3D Light Design Rendering Using Sketchup & Kerkythea

As promised, I am posting a rendering (using the Metropolis Light Transport rendering method) showing what the great combination of Sketchup Pro and Kerkythea is capable of. The picture is of a simple, small commercial staircase with metal and frosted glass railing (modeled in seconds in Sketchup using a stairway ruby script) and a recessed, vertical surface-mounted, cool-white LED accent fixture I modeled in Sketchup, which are the only lights in the scene. This is just a sample and architectural lighting designers can take the combination to new heights but combine these programs and the DIALux program mentioned below and your well equipped as a lighting designer without spending tons of cash.

PS. Let me know what you think of the image by posting a comment please

Click to view the full sized SU & KT Rendered Image

Click to view the same scene rendered in Sketchup only
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Awesome FREE Lighting Analysis Software!

Recently, I stumbled across DIALux which is an advanced, yet easy to use lighting analysis package. I was totally amazed to find that such a well-polished program would be distribued totally free! The program is for anyone who is responsible for lighting design planning and implementation including lighting designers, architects, engineers, electricians, contractors, bloggers, smurfs, whoever! This program is just cool and fun to play with!

Don’t get me wrong, there is wayyyy more under the hood here than I touched on in my tinkering: there’s all sorts of acronym type things that only someone working in the biz would know or would be inclined to find out what they mean such as EN 1838, DIN, UTE, UGR, etc… but almost anyone can produce accurate and understandable lighting analysis reports.

One of the major features is the independence of DIALux from luminaire manufacturers. In fact, DIALux does not come with any installed luminaire fixtures, instead you go online and pick and chose from dozens of major commercial, industrial, and residential lighting manufacturers DIALux plugins that are essentially online catalogs of their luminaires that can be easily clicked on to import them into a lighting design. Many of these plugins can be accessed right in DIALux if you have an active internet connection, and once installed, are ready to go. It’s very easy.This gives you a choice of thousands of luminaires, lamps, leds, power supplies, etc.. to choose from. After about an hour of playing, I had installed plugins from Sylvania, Osram, and more. If a particular manufacturer you like doesn’t have a plugin, see if they have published IES files for their fixtures since DIALux can import these files to create new, accurate luminaires. You can also create your own from scratch if you need to. Powerful stuff!

Almost everything is taken into account in an analysis including the room size, materials on the floors, walls ,ceiling, if there are windows, what type of glass they have, what is the outside light properties, where the luminaires are placed, how many there are, and how often the room is used and cleaned. I’m not kidding on that last one, it gets that deep but it never seems overly complicated or hard to use.

You can pick your luminaires that you want to use and in some cases, even the lamps inside the luminaires and then tell DIALux how much light you want total and it can plugin the correct number of luminaires at the right spacing for the shape and size of the room. Everything is done through a cool 3D CAD window which shows the scene your working on in solid-modeled 3D goodness. You can add windows, doors, columns, sky lights, luminaires, furniture, etc.. here (this is major fun here!) and then calculate the lighting distribution and see in textured, smoothed 3D exactly how the light is distributed throughout the room. The reports break all of this down to exactly how much light is hitting areas on the floor, the walls, the work surfaces, etc.. and shows all of this in cool line drawing charts and graphs.

DIALux is not limited to indoor scenes, you can work with your buildings facade, render general outdoor scenes, plan out road lighting schemes, setup road lamp maintenance plans, and more. This program even integrates POV-Ray high quality, radiosity rendering. This is just too cool!

If your at all involved in architectural lighting or any kind of lighting design application, then you need to have this program in your arsenal. A program of this caliber, for an industry this niche, could easily cost $1000’s but again I say, it’s FREE and so are all of the luminaire plugins!

Heres a cut & paste from their features page:

What is special about DIALux?

