Planning LED Lighting in a Room Designed with Sweet Home 3DHi everyone,
I’m interested in how people plan lighting when designing a room in Sweet Home 3D.
When arranging a kitchen or living room, how do you represent LED strip lighting under cabinets, along shelves or around ceiling details? Do you use standard light sources to approximate the effect, or is there a better way to create a realistic preview of indirect lighting and shadows?
I’d also be interested in any tips for choosing light positions and colour temperatures to make the final render look more natural.
Thanks for any suggestions!
Unfortunately, my experience creating real lighting in a room using SH3D has run into a problematic issue. Render time. Real lighting is always the sum of direct and reflected light from surfaces. SH3D does not allow modeling reflected light (reflections). And it is precisely these that create a realistic image. Therefore, in SH, you get black, unlit areas that do not exist in reality. Light penetrates everywhere, but not in the SH renderer. You have to simulate such reflections using numerous additional light sources. And this makes the render unrealistically slow. There are simplified solutions that allow you to simulate reflections from the floor. These are invisible light panels directed from the floor towards the ceiling (1-2% 1cm above the floor) and a panel on the ceiling (just 1cm below the ceiling level) with a 2-5% direction towards the floor. This is the fastest rendering of all possible solutions with simulated reflexes. But complete realism cannot be achieved in this way. Maximum realism is achieved by a multitude of hemispheres, but this method makes the rendering look like an eternity.. The more realistic and difficult the attempt to simulate reflexes, the longer the rendering. My experiments took 20–30–40 hours for a single render, which is awful. But I don’t see anything else in the program. Unfortunately, artificial intelligence imitates reality much more accurately. Therefore, we can be glad about the program’s signature style, where reality isn’t the main goal. The main thing in SH3D is the ease of creating space; realism isn’t the priority. 
