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Do you want to improve the lighting in your CGI?

Learning how to improve the lighting in your CGI is not rocket science, but there are techniques that we use. By understanding a few key lighting concepts I want to illuminate you and show you how to better your CGI, but before we do; let’s talk about why the sky is blue…

Let there be light.

Under intense and unimaginable pressure, hydrogen atoms are forced together in a huge release of electromagnetic energy, of which visible light makes up a small portion of this energy.

This is the beginning of the journey of a single photon from the centre of the burning ball of gas that we call our sun until it reaches our eyes.

Improve the Lighting in your CGI - The sun — Light is formed as a by-product of nuclear fusion

After its tumultuous birth, our photon then takes, on average, 6 minutes to leave the surface of the sun and fly across the vast, 150 million kilometers of hard vacuum until it reaches our atmosphere.

Improve the Lighting in your CGI - Golden hour at sea — Light then scatters through the atmosphere, turning the sky blue during the day and redder at dawn and dusk.

As our photon passes through the big air bubble that surrounds the earth, it bounces off and passes through nitrogen atoms which make up nearly 80% of our atmosphere.

Our photon is a package that contains all of the colours of the rainbow – it just so happens that light on the bluer end of this spectrum scatters through nitrogen most effectively… which is why the sky is blue.

Improve the Lighting in your CGI - an exterior CGI of a garden office made by Ventham Construction

On a physiological level, we have evolved not only to love light but to need it.

Light is the key component that enables us to see, gives us security, and stabilises our circadian rhythms which helps us to sleep deeper and more restoratively.

It improves our moods, decreases depression, and even increases cognitive performance such as reaction time and activation.

On a fundamental level, we have an innate and primal relationship with light that can be traced all the way back to the roots of our shared evolutionary tree.

“I sense Light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent Light. What is made by Light casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.” Louis Kahn, American Institute of Architects Gold-medal winning Architect

Improve the Lighting in your CGI - Louis Kahn's National Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh — Louis Kahn’s National Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Lighting in CGI.

Modern render engines and most real-time game engines calculate lighting in a way that aims to emulate reality.

By definition, rays are traced (note: ray-tracing), from light sources as they then travel through 3D space and bounce off or scatter through surfaces.

Ray tracing software determines the number of times that a ray can bounce off or through a surface – the bigger the number of bounces, the harder the PC has to work, but generally the more realistic the result.

Improve the Lighting in your CGI - An interior CGI of The Priory in Tetbury

As experienced and industry-leading producers of CGIs, we wholeheartedly recommend V-Ray as our ray-tracing program of choice.

We use this in conjunction with SketchUp and have done so for nearly a decade now.

Improve the Lighting in your CGI - An exterior CGI of Paragraph 79, Kea House, Devon

Feel free to take a look at what our CGI production team is getting up to using this software combo!

These lights have to come from somewhere though, right?

Whether it is the sun, a light bulb, or a candle; it is the job of the 3D artist to add these light sources to the 3D space and program them to emit light realistically.

Improve the Lighting in your CGI - A preview of a 3D scene, lit using a Dome Light. The HDRI image used is from PG-Skies. — A rendered preview from **PG-Skies.com** of a scene lit by a dusk HDRI.

Check out our article on how to use Dome Lights to create night-time CGIs.

As humans, we respond differently to different environs and lighting plays a big part of that. Anything that we see has a direct link to the subconscious, and this is what CGI artists tap into when working with lighting in a visualisation.

How do I put this into practice?

If you have read this far, you already understand the power of lighting within a CGI.

We need a structured workflow to better enable us to generate realistic and emotive lighting setups within our work…

If you are relatively new to CGI production, I recommend our Access into V-Ray for SketchUp course!

Day two of this three-day course is dedicated purely to lighting.

We explore what light sources that we have available to us, and how we go about adding these into a scene.

We then explore the concept of ‘Three-Point Lighting’, which gives us a fail-safe method of programming the lights within our scenes to work together in a photorealistic way.

Improve the lighting within your CGI - Scout Farm with lights toggled on and off

If you already have a good foundation, and simply want to improve the lighting in your CGI, look into our Top-Up courses – the premise is simple:

You pick what you would like to learn
A bespoke, coaching session will be designed by us and then pitched to you before you commit to anything
Once you are completely happy with the custom learning material on offer, this is when we schedule a coaching session – we book these out in half-day blocks, to ensure that you have ample time for study and information retention.
The session is held online and is screen recorded – which means you can watch it back when practicing on your own.
Upon completion of the course, we extend a helping hand by offering an after-care period of 30-days, whereby as you take this knowledge into professional practice; you can come to us with any questions that you may have.

All of our courses, now taught online, aim to give you the tools to consistently advance your visualisation skills and improve the lighting in your CGI.

