How to Adjust Sunlight and Shadows in CABINET VISION Renders [VIDEO Tutorial]

Hello and welcome to another video tutorial on CABINET VISION. My name is Tayla and today I’m going to be showing you how to edit your lights to create really beautiful 3D renders. I’ve got two examples here that we’re going to look at today. The first, on the left here, is a really bright sunny kitchen. And over on the right here, we’ve got a bit more of an evening scene showing off some additional lighting that’s been placed underneath the overheads. So let’s jump in.

In CABINET VISION, this is the kitchen that we’re using to adjust the lighting. First of all, you have to go to the 3D. And it’s always nice to sort of set your kitchen up before you even start editing your lighting. So I’m just clicking and dragging, tilting the kitchen up a little bit to have it at the view that I want to see it from. I like to tilt it up a little bit and move it around so that I can see more of the kitchen. Now I can see a little bit what’s behind the island with the stove and the drawers there.

Ok. If I flip this from wire mode into texture, we’ll see all the colors but now we need to adjust our lights.

So if we go across to lights here, this is our little light editing box. We’ve got different presets that we can have here. And then across the top here, there are different buttons. I’ll explain those in a second. And this is the preview pane below. And over on the left is how we adjust each individual light.

So up at the top, like I said, there are different presets we can have. We can add, copy, or delete presets by using the buttons up here. You can zoom in and out on the kitchen either by using these buttons or just by scrolling your mouse over the preview area. If you ever sort of lose your kitchen because you’ve scrolled a little bit too far, you can use this reset view to just come back to center. It’s really handy if you’re just playing with it. And then we can add and delete lights with these buttons here.

So if I hit add light, you see that it pops up in the center as this little light-blue light. And if I delete it, I’ll use that one. Beautiful.

So if I click on this orange light, you can see this one is called “sunlight” and I don’t have the option to delete it. That’s because, basically, this is the sun lighting up the whole space. It shines in through every opening into the area. I can turn it off by clicking “Enabled, No.” But I can’t ever delete it. So I’m going to leave that one on for this. This is the only light that you really need to know how to use to create a really nice 3D render. It’s the most simple and effective way to create a 3D render. But we’ll look at all the other options as well.

So with this one, I’ve got it set to “White Light.” If I use this drop-down box, you can see there’s lots of different colors that you can have for the light. White light looks really good, it’s very natural…but feel free to see what the others look like in your 3D renderings. And then you can adjust the brightness of that light. I’ve got mine set to 10 here. To adjust it, you can either click and scroll using the little bar there, or you can just click and type in the number that you want.

Then down here, at “Cast Shadows,” we’ve got Yes or No. Leaving it on “Yes” is going to create some shadows in the room. You can see underneath the overheads there and underneath the island here, there is a shadow being cast. It can look really natural to have shadows, but if you’re trying to show something and there’s an annoying shadow on it, you can just click “No” and it will turn off.

Then, the most important thing that you probably need to play with here is the direction of the lights. First of all, we’ve got the Vertical Direction. That refers to how it shines down into the room. “Minus 90°” is directly down. “Plus 90°” is directly up. I got mine at minus 30, so it’s sort of shining just down slightly into the room. I usually like to keep mine between about minus 20 and minus 40. It looks really natural but, again, feel free to play with it and see what you like the look of.

Then, the horizontal direction refers to how it’s shining across the room: i.e., which direction is it coming from. So you can see the little “dash” attached to the light that gives you a little visual representation of the horizontal direction. If I were to change it to just, let’s say, 120…you can see that it points in the other direction. If I change it to minus 90, it points down. Zero is going to point straight across.

I find that the nicest way for this to point is usually in line with the way I’m looking at the kitchen. So in the background there, you can see that I’m sort of looking at the kitchen from that direction. And that’s why I have it set to 60, so that it’s shining the same way I’m looking into the kitchen.

So, if I click “Close” to see what this looks like, then we go across to xRender. And, using the architectural settings, we can just do a little preview to start with, and that will just quickly show us the effect of our lighting on the kitchen. So that’s showing us there. So it looks really good! It’s nice and bright. We’ve got those shadows where we want them. It looks great.

So if we’re happy with that for the client, we could either go down to “Full Architectural” or “Save Architectural.” Both “Full Architectural” and “Save” take a little bit longer, which is why it’s good to use the Preview when you’re just playing with the lighting until you’re happy with it. But once you hit “Full,” it’s just going to take a few seconds to work through all its “computer brain work” that it’s got to do. And then at the end, all the grains and all the little junctions will look really good with no pixelation. So we’ll just wait for that to finish. Beautiful! So it’s all done now. That’s ready to send off to your client.

So that’s Part One: How we can use just the sunlight to create a really beautiful 3D rendering. In Part Two, we’re going to look at adding different artificial lights and the effects that those will give us to create different-looking scenes.

Hey, thanks so much for watching. If you’d like to see more tutorials like this one, please be sure to like and subscribe. You can also check out our other videos that will help guide you on your path to becoming a CABINET VISION power user.