Lighting with V-Ray for SketchUp – definitive guide part 2

Nomer continues his great collection of lighting tutorials to help you get to grips with and simplify this often complex process, with some easy solutions to this often frustrating and confusing aspect to rendering. In this guide Nomer checks out Emissve materials to help light your SketchUp models. You will need a reasonable knowledge of SketchUp, rendering and the use of Photoshop for this tutorial.

1. What is Emissive Material?

Emissive Material is actually a special material layer of V-Ray for SketchUp used for producing self- illuminated surfaces. It also allows a plane, a face or an object applied with this material to turn into an actual light source. In other rendering engines, they call this a “self-illuminating material” or in V-Ray Max it is equivalent to V-Ray Light Material. When I first used V-Ray for SketchUp, I was not encouraged to use pure Emissive Material to light up my model. The reason was blotchiness…. is this the case though? Can I possibly produce quality rendering just by using Emissive lighting?

In this 2^nd Part of my tutorial, I will try my best to share my knowledge and my experience in using Emissive material. But before that, let me reintroduce the basic function of it and how you can access this in V-Ray for SketchUp. Emissive material is normally used as self illuminating material for glow sticks, neon’s, bulbs and LED lights. I will be using this simple scene to show you how to access this material easily. Again, just like my part 1 tutorial in this series, the Camera and Physical Sky are turned off.  This means I will be relying totally on Emissive materials to light up my scene.

CONTINUE THE TUTORIAL HERE