Layered Views

[Dave R]

I was working on a sketch for a client and came up with this. I'm sure it's not new but I thought I'd offer it for anyone who is new to LayOut. It might be useful.

My client wants to give his client a rough idea of how lighting underneath the new cabinets and microwave would look. I drew in the cones for the lights and gave them a yellow transparent color. I set the shadow sliders quite low and made the background and front face colors rather dark. I haven't applied any materials to the walls or lower counter top and I want them to be white in the other views so I changed the style instead.

I created one scene with the dark style and dark shadow settings. The layer for the lights was turned off. Then I reversed layer settings and used a style with white for the background. I also set the shadow sliders quite high. This scene only shows the lights.

In LO, the view of the cabinets was set so the background is displayed. I copied and pasted the view, then changed it to the lights-only scene and turned off the background.

It takes longer to write it than to do it and I think for a SketchUp and LayOut only solution, it works well enough. I could add a larger, more transparent box to give more of a glow in there and I expect if I played around with the shadow settings, I could make the light from the microwave look a little less like a pyramid but I think it'll get the point across.