Lighting has also seen a paradigm shift. The Adaptive Dome Light now uses HDRI ambient occlusion to calculate indirect lighting with 75% fewer samples, drastically reducing noise in shadow-heavy scenes. The Rectangular Light gains a "Portal" mode that can simulate skylight shafts, and the feature—powered by machine learning—analyzes a scene’s geometry and suggests optimal light setups (e.g., "north-facing living room at 4 PM in winter"). This reduces setup time for junior visualizers from hours to minutes.
Let’s look at a practical use case: Rendering a modern kitchen in SketchUp 2024. V-Ray 7.00.01 for SketchUp 2021-2024
: Adds AI-generated details to elements like people and vegetation without a full re-render. Lighting has also seen a paradigm shift