of the way the geometry was created in SketchUp.

Put just one of you lights into a model, render it and see how many lights you get.

Then try recreating the geometry to see if you can lower the number of individual lights you get.

You might try a 2-D shape for you light, with "always face camera" to see if you can get it to render as a single light.

The quickest solution is to use our round light bulbs for your lights. You could try stretching them to look more like a Christmas tree light. In the model below, I stretched the yellow light to get a better shape.

I did get just one "light" per bulb.

Note - when placing the Point light, I had to uncheck "Make the bulb invisible".

Also, there is a bug where the lighting intensity sometimes gets set to 0. Make sure it is s\et to 5 watts or so

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Permalink Reply by mike S on November 19, 2017 at 11:09am

Thanks Al,

I re-downloaded the model I was using from the Warehouse . This time I carefully selected the part of the component that would become the light and it seems to be working. I'm trying to refine it to get better results now but I don't seem to be having the same issue. I'm going to try to reduce the lumens (I think it's set at 60 now) as it the lights seem to wash out (the light colors are much deeper for each color) even at an extremely low/minimal lamp setting for those objects. I tried adding a glow (but not too much) to the blue light but It doesn't seem to do much. When I get a better result, I post that as well but for now here is what I'm working with.