making a 10 watt light bulb

[jenr0o]

I am new to both twilight and sketchup.. I am in Interior design student working on the nightclub/bar in a hotel and am in despereate need for a few tips to make it look more realistic...The lighting i am using is bocci lights and the problem is they are very low voltage (10w halogen) and the lowest wattage on here is 25w.. Is there any way to make theese lights look more realistic ...any tip will help.. THANK YOU

( I have demo right now but in the process of getting the full twilight again due to my computer crashing)

[Fletch]

those are looking fantastic
I'm not sure what you mean about the only lights avail. here are 25w.

The easiest is to insert a spot light at power of "1" and size it to the correct radius and load the IES file for the fixture - I'm guessing the manufacturer can provide this for you on their website (likely already there if you look).

If you don't have the IES file... If you put in a point or spotlight it's difficult to know the wattage... but if you have a good simple realistic photo to which you may create and compare a test scene you get get quite close by experimentation.

To actually use wattage, you can use a small triangular shaped face that is painted with a material (call the mat. "emit") then use the material tool in Twilight and apply the template "Light Emitter" 40w/m2.
Then you need to figure out, using some math, how to get it to emit 10w or 25w for example.

This process of calculating this number is described in the manual v1.3 on page 44 under "Lighting an Interior Scene" in the Reference section.

1. Select the face in SketchUp and look at the Entity Info to see how many meters squared it is, then go from there to figure out the power you want it to
   emit.
2. If you want a total emittance of 1000 watts to light the entire space (large dining hall or airplane hangar), and your plane is 5540sqft(515sqmeters)
   and you apply the 100w/m2 light emit template, this will mean that the plane will emit 515m2x100w = 51500watts…
3. This is too much, so change that to what you want, and put that amount of watts you want it to emit. 1000w/515m2=1.942 w/m2. So set emitter to 1.942
   w/m2 for a 515 square meter plane to make it mimick the light output of an emitter powered by 1000 total watts.
4. Now your ceiling just became a 1000watt light bulb and equals 2 lights in Twilight because a rectangle will be triangulated, but because the light is in
   power defined by area, it doesn't matter the number of triangles, but rather the area.

so for a 25w bulb, if you have a tiny triangle, say about 1.5 inches from tip to edge:
the area= 1.3 (inches squared) = 0.000838708 meters squared
Xw/m2 * .000838708m2 = 10w
or in other words... 10w/.000838708m2 = 11923w/m2 (this number would go in the emitter template)

Please also, it's very important to get the color of your light right! See this thread.

[jenr0o]

Thank you for your time ..very helpful information !! I'm going to experiment and let you know how it comes out

-jenna!

[Frederik]

Great start, jenr0o...
Many moons ago, I also worked with some lights similar to the picture you've posted...
You can check the 3D Warehouse model... thread...

If it can help you in any way, I can share the model here, enabling you to learn from the materials and lights I used back then...

[jenr0o]

WOW thats impressive !!! ...can you teach me how you did that hahah ! oh boyyyy I have a lot to learn with twilight