I can't believe you've not have loads of replies about your new rendering plugin, it is incredible!! Maybe most people haven't noticed it yet?
I don't think the 2500 hits on the blog article about the plug-in were made only by lost Internet users and search engine crawlers. 
would it be possible to give the lights a surface to make them visible in the '3D view' for easier positioning
If you want to make them visible in the 3D view and 2D plan with the current version of the plug-in, the name of their 3D shape should be prefixed by "sweethome3d_window_pane" in the OBJ file (use a sphere.obj instead of light.obj for example) and they should be flagged as windows in PluginFurnitureCatalog.properties file, because the only objects that are not rendered are windows named this way.I can build such a file if you want to, but then these lights will behave like windows when magnetism is active (they will make holes in walls when drop on or close to them).
even when hidden this way it still produces a light source in the final advanced photo render.
Please, consider this behavior as a bug that will be fixed in next version.Is there any way to make large size lights (like a lighting softbox) so soft shadows can be generated?
That should be possible, by changing light radius. In the next version, I can use a variable radius depending on the size of the light.Also would you be able add an ambient lighting adjustment?
SunFlow doesn't seem to have such kind of light.could you add a button to the Advanced photo window so a user can select either Landscape or Portrait for the rendered view?
Why not...It's so good that I'm surprised you didn't replace the normal rendering method and release it as 'Sweet Home 3D version 4'!
From your remarks, I'm was right not to do that since it's not perfect yet. I'll probably add the advanced rendering parameters to Sweet Home 3D itself when SunFlow will be able to compute light going through panes and other transparent surfaces.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
