First try / happy!

[lef80]

Hello there !
today I did my first test scene with sketchup + shapespark ! I am really amazed
but I have some noob questions… if you don’t mind

the test project is a 120sqm apartment :

https://bbt80.shapespark.com/shapespark_test/

1. Although I used the ‘‘ultra’’ settings for the lightmap , the lighting is ok but the reflections are really poor…
   is there a limitation ? or do I need some extra ‘‘reflection balls’’ for some extra accuracy ?
   for example , although that the material is the same (kitchen lacquer - tv unit 's marble) the reflection stops for no reason …
2. When the lightmap is baked, is there a way to delete it and rebake it ? or do I have to update it ? I tried to raise the settings more but I got a ‘‘scaledown 11% message cause of two lightmaps’’ or something …
3. When I upload a scene, is there a way to re-edit the materials - light etc ? or the scene is ‘‘closed’’ ?
4. Is there a way to adjust the light spots (e/or sun) intensity in real time ? or do I have to rebake the lightmap to see the result ?
5. I am not sure what the post process button does , I can see that updates the file in the server … is this the way to update the lightmap for avoiding the recalculation ?

thanks in advance !

[jorgearq]

Hi @lef80
Your test project looks good! is only a matter of time to setting up your tours

I send you through others’ posts to understand your questions.

@wojtek

@jorgearq, in this particular scene the inaccuracy of reflections is caused by the limitation of light probes irrespective of their type (cubic or spherical). To produce realistic reflections of objects at different distances (eg. a standing person in the foreground, and a wall in the background) full 3D information is necessary. However, images captured by light probes are like panoramas - they cover all the surrounding but they are only 2D - so they do not produce enough information for fully realistic reflections.

This is true for light probes in general, so a similar scene in Twinmotion will suffer from similar inaccuracies and distortions of light probe based reflections.

@jan

The lightmap space needed for a scene depends on the total area of the objects in the scene, even a small number of large triangles can have large total area.

It looks like you have correctly reduced the resolution for large external objects that don’t need detailed shadows using the Custom lightmap resolution setting. This message says that even after your reduction, the scene still couldn’t be fit into 2 lightmaps and the resoultion was reduced further by 6%. This isn’t a large reduction and shouldn’t affect the quality much . You can check the final resolution used in the Objects tab Auto lightmap resolution property.

As you can see, for important interior objects, the resolution was automatically reduced from 75 to 70 , which isn’t a big difference, but if you would like to avoid this reduction you can further decrease the resolution for the largest external objects.

The main problem seems to be too dark interior, which is not related to the lightmap resolution. To improve this you could:

• Decrease the windows opacity for the time of baking to let more sky light inside. After the baking you can increase the opacity back to 0.1 .
• Increase the sky strength (for example to 6 or 4 ) and use the Camera volumes feature in the Viewer tab to reduce exposure when the camera enters the balcony to avoid showing overexposed exterior.

3. you can edit the entire scene all the times that you need, then you upload it again and this process renews the web scene. Upload scenes take a few seconds.

4. No way to adjust in real-time. But the ease way to adjust that is using the camera tab and set exposure and gamma, you don’t need to re-render, just adjust, save, and upload again.

@wojtek

The post-processing applies a few filters to the baked lightmaps in order to improve their quality, and it is always performed automatically at the end of baking. So, running post-processing manually is needed only when you change these filters settings after the lightmaps have been baked. Currently the only configurable post-processing settings are: Enable filters (which effectively enables/disables post-processing) and the Flood dark limit .

[lef80]

thanks a lot jorgearq!

It’s a pity that you can’t adjust the light in realtime (like enscape for example …!)
Some times lighting design can be really tricky and realtime response helps you work better !

[jan]

Very nice scene. You can also use a Preview button in the Bake tab to quicker evaluate lighting of a particular place without baking the whole lightmap. This is for evaluating baked diffuse lighting, reflections are not visible in the preview, but reflections can be adjusted without baking the lightmap again.

Because of the large windows in the main room, the automatic light probe calculation did not work correctly. For more accurate reflections light probe bounding box should align with the room borders. If you change Bounding Box -> Min -> X setting to about -12.1 to align with the wall, the reflections will be more accurate.

Each object uses only a single light probe, so more light probes will not improve the accuracy of reflections.

[lef80]

thank you Jan ! Very useful tips !

[Marcos_Rosillo]

Really nice project =) just adjust the view height it is too low

[lef80]

Thank you ! the scene needs a lot of adjustments …
currently I am struggling to get realistic materials

[lef80]

Here is a small update of the scene :

https://3dboxme.shapespark.com/e1/

still can’t get realistic reflections in the living room although
I made the change in the light probe like @jan told me in the previous comment …

• for example , all the kitchen cabinet is shiny but a small part is showing correctly

• in the tv unit , there is no continuity in the reflections although the surface is planar and the same material

• and the worst part , is the sharp line that I get in the floor reflection , is this the limit of visibility of the light probe ? I don’t understand …

[wojtek]

Intro: one mesh can use only one light probe, and it is assigned the closest light probe “from which the mesh is visible”.

As a rule of thumb, for apartment with a few rooms add one light probe per room (usually somewhere near the room center).

The kitchen cabinet you show most likely isn’t visible from any of the light probe positions, so add additional light probe somewhere in the kitchen area.

If you split the floor into two meshes - one for the bathroom, one for the living room - the two meshes will use different light probes. To reduce the effect of the seam between the light probes try splitting the meshes on an edge between tiles.