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Selling your lighting design

& how you could do it better

DAYTIME

NIGHT

The QuestionWhy does lighting design only

begin when other design work is finishing?

Have you ever wondered why specialist lighting design input is largely left to the building services documentation phase, long after the concept and design development phases? Which when you think about it, is quite bizarre, especially with the obvious implication that if there is no lighting present, then this design effort is all rather pointless.

During the critical concept and design development phases, there are a lot of discussions amongst the numerous project stakeholders with many critical decisions that need to be made. And not only is it essential to have timely design development communication, but it is also important that all stakeholders have a consistent understanding of the detail being shared and the range of ambient conditions that are likely to be encountered.

Without dependable context imagery, it’s a bit like being asked if you are going to like a song, when all you have is a copy of the lyrics. Building exterior detail will not only look very different from day to night conditions, but changeable sky conditions can also dramatically impact the appearance, especially during the dusk or dawn transition periods, where the surrounding lighting conditions can vividly transform the scene.

With interior design there is also the important connected requirement to minimise the energy footprint, which inevitably leads to a growing need to explore unconventional and potentially costly methods in combining

natural and artificial lighting systems. For the natural lighting component, there must be an accurate and efficient method in evaluating the relative merits of a range of skylight and glazing system options. For the artificial lighting component, a large matrix of source types, mounting locations, control systems, photometric distributions and luminaire aiming strategies must also be explored and developed.

The lighting system, from the all-important visual perspective, is clearly the glue that brings together the elements of aesthetics, energy management, design features, finish selection, space management, workflows and occupant comfort. The critical coherence of all these design and functional elements must be carefully assessed by all the relevant project stakeholders, before the largely irreversible step of committing this detail into the building contracts documentation, and clearly it should not be the other way around.

So why is the lighting design and lighting supply community largely left out of these early critical phases?

the answer is because the currently available lighting

design and simulation tools don’t even get close

to fulfilling this requirement. Instead these current

design tools are largely limited to providing arrays of

point-by-point lighting grid values or isolux diagrams

and occasionally low quality, low detail visualisation

that excludes any natural lighting contribution.

These data sets play a very small role in the wider

decision making process, where their value is largely

limited to a small section of the project building

services team.

So, for the lighting community, any other contribution

is limited to sharing product data sheets, images

of other installations, feature lists and, of course,

more competitive pricing, which, all too often, is

predominantly assessed by a spreadsheet put

together either by the installing contractor and/or

their supply wholesaler or the quantity surveyor.

The AnswerThe lighting sector simply

doesn’t have the right tools to join in the conversation

The particular product version we will be describing

here and also the application used to produce all the

images shown in this article is called Bloom Unit, which

is a plug-in application for SketchUp. Similar product

versions will also soon be available for both Revit and

ARCHICAD.

The critical element missing from current lighting

toolsets is the ability to rapidly produce physically

accurate and photographic quality imagery. This

imagery must be of a standard where all the project

stakeholders will readily accept the visual and

photometric accuracy of the captured detail, which

in turn, creates a vital common grasp of the potential

design outcomes, leading to a common understanding

of the proposed solution detail, leading to better and

more informed decisions.

But now there is a powerful new capability that has

emerged from the massive investment and technology

developments over the last couple of decades in the

3D visualisation, gaming, entertainment, CAD/CAM and

cloud processing sectors, where physically accurate

imagery of complex scenes can now be generated

in seconds or minutes, using only a standard laptop

or notebook computer with any standard mobile or

wireless internet connection.

The underlying technology behind this breakthrough

capability is derived from a software product platform

called RealityServer from migenius, which also

utilises a unique and powerful rendering engine called

Iray, developed by NVIDIA.

Cloud technologychanges everything

tiles, any type of gloss finish, translucent materials and many others.

As you can see from the inserted images throughout this article, there is clearly a completely new standard in communicating not only the materials and lighting system capabilities, but also precisely how all the separate design elements comes together as this detail is transferred from drawings to reality. Every one of these images has been entirely produced with our standard Bloom Unit plug-in application for SketchUp, using no more than a regular Wi-Fi connected laptop computer and definitely without any post-processing or photo-editing being applied whatsoever.

