In this tutorial I will be explaining lighting effects in AutoCAD.
First off, I'm going to create some 3d boxes and arrange them like so:
Next, I've given the walls a “Plaster.Stucco.Trowled.White” material under the “finishes” tab on the materials panel.
Now I have my 3 walls, I'm going to give the walls a floor by using a planar surface. This basically gives me a flat surface to work with. The tool is located here as shown:
Now I'm going to give a flat surface to the area enclosed by the 3 walls to act as a floor. Just use the planar surface tool as you would with the 3D box tool except you don't need to input the height. (Don't forget to use snaps):
Now lets give that flat surface a good wooden material as shown below:
Great we now have this:
For one last finishing touch before I show you lighting, let's add a box in the corner:
Now give it a “Concrete.Cast-In-Place.Panels.Square” material under the Concrete tab.
My room currently looks like this:
Next, draw two 2D lines on opposite corners of the walls, using them for snaps to create a point where the 2 lines intersect:
Now that you have your 2 lines, make sure they actually intersect. You can check this buy using a tool like the 3D box tool and move the cursor over the 2 lines. If a cross appears, then the lines intersect, otherwise you've done something wrong.
Usually when the lines don't intersect, one side is higher than the other like in my drawing right now. (I've done it on purpose, honest ;P):
To correct this, I would have to find out what side is taller:
And I would correct it (Just re-draw it):
Now that's settled, I can draw the two 2D lines:
You will notice that the intersection point is not completely in the middle of the room, that doesn't matter because I just want a point to work from.
Open up the lighting panel by right clicking at the top of the tools panel and selecting “Lights”:
Now for the lighting effects! First off, select the first light which should be “Default Point Light”:
This is standard light that emits light from all directions. We will place it at the point where the 2 lines we drew earlier intersect:
You will notice that parts of your model have lightened up. This is what your model would look like in render mode without the point light:
And now, with the light:
Great isn't it? You can adjust the lighting by clicking on the “Light list” as shown:
Here it will display your lights that you have in your model, right click on your desired light and click on properties:
Here you can adjust specific properties of your light, but to change the strength of your light, you would change the intensity factor. If you wanted a nice and darkish lighting, I would recommend you set it to 0.2 or 0.3. Otherwise, experiment around with it:
Ok next light I'm going to show you is the spot light:
This spotlight enables me to focus a light onto a specific object(s). To apply this, I would first click onto the place where the light is going to be shown FROM, in this case, it's the intersection that we created:
Then I click on the object I want the light to focus on:
Now I have my spotlight, in lights menu as I showed before you can change the properties of the spotlight as well (like colour of light, how big the light it etc.):
Note: You can more than light
The last light I'm going to show you is the distant light:
This light works differently. This light shines evenly throughout the model and it goes in ONE direction. Think of it as a powerful spotlight shining in only one direction. To apply the light, click any spot and move your mouse and click at your specified direction. You may not see it but here I've clicked on the intersection and moved my cursor up to specify that the direction that I want my light to be going is up:
And now, here it is with the light applied in render mode:
Let's do it again, this time with the light going the opposite direction:
It's very dark, why? Let's look at the other side of the wall:
The wall is blocking the light! Well, light doesn't pass through non-transparent walls so it is quite expected that this will happen since the light is coming from this direction. Like the other 2 lights, this light can also be edited in the lighting panel I showed you earlier.
Congratulations, you have gained knowledge on lights in AutoCad 2007.
