Architectural_Design_with_SketchUp

Chapter 5 Rendering in SketchUp
For exterior night renderings, a good approach may be to create some color contrast
between artificial lights and the night sky. To do this, apply a light yellow color to your
artificial lights and a light blue color to your general illumination. This effect can be very
subtle or quite dramatic. Adjust the settings to your liking, but keep in mind that subtle
is usually better than overly dramatic.
TIP
360° Environments
Another approach to applying a sky and ground environment to a rendering is to use hemispherical
skies, spherical skies, or a sky probe. The images in Figure 5.35 illustrate what
these look like. In essence, all of these are seamless images of the entire sky and ground as
seen from a single vantage point. While a spherical sky image or a sky probe contains the
entire 360-degree view, the hemispherical sky contains only the sky and omits the bottom
half—the ground. The latter images are useful for oceanside renderings or any other setup
where the visible ground is actually modeled in 3D.
Figure 5.35: Sky probe (top left); planar, spherical sky image (top right); hemispherical sky (bottom)
Using these environments has several benefits. First, the image provides a complete sky
and ground environment, which can eliminate the need to add some background entourage
(e.g., trees or a field) to the 3D scene. Another benefit is that if a spherical panorama has been
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