Apart from the lack of any type of suitable material definition system, there are numerous other feature elements missing from the current lighting software toolsets. But, as examples of these differences, we will detail only 3 of the important missing features from all the current lighting software packages.

and colour values of the emitted light component. These calculations increase on a compounding basis as the huge number of surface/material segments throughout the scene continue to re-reflect light and colour values into the surrounding space. And at the core of this massive computation process is the separate light transport calculation within each and every material type on every segment in the scene, where each material definition can be made up of hundreds of separate programming parameters covering a huge range of properties, such as reflections, refraction, transparency, translucency and sub-surface scattering, to name only a few.

The problem for the lighting design community is that none of the currently available lighting simulation packages even remotely has the necessary material definition or light transport calculation systems needed to support the requirement for high quality and physically accurate imagery. This is further highlighted by the inability to plausibly represent the correct appearance (much less the proper reflected lighting contribution) of finishes such as aluminium, stainless steel, ceramic

Whenever we physically view a scene, we cannot see the light itself, only the luminance values of the surfaces in the scene that reflects this light. So the light sources actually only play a small role in this calculation process, where after the emitted light values from the installed luminaires strikes the first set of surfaces, these luminaires play no part further part in the very considerable calculation process that follows.

Following this initial cast of illumination, the lighting calculation then becomes mind-numbingly complicated. For physically accurate and photo-real imagery, material definitions are comprised of complex algorithm sets, where the light transport calculation for a surface segment, with a material applied, is far more intricate than the initial cast of luminaire source illumination. Not only is it necessary to calculate the precise angle, intensity and colour value of the incoming light component from the huge number of source elements throughout the scene, but we also need to precisely calculate the very wide range of directions, intensities

Bloom Unit provides the missing proof that the Stakeholders and

Design Teams need

The second missing feature is the ability to calculate diffuse

transmission. In the top image on the right, we have a common

example of sunlight being scattered as it passes through a

semi-transparent material, which simply cannot be calculated

by any of the current lighting simulation packages.

When the light emitted from any light source passes through

any type of diffuse material, the current light transport

algorithms are incapable of simulating the scattering of

the transmitted light value as it passes through this type of

material. Therefore, as seen in our example here, the result

will always be bands of direct illumination throughout the

scene, significantly altering the vital reflected light component

calculation necessary for accurate visual and photometric

analysis.

The work around for these situations is to replace these

diffuse material sections with fictional and inaccurate area light

sources, with standard cosine lighting distribution and oriented

into the room.

Diffuse Transmission

Specular ReflectionThe first missing feature is the ability to calculate specular

reflection. In the image set to the left, we have a mirror surface

section placed on the floor in front of a standard window with

direct sunlight streaming onto this floor area. The left hand

image set has been produced by Bloom Unit’s rendering

system and, as you would expect, the light is properly reflected

off the mirror and onto the wall, as correctly calculated by

Bloom Unit’s light transport system. But this significant visual

and lighting source element is entirely missing from the right

hand image set, as would be the case using current lighting

calculation systems, and this same limitation would also apply

to the light transport calculation of every other reflective

surface throughout your scene.

There is no work around for this missing item, unless you

go to the considerable trouble of placing an arrangement

of invisible and entirely fake light sources specifically for

illuminating that part of the wall. And not only would this

need to be reconfigured every time the sun position moves,

but any energy/lighting calculation would also be seriously

compromised.

And it should also be added, whenever you see reflective or

polished surfaces in any visualisation produced by current

toolsets, this is simply a reflective overlay applied to that part

of the image, as a post process function, and does not impact

on the resulting measured lighting values, in any way.

The third missing feature is daylight contribution which is

removed from almost all of the current lighting software

packages. In any of the very few remaining packages, only

limited sun/sky calculations are possible, and they are

certainly not able to capture the changes in early morning or

late afternoon sky distribution and colour, as can be seen in the

image below.

Daylight Contribution

What’s so special about Bloom Unit?

A key feature of the Bloom Unit application platform is that all the rendering processing is carried out in real-time, using very powerful multi-GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) remote cloud servers.

This feature provides many benefits, including:

• Runs on any connected laptop or tablet capable of running SketchUp

– no need for any specialised local hardware.

• High speed interactive performance, not even possible with high spec local hardware systems.

