LightUp v2.0 sneak peek (part 1)

v2.0 is a new major release of LightUp that has some great new features that really accelerate the workflow of using SketchUp and LightUp to produce high quality content; there are also many fixes and improvement to existing functionality.

LightUp v2.0 sets the foundations for moving more and more of the lighting calculation onto the powerful GPUs that are now generally available on commodity PCs - as well as refining the features it offers to better serve LightUp power users. Retail customers can buy an upgrade from 1.x to 2.0.

Below are a few of the new features of LightUp v2.0.

[Sneak Peek part 2 can be found here]

Multisampling / Anti-aliasing

LightUp has always exported high resolution, anti-aliased images and now v2.0 offers realtime anti-aliasing if your graphics card supports it. Below you can see two small screen grabs that show the effect of without, and with multisampling enabled. You can notice particularly on the light fittings the effect of multisampling in smoothing the edges.

Most graphics card do now support anti-aliasing to smooth out the jaggies you see at the edges of geometry. LightUp v2.0 and LightUp Player both leverage this GPU feature to produce realtime anti-aliased images. LightUp v2.0 will also use the GPU to significantly accelerate rendering out movie frames.

Animated Dynamic Light Sources

The LightUp workflow revolves around rigging lighting in your SketchUp model, calculating the lighting followed by a realtime navigation around your model. Adding dynamic elements to you model helps produce eye-catching movies and LightUp Player files without requiring complex authoring.

Dynamic Lights are created simply by opening the lighting dialog with the QueryTool and clicking on the checkbox.

Material by Layer Rendering

New in v2.0 is the ability to render using the SketchUp Color By Layer mode as well as existing normal rendering, lighting-only, and Lux analysis styles. The images can be instantly rendered at high quality over a whole range of resolutions right up to 7000x5000 pixels. Optional DepthMap can also be generated.

Styled outline of faces

LightUp v2.0 introduces realtime styling controls. Your geometry can be outlined with a realtime adjustable edging to complement the lighting you've added to your model. Future controls planned include direct importing of SketchUp Styles.