- [Instructor] Scenes and lighting in SolidWorks
can be used to greatly enhance image qualities
to make our projects look more realistic,
and can also give off shadow effects.
Scenes and lighting in SolidWorks can get quite in-depth,
but for the purpose of this course,
I'll only worry about introducing the basics.
And of course all scenes and lighting
can then be used within animations.
So to navigate over to our scenes and lighting,
I just go over to my left-hand side assembly tab here.
Take a look at all the tabs.
The last one is display manager.
If I just click on that tab there,
I have a few options for viewing appearances,
all the colors and appearances within my project.
And I notice I have this icon here which I can click on,
which will be scenes, lights, and cameras.
Now within this we have a number of scenes applied,
number of lights and camera information applied,
and all of this can be customized or edited
to suit your exact needs.
SolidWorks comes with a number
of default pre-created scenes.
And to take a look at some of those,
we just navigate over to my top view toolbars here,
and I have this guy here,
which I can hit the dropdown,
and apply any number of some of the default scenes.
So what we've using thus far is this three point faded,
which generally is the SolidWorks default.
Kind of that gray background that you see.
But you also have a plain white,
now it's just a plain white background
and a number of other options.
You can run through a whole number of these
and throw in really whatever you'd like.
We even have something that's like a cityscape background.
Things like this.
You can play around with these
until you find your own preference.
So these are the SolidWorks defaults,
but then from each of these,
you can customize and edit to suit your exact needs.
So let's take a look at, maybe,
backdrop gray with an overhead light here.
And then what we can do from there
is take a look back over to our scenes, lights, and cameras.
Check out exactly how this is created
and make any edits or customizations we may need.
So for example this has one ambient light
and a whole number of directional lights,
but I can add lights, I can remove lights,
I can edit lights, to suit your own needs.
So let's take a look at just making some quick edits here.
So maybe I'll jump into the ambient light first.
And you just do a right-click in here,
is where you can add, delete, or edit.
So I'm gonna go maybe edit light here.
And just a few options here,
I can change essentially the intensity of my light here
and see how that will affect my object.
And I can also edit the color.
So maybe I want it to be like a pale orange color.
And see again how that might affect my object here.
Change these to your own needs and just hit the green check
when you're happy with those.
Same for all directional lights, same ideas,
except directional lights
can actually control shadowing as well.
Let's take a look at some of my directional lights,
there's a whole number here.
Let's go into directional one.
Again right-click, and edit directional light.
And again we have a number of options
or properties to change.
And I can zoom out actually,
and kind of see where this directional light
or kind of spotlight is being placed.
And again I can change the intensity here,
the color, the brightness, and so on.
And I can also change the longitudinal attitude,
directly, with exact degrees,
so I can get very specific with it.
Or I can just click and drag on this directional light here,
and that's gonna change the direction
or the location of my spotlight as well,
and you can see how that's gonna change the shadowing
and the lighting effects and so on.
So of course you can go very very in-depth
with all your lighting options.
Add as many or as few lights as you may want,
play around with the positioning,
play around with the properties.
And you can really spend quite a bit of time
on your lighting, just to make everything exactly perfect
the way you'd like it.
In this case, just showing the very basics
of how to make some slight changes and edits,
but it's the same idea across the board there.
Once I'm happy with that, just hit the green check,
to finish it off.
And I can do the same with a whole number of other lights.
So this is the basics of how you can change
and edit lighting, scenes, and even shadows,
and then of course we can apply these
or make these changes within our animations as well.