Brought to you by the Archilime Academy.

5 time saving techniques for SketchUp or V-Ray

1. Hotkeys

When extrapolated for the full working day; the everyday SketchUp user may spend upwards of 10 minutes simply searching for the correct tool to use.

Introducing Hotkeys.

Also known as shortcuts, hotkeys are a defined as:

A key (or combination of keys) which give you quick and immediate access to a particular function within SketchUp.

The particular function that the definition above refers to would be different for each SketchUp user – meaning that we need a way to manually assign certain shortcuts to assist us with very specific tasks.

Head over to your preferences window, and click on the shortcuts tab.

Simply search for the tool that you use frequently, and tap the key (or series of keys) that you would like to assign to activate the function.

A simple concept – but within a week, we guarantee that this will make you feel more fluent within SketchUp.

5-time-saving-techniques-for-sketchup-or-vray - a keyboard showing sketchup hotkeys

If you would like to hear about other ways that you can feel more fluent within SketchUp, why not try our Access into SketchUp course?

2. Components

The second of our 5 time saving techniques for SketchUp or Vray is, in our opinion, components are THE best way of advancing the quality of your 3D scenes in the most time-effective manner possible.

How do they work?

Right-click on one of your groups within your scene, and ‘Make Component’

This simple process now gives this entity new editing properties. When you make copies of this component, you will notice now, that editing one of them enables all of the others to be edited simultaneously!

The sky really is the limit when it comes to the applications that this offers us.

How do we use them?

Vegetation.

Make loads of copies of a piece of vegetation; randomising the rotation and scale as you go…

Here, we’ve used something called a V-Ray Proxy – which explains why our ‘vegetation’ looks like a box! When rendered, this box in-fact looks like a small patch of meadow grasses.

As you can see, the same principle still applies – an edit made to one of these affects each and every other instance!

We cover components in great detail on our Access into SketchUp courses, which tend to run at the end of every month. Click on the link to find out more!

3. Parametric Modelling

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way where, as if by magic, you could pre-program a set of rules into an intelligent program, which could generate a whole host of different modelling elements, with minimal input from the user?

Well, I’m very glad that you asked…

Rather than manually modelling, duplicating and generating profiles and components, take a look at parametric modelling plugins such as Skatter and Profile Builder.

When it comes to creating realistic vegetation, Skatter is the sharpest tool of the lot.

As the name suggests, this intuitive plugin allows you to scatter vegetation components around your model, allowing you to randomise the distribution in ways hitherto impossible using SketchUp’s native toolset.

We have been using this plugin for years, and it truly is the cornerstone of our landscaping workflow, which enables us to apply and produce complex and detailed landscaped imagery.

Building complex, parametric models is achieved through Profile Builder 3‘s intuitive interface, which gives you the power to construct detailed and future-proof assemblies with labour-saving in-mind.

Download preset assemblies or create your own – we really do vouch for the efficiency of this powerful SketchUp extension!

We are often asked for bespoke training in these plugins – take a look into our Top-Up courses if you would like to know more.

4. Test Rendering

If you have done some rendering in the past, you will be well aware that this is not instantaneous… unfortunately.

That said, there are certain techniques that you can use to speed up this rendering process, depending on the quality of the output that you require.

When ultra-high quality is not necessary for the early stages of a project, using a Denoiser in conjunction with a low-quality draft enables you to understand the design without waiting a long time for the render to finish.

After running a few tests of our own – adding a Denoiser to lower quality drafts buys you time to spend elsewhere.

Another pro-tip is to use region renders whenever possible – as the name suggests, this allows you to test-render only a small portion of the overall image.

The same principle applies when interactive rendering when using the ‘follow-mouse’ technique. After pressing the icon highlighted below, the render engine will focus its attention on the position of your cursor – another very useful technique if you need a quick solution.

We cover rendering techniques in great detail on our Access into V-Ray courses, held in the middle of every month – check out the link to find out more!

5. Distributed Rendering

This time for V-Ray not Sketchup, one of our 5 time saving techniques Many hands make light work.

Imagine being able to harness all of the computing power of your office or home, enabling you to ‘borrow’ computing power from all the machines within your local area network…

Introducing the V-Ray Swarm.

Intelligent render engines like V-Ray allow the user to break-up and ‘distribute’ the rendering workload across many machines.

Depending on the number of cores within your CPU (the brain of your computer), you will have varying amounts of buckets (which are the small squares that can be seen above).

When you add another machine to your V-Ray Swarm, you will notice that the number of buckets increases – which means that your render will finish much faster!

Let’s have a look at a real-world application for this…

Whenever anyone purchases a new V-Ray license, you automatically receive a free V-Ray Render Node accompaniment.

Imagine that we have two machines in the office, one that we will work on, and the other that will act as our render node.

