Making a lens glow, placing a light source that falls on the shade and the wall, and letting visitors look up at a ceiling fitting.
VUE lights a model with a photographed environment rather than with lamps. That is deliberate: it is what makes a converted anthracite read as anthracite and a chrome read as chrome, and it is the reason materials survive the trip out of Revit looking like themselves.
It has one blind spot, and it is an expensive one — a product that is a light. A pendant, a downlight, a lit sign, a display case: until now those could only be shown switched off, and only from above. This page is the three settings that fix that, and they are usually used together.
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| The lens or diffuser to look lit | Emits light, on the material |
| Light to fall on the wall, the floor, the product's own shade | A light source |
| The visitor to look up at a ceiling fitting | Let visitors look from underneath, on the embed |
Open a model, open the material panel, and pick the material that should be lit — the lens, the diffuser, the strip, the LED itself. Turn on Emits light.
You get two more controls:
#ffdfa8 rather than pure white.Switching Emits light off again returns the material to exactly what it was.
Once anything in the model is brighter than white, VUE adds a soft bleed around it — the spill that makes a photograph of a lit fitting look lit. It is automatic: there is no setting, because the honest trigger is simply whether something is emitting.
Two things follow from that, and both are intentional:
Emission lights the surface itself. It does not light anything else — the lens goes white and stops. A light source is what makes the light leave the fitting and land on the shade, the wall and the floor.
Open a model and find Light sources under the viewer.
Press Add a light and you get one immediately above the product. Then:
The easy way is to drag it. Turn on Inspect and the light appears in the viewer as a coloured ball you can click and drag with the arrows.
A lamp usually sits inside its shade, so clicking one has to reach through the geometry around it — it does. Clicking a handle always selects the light rather than the part behind it.
A spot has a second, smaller handle showing where it points, joined to it by a line. Drag that to aim the beam. The Move and Aim buttons choose which handle the gizmo is on.
Two other ways, for when dragging is not what you want:
All three edit the same values, so you can drag roughly into place and then nudge a slider.
Every position here is a fraction of the model's own size, and so is the brightness. That is why the sliders say "0.6" rather than "180 mm".
It is not a simplification — it is what makes a light survive the range. A setting made on a 450 mm pendant means the same thing on the 1800 mm one beside it in the same family, and on every type in between. A position in millimetres would put the lamp outside the small one and buried inside the large one, and brightness stated absolutely would be visibly dimmer on the bigger product, because light falls off with the square of distance.
Up to eight lights per model. In practice one or two does it. Each one is a real light being computed on every visitor's device, and a fitting lit by six is usually a fitting that wanted one brighter one.
A ceiling product is seen from below, and by default VUE will not let the camera go there. Turn on Let visitors look from underneath on the model's Embed page.
The default is off for a reason worth knowing. Below the ground plane the soft shadow that seats a product on a surface has nothing to sit on, so it is hidden while the visitor is under the model. For a pendant that is exactly right; for a radiator it is a worse picture and no gain.
Light does not bounce. A red wall beside a white lamp will not tint it, and a light pointed at the floor will not fill the room — the environment still does all of that, and it is still what makes the materials read correctly. These settings add a source on top of it, they do not replace it.
Neither emission nor a light source changes anything about augmented reality: AR hands the model to the phone's own viewer, which lights it with the room the visitor is standing in. A lens set to emit will still look lit; a light source will not light their kitchen.