• Work from anywhere with internet access, even in your client’s office.

• Run live collaboration sessions for any number of people who can see everything in your viewport.

• Seamless access to vast, high detail content libraries stored on the same cloud servers.

• No need for any local IT support.

Just one of the reasons why Bloom Unit provides extremely fast processing is that

our standard GPU cloud server configuration provides over 6,000 processing cores

for every user session, compared to the 2 or 4 local CPU cores typically available to

current lighting software applications. And unlike the limitation of the local CPU, the

processing capacity of the GPU cloud servers can be readily expanded and we have

current clients with systems that utilise over 50,000 processing cores.

Massivecomputational power

MaterialDefinition Language

For material definitions, as discussed earlier, Bloom Unit fully utilises the industry

standard capabilities of MDL (Material Definition Language) developed by NVIDIA,

that uniquely allows for the efficient creation of a very wide range of complex material

types that will render both quickly and accurately in any combination of design layout

or lighting configuration, and without the need for any custom ‘tweaks’ of the finish or

render settings.

And there is a rapidly growing number of libraries of real world materials being

created using the MDL standard, mainly by product manufacturers who need to

support their rapidly expanding end user on-line requirements, which will lead to free

and easy access to massive collections of real world MDL compliant materials and

finishes for your projects.

In-built library of photorealistic Objects, Materials & Luminaires

For populating your scenes with furniture, fixture and material elements, Bloom Unit

comes with an in-built library of over 2,000 objects, 300 MDL material definitions and

a library of around 200 real-world luminaires.

Even more Objectsavailable from other sources

A much larger number of objects are also available from SketchUp’s proprietary,

on-line ‘3D Warehouse’ library system, where you can browse for the objects you are

after and have them inserted directly into your open SketchUp model. But another

source are the massive number of additional objects available from 3D Content

providers such as Evermotion, TurboSquid, FormFonts, Floorplanner, Laubwerk,

BIMobject and Arch-LOG, many of whom are actively working with real world

manufacturers to build huge, precision libraries of their product catalogues.

Create your ownMaterials, quickly & easily

In Bloom Unit’s Material Management module, there is also a very capable MDL

custom material system for rapid creation of any material definitions not already

available from either your material library or other local sources.

Create your ownLuminaires, quickly & easily

For additional Luminaires and lanterns for your scenes, Bloom Unit’s Luminaire

Manager Module provides you with a straightforward way to setup custom luminaires

rapidly with your selected IES photometric file and lamp lumen output. You can also

quickly set the lighting source area shape and dimensions and, uniquely, set the

colour temperature of your chosen lamp source, as shown in the image set below.

HDRi Sky Domes for realistic backgrounds & illumination

Bloom Unit also allows you to insert physically accurate HDRi (High Dynamic Range

Image) sky domes that not only provide a high quality photographic background

surrounding your project site, but also use the in-built pixel luminance values stored

in this type of imagery to light your scene accurately based on the displayed sky

conditions.

False Colour Displayfor lighting analysis

Bloom Unit includes the ability, at any time, to turn your viewport into a live luminance

or illuminance false colour display that is instantly and continuously updated as you

move the camera around your scene.

Another big advantage of the Bloom Unit system is its capability of handling very large

scenes. Current lighting software packages are limited to model sizes of about 50,000 poly-

gons, but Bloom Unit can routinely work with scenes comprising 5,000,000 polygons or more,

and the following images show some spectacular examples:

Here are a pair of images showing 2,400 excavators illuminated by 810 Sylvaglow 400W Metal Halide Highbays mounted at 8 metres.

This pair of images show 121 Laubwerk 3D Sycamore Maple Trees (middle aged, summer), lit by a HDRi Skydome.

A night aerial view of the 125,883 individual street lanterns maintained by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works

covering an area of 93 miles (150km) x 93 miles (150km).

New ability tohandle massive scenes

With this next generation of high speed, cloud based lighting and

visualisation tools, the goalposts have now been radically moved in favour of

the lighting design community.

To see how you can access massive computing power to communicate lighting concepts and designs simply, accurately

and in real-time, please visit our website at

www.bloomunit.com or contact us at info@bloomunit.com

www.bloomunit.com