Hot on the heels of SketchUp’s 2020 release, the Shaderlight team are pleased to announce our latest version which will install to and run from within SketchUp 2020.
That’s not all you get in Shaderlight 2020 however. The team have produced a brand new material that combines the features of the old Self Illuminating material type and an associated area light.
Introducing…Light Emitting!
Light Emitting is intended to replace both Self Illuminating materials and area lights because they produce the most physically accurate results for less effort. The old material type and area lights have been retained so that existing models continue to work and to support particular non-physical effects (such as invisible light sources).
The new material both visibly glows and emits light that illuminates other surfaces, making it much easier to create accurate light emitting objects.
The Light Emitting material type has two modes of operation – one that uses the underlying SketchUp material to define the emission colour and another that allows the colour to be specified in terms of correlated colour temperature.
What else has changed?
We’ve fixed some dialog layout issues on Windows
Some Windows machines with certain versions of Internet Explorer installed displayed the Shaderlight dialogs (such as Render Settings and the Light and Material editors) with incorrect layout and inoperative controls, making them difficult or impossible to use. We have addressed all of the problems that we could reproduce on our systems but we would be interested to hear of any remaining issues.
We’ve fixed incomplete exports of models with certain texture types
Certain texture types are unable to be exported by Shaderlight and the presence of such textures would prematurely abort the export process, resulting in renders with missing elements or crashes of the Shaderlight render process. These models should now export and render to completion, although the affected textures are still not exported – geometry with the affected textures will render with a flat colour for now. We continue to work on addressing the actual texture export.
We hope you like the new version. Don’t forget to let us know what you think and send us some of your light emitting images!
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