Visualize - How to Add and Manipulate Lights in Visualize Standard

Lighting is an essential aspect that controls how vibrant the colors look and highlights important areas of your model. The feature to directly add light objects with adjustable properties nicely laid out is only available in Visualize Professional. However, you can achieve similar effects in Visualize Standard by using additional models and emissive appearances.

In this article, we will be walking through two ways that are available to control lights in Visualize Standard.

Note: make sure your Render Selection tool is set to Accurate to have the most realistic lighting calculated.

Controlling Lights from the Environment

Before talking about lights that are more specific and individualized, we would want to first recognize where the initial lights are coming from when you first import your model into Visualize. The lights are coming from the environment being used in the Scenes tab.

Clicking on the environment would allow you to access properties related to light in its Advanced tab, such as:

• brightness
• gamma
• positioning of the light
• shadow intensity

Controlling Lights from a Model with Emissive Appearance

Once the environmental lighting is satisfactory, we can try to add more specific lights.

We will start with a shader ball project with the intention to make its top shinier than the rest of the model, with the light coming from the back of the ball. The yellow arrows indicate the general direction the light will be coming from:

1. In the Models tab, right-click in an empty space where a list of models is> New Model > select a model with the shape that most closely imitates the light source shape you want. I am choosing a sphere in this example.
2. Scale and reposition the newly added model as fit.
3. Go to the Appearance tab, right-click in an empty space where a list of appearances is > New Appearance.
4. Make sure you have the new appearance selected. Change the appearance's type to "Emissive" in its General tab.
5. Drag and drop the appearance onto the model added in Step 1. Rename the appearance if desired.
6. In the appearance's parameters, adjust the emission value (the higher the brighter the "light" is) and, if needed, emission color to white, yellow, etc.
7. After you are satisfied with the lighting effect, you can go back to the Models tab, click on the model with the emissive appearance, and check on "Faded" in its General tab. This will hide the model in the graphics area but still keep the lighting effect.

Final result:

For more user-friendly and customizable lights, Visualize Professional would still be recommended.

For further technical support, please contact Hawk Ridge Systems at 877.266.4469 for the U.S. or 866.587.6803 for Canada and support@hawkridgesys.com.