We then install V-Ray on both the primary machine, and also the render node.

Once we are ready to render, we then turn on the V-Ray Swarm at the bottom of our Asset Editor, and then go to add a new node. You reserve the right to name your nodes anything you like – if you are cool like us, you can also name all of our machines after characters within the Marvel cinematic universe!

We truly believe that these time-saving techniques are useful to anybody, regardless of your level of SketchUp and V-Ray – which is why we cover all of the above on our Access into SketchUp and Access into V-Ray for SketchUp courses – head over to our shop to find out more!

All of our courses are now held online, and we truly believe that the quality of the course is only improved by being able to attend within the comfort of your own home or office.

Brought to you by the Archilime Academy

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Dome lights: how do I use them to create a night time CGI?

You may not know it yet, but a dome light is the answer to creating ever-more realistic lighting setups within your CGIs…

Let’s break it down…

In a day-time scene, we have direct sunlight to illuminate our scenes. Direct light also scatters through the atmosphere and illuminates our environment.

A preview CGI from Peter Guthrie. Used to light a 3D scene using a HDRI within a dome light — HDRIs from **PG-Skies.net**. is a great way to illuminate your night scenes.

V-Ray considers both direct and indirect illumination as two separate light sources.

To create a night-time scene, we require a technique to remove direct sunlight, whilst being able to create a night-time environment.

To do this, we use something called a Dome Light

A flattened, spherical HDRI from Peter Guthrie. Used to light a 3D scene — A flattened, spherical HDRI from PG-Skies

A Dome light is a type of V-Ray light that surrounds our entire model, forcing light inwards. Images can be loaded into these light sources, which enables the user to simulate real-world environments by using panoramic HDR images.

Learn more about the benefits of a Dome Light on our Access into V-Ray for SketchUp course

I like to think of a Dome Light as a giant snow globe – with our model in the centre. We can choose what the sky looks like by swapping in different panoramic images.

Now that we know what dome lights are; what does this mean for you?

Select the highlighted tool to add a Dome light into your scene. Putting this into practice is straightforward. Pick out the Dome light tool from your V-Ray toolbar…

Loading a bitmap image into our Dome Light. — Click on the chequered box to import your HDRI…

Load in your HDRI…

Preview of a scene lit by Dome light using a spherical panoramic, HDRI image — Rotate to ensure that your shadows are pointing in the correct direction!

Hit render! Don’t forget to rotate your dome light to adjust the position of the sun

Over the years we have come across many different sources for dome lights…

We would like to recommend just two…

A preview of a 3D scene, lit using a Dome Light. The HDRI image used is from PG-Skies. — **PG-Skies** provide rendered previews so that you know what the sky will look like once rendered.

For variety, we highly recommend taking a look at Poliigon. Besides offering free assets; they operate a simple, subscription-type service where, depending on your package, you obtain different amounts of credits every month to spend on HDRIs, textures or models

If you are looking for top-quality HDRIs, look no further than Peter Guthrie’s shop – PG Skies. This in-depth collection of ultra high-quality HDRIs contains skies for all occasions. The handy preview renders show each of these in action, to make picking out your favourite that much easier!

Brought to you by the Archilime Academy

High quality 3D models of furniture… where to find them?

A product CGI that demonstrates the sourcing of a high quality armchair model from Design Connected. — A Product CGI showing high-quality models downloaded from Design Connected.

We get asked this because SketchUp & V-Ray users like yourself are wise to the fact that adding better quality 3D models into your scenes adds realism to your work.

We are in complete agreement – from our experience; there is no other part of the visualisation process that boosts the quality of a CGI more than the usage of high-quality, realistic 3D models…

Check out our work here!

Finding the right source… now that’s another question entirely…

Our favourite source is a website called Design Connected.

A screenshot showing a high-quality 3D model of a bed from Design Connected. — The Kelly Bed, by Poliform. A Design Connected 3D Model.

We have no affiliation with these guys – but we rely heavily on their models. Without a doubt; they are the place to go for high-quality SketchUp models of furniture, lighting, and accessories.

For over 10 years, they have worked with premium brands to provide photorealistic 3D models of their products – so that SketchUp and V-Ray users like us can download and import these into our scenes!

All models are (or can be) made available in SketchUp format, and all textures are correctly applied to each model, meaning it is the closest thing to a plug-and-play technique that exists for our workflow for furnishings

Another source that we use is 3D Sky.

A website screenshot of 3D Sky showing the range of 3D models available to download — A screenshot of 3D Sky showing the range of 3D models available to download

Again, we have no affiliation with this website, however, we have really benefited from the vast 3D collection that they offer.

If models are not available on DesignConnected, we head over to 3DSky, safe in the knowledge that we will find something that we can use.