• Daylight: Perfect calculation and visualization.
• Lighting scenes: Realistic planning and documentation.
• Up-to-date: Easy compliance with national and international standards.
• Emergency lighting: in accordance with EN 1838, simple positioning of exactly the right number of luminaires along escape routes and in anti-panic zones.
• Calculation: latest radiosity procedures, fast and always correct.
• Colour: Lighting design with colour filter coloures lightsources and materials.
• Interactive 3-D visualization: Simply move around the room.
• Movies: Walk through the photo realistic visualization of your light planning and send the film to your customer via email.
• Visualization: Use of textures and furniture for realistic rendering.
• Photo realism: with integrated raytracing module.
• False colours: False colours provide quantitative analysis of complex geometries at a glance.
• Results: Results can be printed out or transmitted as a pdf file. Each view and each rendering can be saved as a .jpg file.
• Interaction: Import and export: .dwg and .dxf files can be imported and exported with results after completion of the planning process.
• 3-D Import: Integration of complete buildings as 3-D objects.
• DIALux Light: Easy to use, step-by-step lighting design.
• Assistants: On request they help in the planning of indoor and street lighting.
• Drag and drop: It is so simple to place furniture, surfaces (textures) and luminaires in the room.
• Intelligent elements: Wall lights are always positioned correctly on the wall and the computer is always on the table.
• Alignment of luminaires: One click on the light aiming point is enough.
• Guides: These lead you step by step through special questions related to lighting design.

What light fixture data does DIALux use?
DIALux works with the international data formats of all manufacturers. The DIALux partners offer an electronic catalogue (DIALux PlugIn). Here you will find all the product information needed to select the optimal light fixtures for your project.

How do I obtain light fixture data?
On CD directly from the manufacturers, via download from the manufacturers’ websites or as an online plug-in directly from within DIALux.

Does DIALux also speak my language?
DIALux is active globally and currently speaks 26 languages.

Do I need long to become acquainted with DIALux?
DIALux is modelled on common standard programs (Windows XP) and is thus simple and intuitive to use.

What features will DIALux have in the future?
The market will determine that! DIALux is undergoing continuous refinement. Information on current versions and patches is available

Internationally known lighting fixture manufacturers are partners of DIALux and this group is growing continually.
Current data from our partners can be obtained via the individual online plug-Ins (directly from within DIALux) or at www.dialux.com.

You can download DIALux here

Click here for a partial list of luminaire/lamp manufacturers with plugins (you can also download plugins here)

Click here to checkout a sample report I created in the short time I’ve been playing around along with a screenshot (PDF). Here’s a POV_Ray rendering I did of the room in the report (DIALux can render quite nicely itself but can also automatically send out the 3D scene to POV-ray for better rendering including radiosity lighting calculations:

Click thumbnail for full size image
Go get this program now! It’s cool

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Inexpensive Tools for Architectural Lighting Analysis

For any lighting designers or architects that have to work with lighting design and want to do some visualization for your clients might I suggest the powerful yet low cost combination of Google Sketchup Pro and Kerkythea Rendering System. Google Sketchup is a terrific program (I use it extensively myself both professionally and outside my company and I spec’d it FOR my company) to rapidly and quite intuitively make 3D models of almost anything and is particularly well suited for architecture. It’s own rendering capabilities lean towards the “hand-drawn sketch” look hence the name but when you combine it with Kerkythea which is a fabulous and quite powerful rendering system, the results can be truly amazing. Better yet, to anyone interested, this combination of software is highly functional, easy to use, and quite a bit cheaper than the bigger name packages out there since Sketchup is only $495.00 (single license) and Kerkythea is totally free! There is a free version of Sketchup for those who want to try it out first.

If your interested, check out this thread about using Sketchup and Kerkythea for Architectural Lighting Analysis from the Kerkythea forum.

Here is a sample image from the above mentioned thread that shows what Sketchup and kerkythea can do and quickly too!

Fly over to my LED Development Blog to checkout a couple of non-architectural lighting related Sketchup and Kerkythea renderings I did.

