Exploring Autodesk Rendering Lighting Features in Navisworks

Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video, we'll be continuing with the Autodesk rendering features, this time concentrating more on lighting. So with the Autodesk Rendering panel open, go to the Lighting tab.

You'll see that in your model you have a number of lights already. The first two are Ambient and Sunlight. They're called Distant lights, and they have parallel rays.

And then we have Web lights, which are coming from the interior lights that were exported from Revit. For the purposes of this demonstration, we can turn off all of the Web lights. And Autodesk does not give you an option to select all and turn off.

If you select one, holding down CTRL or Shift, it just doesn't let you. It's a very old-fashioned way of using a menu. So you'll have to uncheck them individually.

Just remember that unchecking the lights means that you're not actually deleting the lights themselves. Those remain on. The only thing we're doing is turning their status off.

Now that we don't have any lights but the Ambient and Sunlight, we can change our Lighting Mode to Full Lights. And we can get a good idea of what our scene actually contains. So let's get a view inside of our building.

It's going to be a little dark at first, but we'll be able to put some lights in here. I just made my way up to the second floor. So to create a new light, you can just simply hit Create Light.

And then we can pick a number of different types. The ones that we were looking at before are Web lights. A Distant light is an Ambient or Sun.

And Point and Spot—the difference between the two is that Point is just a place that projects light in every direction. And Spot allows for directed lights. So let's practice with both Point and Spot.

First we'll select Point. And then right next to the Create Light, there's a Light Glyphs button. If we turn that on, then we can actually see the light glyphs.

We'll have to select Point again. And you'll see that you have a focus tool. And Navisworks is asking you where you want to put it.

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So as soon as you put it down, then it'll turn the light on. You can turn it off and on. If you'd like, we could change the filter color from bright white.

We can change it to something like orange or yellow. Or we can even define a much lighter version of yellow. There we go.

That's a little less harsh than the white. We can change the lamp intensity so that it's not so bright against that window. Right now it's set to 1500 candela.

And let's change it to 500 and see what happens. Now we see a lot more of the texture. It's not so blinding.

But if you look at each of the walls that are around it, you'll see that it's projecting light into that direction, into this direction, and then into this direction at the same time. So let's see what we can do with a Point or a Spot light now. So let's create a Spot.

First asks us where we want it to be. We want it to be on the ceiling. And then we want it to point down at our floor.

And you'll see that Navisworks will make the calculations, and it will be pointing toward the floor. You can even move around and see it better. We can change the location of the target.

You see that our light is adjusted in real time. And you can also adjust the falloff angle. So see how it's a cone? We can select, using the Select tool, each of these nodes to stretch farther.

So this circle in the center is the most intense point. You can make that smaller or larger. And then the falloff angle is from the most intense to the least intense, or zero.

Notice the glyph symbols. The Point light is a sphere, and the Target light is a flashlight. And if we look at these lights from the outside now, we'll have a little bit of illumination within our building, not just outside of it.

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So let's make a few Point lights throughout our building to give some good illumination. I'm going to change my intensity to,000. And you can even change the lamp color to a preset color—for example, if you had a halogen.

And on your list, you'll see all the lights that you've created. The most recent one, the one we have selected, is the one that's highlighted on our list. If you select any of the other lights, you can edit them remotely.

You don't have to be directly below them. If you need to compare your lighting between two lamps, then you can simply do that by selecting one and then the other. I've created a few more Point lights.

I'm going to create one here to lower intensity. And as you place more lights, you'll see your scene start to get more realistic looking. You can change the way that your light reflects off of glass by changing the materials of the glass.

Our Level 1 curtain panels, we can change to a Navisworks Autodesk Material Glass. Say we have Dark Blue Reflective. You can right-click and assign the selection.

And you'll see that we have a little bit more reflectance from our light in that material. It's a little bit darker from outside. You change it to Clear Reflective, and we'll have a lot clearer view from the outside.

Not much change from the inside. We're going to render a view sort of like this. So make sure we have enough light on the inside of the building so that we're not just bombarding it with sunlight.

And then in the next video, we'll go on to render this model. I hope you enjoyed. I thank you for joining me, and I'll see you next time.