The great advantage of emissive materials is that you can use them to create complex forms that glow you can get really creative! Check out the picture below I just created some shapes in SketchUp, and made the generic white material assigned to them emissive. When an emissive material is used in a scene, it is rendered as a visible light source, and depending on the intensity you set, its glow can actually light up the surrounding area. This post show examples from SketchUp, but you can of course work with emissive materials in Revit, Rhino, Vectorworks, and Archicad as well! What is an Emissive Material?Įmissive materials are self-illuminated materials, that is, materials that emit light across their surface. In this post you’ll learn what are emissive materials, how to apply and adjust them in SketchUp using Enscape’s Material Editor, and many different use cases. Understanding when to use which type of light can take your project to the next level in terms of realism. It might be difficult to decide when to use emissive materials versus artificial lights both have their benefits and drawbacks. But you can also use self-illuminated emissive materials to create light in areas of your model where it might be impractical to use artificial lights: to create the effect of recessed ceiling lighting, for example.

They are often used on objects where some part should appear to glow, such as a television or computer screen, the brake lights of a car, or an exit sign.

This means you can be incredibly creative with emissive materials. Making your material emissive turns it into a glowing light source, which you can assign to any shape and even add a texture to. These self-illuminated materials emit light, but differently than artificial light sources, and can be used to create effects that you can’t achieve with artificial lights and make objects glow, even in the dark. You may have seen my post about artificial light sources in SketchUp, in which I covered different techniques for realistic lighting in SketchUp ( Best Practices for Lights and Materials in SketchUp).īut there is another way of creating light and making something glow in your SketchUp projects: emissive materials.

Enscape in sketchup