Lighting Channels in IRender nXt

Al Hart

Lighting Channels is a new Post-Processing feature in IRender nXt. Using Lighting Channels, you can change the effects of individual lights, or groups of lights in "real time" after the rendering is completed. The sun, the sky, and other spe3cial effects - such as "Self Glow" materials can also be placed into lighting channels.

By using slider bars, you can adjust the effects of each lighting channel and see the results immediately without having to re-render the model. A drastic, but sometimes useful, example, would be to turn down, or off, the sun and sky, while turning on the lights on order to create daytime and night scenes from the same rendering.

A simpler example, is to adjust a single light to get the effect desired.

Here is an original rendering with two spot lights and two ceiling lights:

Here is the same rendering, using channels 2 and 3 to turn down the ceiling lights and right hand spot light, and channel 7 to turn up the left hand spot light.

This can be much, much faster than changing light intensities in the SketchUp model and re-rendering the model. The effects of the Lighting Channel changes are seen immediately.

Al Hart

Here is another example where both the sky and lights in the room were used to render an image:

And then lighting channels were used to turn off the sky.

This kind of post processing can be just what is needed to adjust the balance between natural lighting through a window and artificial lighting in the interior space.

museummaker

That looks amazing, I am going to DL the latest version and give it a go.

How may lights can you control?

Al Hart

@unknownuser said:

That looks amazing, I am going to DL the latest version and give it a go.

How may lights can you control?

Upload some pics if you get something good. And/or let us know how you felt about it.

You can currently control eight groups of lights. We are petitioning the developers to add more channels. I'm sure they are tired of hearing from me, but if a user wanted to make some positive comments on the nXt Forum and mention that more channels would be useful, it might help.