Lighting

SketchUp's single light source (the Sun) is a real drawback when it comes to getting any feel or atmosphere into your renders, so the provision for various light types in TurboSketch Studio should prove to be a real boon for users. The way that TurboSketch Studio handles lights is rather left-field and quite clever. Basically, you're provided with seven types of light sources as components in SketchUp's Component browser. These are Ceiling light, Exterior light (not the Sun), Point light, Spot light and three types of Wall light fittings. These are just simple SketchUp geometry shapes, so their placement within a model is extremely straightforward. Since they're geometry, they'll also show up in any render -- not a problem for the light-fitting types, but you'll also get visible point lights. However, you can scale these down to invisibility without affecting their light-casting properties. (see images 10-11).

10 - Because TurboSketch lights are supplied as geometry in the form of SketchUp components, they will be visible in any render. The orb here represents TurboSketch's standard point light at 1:1 scale.	11 - However, scaling the size of the light component has no effect on the type of light that it casts, allowing the user to hide light sources.

As mentioned, the lights supplied are components, and conversely, any geometry defined as a component can be turned into lightsource. So you could have a spiral staircase as a lightsource if you chose to.

TurboSketch Studio uses SketchUp's sun as its main lightsource, taking its position from the program. There is an option to override this within TurboSketch Studio, but you have to enter the Sun angle and elevation instead of geographical location and date and time, which seems a bit like hard work. You can also set lighting conditions for the sky, so you get Clear, Hazy Overcast, cloudy for both daylight and twilight, and nighttime full moon, half moon and overcast. You can also supply any image to be used as a backdrop to your scene. But these images cannot serve as light sources themselves.

You'll notice something, however, when you add an internal light: the sun goes out. This is because IMSI/Design reckons that natural light tends to swamp interior lighting. They have a point -- although this can be a little confusing at first. It is possible to force natural lighting on at the same time as interior lighting from the TurboSketch Lighting controls, but you then have to set the intensities of the internal lights way up high -- in the millions of lumens ranges, to overcome this. We found that this was a little hit-and-miss in practice -- wouldn't it be easier to simply reduce the contribution of the Sky Component?

Conclusion and Recommendations

Overall, TurboSketch Studio largely delivers on its promise of one-click rendering. The are are some interface glitches that need smoothing out -- a persistent tendency of the render window to resize itself to a small letterbox format, for example -- the dialogs need a lot more attention, and we'd like to see IMSI/Design get the UK release sorted out (just release the plug-in on its own, maybe?). However, we think IMSI/Design have defined the market for this product rather well. It's the only product on the Mac platform that does what it does: one-click rendering from within SketchUp without the hassle of transporting your files between two different environments, and its attractive price certainly merits it serious consideration. ---- TIM DANAHER, Associate Editor

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Published: 29 Jan 2008