Rather than the standard SketchUp file-type (.skp) that we are used to; models from 3D Sky tend to be in a different format – a filetype called obj…

In a nutshell, they store the geometry and textural information that makes up a 3D model. Different 3D modelling programs use different file types to save models – however, the .obj file type is the closest thing to an industry-standard in this regard.

Transmutr allows you to convert obj, fbx, 3ds, dae files into SketchUp (skp) files. — Convert various 3D formats into SketchUp files using Transmutr

To import .obj models, we use an extension called Transmutr. The easy-to-navigate interface allows you to convert these into .skp files – for you to then import into your scenes.

This process can be covered on our bespoke Top-Up Courses.

For its value, the 3D Warehouse is an invaluable resource

An image showing a screenshot of a 3d model search using the 3D Warehouse within SketchUp — The 3D Warehouse has been designed around you. Find free 3D models for SketchUp scenes here.

If you are working under a tighter budget, without the capacity to spend much on 3D models – there is no better source than the 3D Warehouse within SketchUp’s interface.

If you own or have owned, SketchUp Pro – there is a very good chance you know about this already.

Use the sliders on the left to control the quality of the models within your search parameters.

Take note… these models are not quality-checked before being uploaded to the warehouse – which means that you can end up with a real mixed bag in terms of quality.

To be safe, we always recommend saving the desired models into their own files, rather than importing straight into your scene – as this protects your master file from any latent errors that may be present within the imported models!

We run over how to make the best use of the 3D Warehouse on our Access into SketchUp online course.

Without over-complicating things…

A CGI demonstrating the quality of furniture 3D models sourced from websites such as design connected, 3d sky and the 3d warehouse — High-quality 3D models bring your CGIs to life. Invest time in sourcing the best quality 3D models available to you.

If you are looking for consistent, high-quality 3D models – we recommend Design Connected.

Variety, on the other hand, is a real strength of 3D Sky.

If you are looking for free models – 3D Warehouse is the source for you.

Still doesn’t answer your question?

Model it yourself!

Join us for our next 3-hour, Bitesize course where you can learn to Model with Photography – follow the link for dates!

Brought to you by the Archilime Academy

A Photo-Realistic Finish

Following the success of SketchUp at The Archilime Academy, based in Southernhay, Exeter, we cannot wait to deliver our new course: Access into V-Ray for SketchUp Pro. With its speed, efficiency and the future-proof nature of this cutting-edge software, we feel that this is the next generation of rendering. The course will be suited to those who have already completed the SketchUp course (or who have a basic understanding of SketchUp), and are looking to extend their skills further. V-Ray for SketchUp Pro gives you the ability to create amazingly photo-realistic renders. The course will give you not just the theory, but practical experience too, where you will be using a high-spec computer, delivered by our Head of Operations, Dan Stone. The aim of the course is to give you the confidenceand independence to be able to create your own professional, photorealistic images.

New Year Resolutions?

Here at Archilime, we consider the New Year to be a time where we think about how we can move forward, and consider how we can better ourselves as creative practitioners in an industry that we love. We would also like to help other practitioners from all backgrounds: from interior designers, architects, construction, hobby and film as well as craftspeople, to stay ahead of the game in the Visualisation arena. This is why we are so excited to announce the launch of this new course. We would like to enable others to share in its enhanced capacity to render still images quickly and easily: from 2D plans and elevations to 3D objects and interiors, all delivered with the Archilime coaching by Archilime Artists, personal support and guaranteed 30-day after-care that makes our Academy so unique.

Easy Access to The Archilime Academy

At The Archilime Academy, we welcome students from all over the country, from all industry backgrounds. Our Academy, based in the offices of Attention Media in Southernhay, Exeter is an ideal, easily accessible location and is comfortable and conducive to learning; with our dedicated training being delivered support in small groups. Once you have completed our 2-day SketchUp course, by moving onto Access to V-Ray for SketchUp, you are ensuring that you are staying at the cutting edge of the Visualisation industry. We will also share opportunities for future advanced coaching with you.

A Showcase Opportunity with Full Support

V-Ray for SketchUp showcases what you have created in SketchUp by bridging the gap between a 3D model and a photorealistic image. It will give you the tools to present complex, detailed and lit renders to enable you to effectively communicate your ideas to clients and colleagues. By the end of the two-day course, you will have had the benefit of lots of hands-on experience having been taken, step-by-step, through the techniques of the software, as well as opportunities to ask questions specific to your own role and industry. All course files can be taken away with you, and, when you leave The Archilime Academy, you are still not alone! Delegates are entitled to 30 days’ email/phone support from their trainer to help with any post-course issues or answer any questions.

To find out more, call the studio on: 01364 654267

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Improve the lighting in your CGI

Do you want to improve the lighting in your CGI?

Let there be light.

Lighting in CGI.

How do I put this into practice?