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Yeah, it figures…only the VIP’s get the LEDs

LEDs create magical walk for VIP Entrance at O2
Really, this article demonstrates a fine example of solid-state architectural lighting but come one….just for the VIP’s? What do the rest of us get? Flickering old T8 fixtures?!?! Just kidding.

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Solid-State Lighting Trashes Fluorescent Tubes

Well, at least in one way the just dawned on me that may not be evident to everyone and I am sure is overlooked when discussing the cost savings of switching from T-x based fluorescent lighting (you know, the tubes that hang in most offices) to LED based bi-pin fixtures such as those from EVERLED . By now your probably wondering WHAT I am talking about. I’ll get to it in a second. Fluorescent lighting still remains more efficient and cost-effective than LEDs but with technology rapidly catching up (check out my LED Development Blog for the latest news on that front. ) LEDs are proving they can compete, certainly it looks good for LEDs to take a major chunk out of the compact fluorescent market anyway but while efficacy of LEDs remains below that of fluorescents and energy savings a toss-up depending on vampire power consumption of LED controllers and manufacturers that misstate their LED specifications, one thing remains clear to me: you can throw LEDs in the trash. Try that with your fluorescent tubes with their Mercury. Hah! So while things like efficacy and the “real” energy savings are still going around and around, LEDs have two things working in their favor, cost-savings on maintenance due to their generally much longer lifespan and also cost-savings on disposal since you can just toss LED based fixtures into the trash while fluorescent tubes must be handled carefully and are considered toxic waste.

Working in the LED industry as I do, I’m not sure why this never occured to me before or, since I started this blog, why I haven’t run across someone else stating what would appear to be the obvious but I didn’t and so there it is.

Let the comments roll!

Lighting Form, Fit, and Function Combine With Architecture with Stunning Results

Fluid, flowing architecture demands lighting equally flowing and dramatic. Lighting designers are forces to work hand-in-hand with artists and architects to fully realize a clients visions while still remaining fully grounded in practicality. It is often a touch-and-go two-step dance when engineers, artists, and designers are often pulling at opposite ends and have to compromise. These types of lighting projects can become cluttered and needlessly complicated quickly if the designers don’t have a good understanding of the physical and artistic properties of the building itself and how artificial and natural lighting will interact to best fit the design requirements.The Agbar Tower Auditorium, Barcelona (click to read about the project)
project is a good example of a lighting design that has practical roles to fill yet remains faithful to the architecture it is contained in and even enhances it.

Kudos to ECLER!

Technorati Tags: architectural lighting, architectural lighting design, solid-state architectural lighting, led architectural lighting, architectural led lighting, lighting design, solid-state lighting design, lighting designers, lighting artist, artistic lighting, lighting engineering, architectural lighting industry, designing with light, architectural design, office lighting, solid-state office lighting, office lighting design

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Architectural Designers Require New Approach From LED Distributors

Distributors see LED lighting opportunity
Sometimes the architectural designers tries to go outside the specs in the pursuit of the aesthetic and the distributor, if properly positioned with knowledgeable applications engineers, has to set them back on the straight and narrow. My company, both as a distributor and a manufacturer of LED-based lighting products that are particularly suited to architectural use, is seeing both sides of coin as explained in the article. There is a lot that the distributor needs to convey to the designer, these are not just simply plug-and-play replacements for traditional light fixtures. The are sophisticated devices capable of so much more than traditional lights can do. Not only do distributors need to make designers aware of the constraints of using solid-state lighting but must also make sure their aware of all the features and benefits too. Anyway, check out the whole article, it’s worth a look.

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LA Plaza used LEDs for decorative architectural display

Using an LED module from Act One, the Ernst & Young Plaza recreated their ornamental courtyard star display to be much more efficient while keeping all the effect of incandescent bulbs. Each of the several thousand modules uses 6 LEDs to create a star shape to give shoppers the illusion of a bright night sky. With a lifetime of 13 years for each module and a reduced power bill, the owners of the plaza made the right decisions switching over to these LEDs. Here’s the original article at LEDs Magazine.