Designing for building illumination
The illumination design of a building is a multi-faceted activity that takes into consideration not only building elements and ergonomics, but also user preferences and best practice. The opinions of architects, engineers, clients may vary a lot, as everyone is looking at illumination aspects from a different perspective. Apart from intensive interaction between all building-process participants, visualisation of various options is an additional requirement for high quality illumination design. Addressing these issues, the "Lighting Simulation" tool provides static views of the lightning configuration along with possibilities for interactive changes. The tool has been developed within the context of the DIVERCITY project concerning a distributed virtual workspace for enhancing communication within the construction industry. The project work covered all key building construction phases, namely the client briefing, the design review and the construction. The "Lighting Simulation" constitutes a major component of the design review. The tool enables decision-making by allowing optimisation of lighting solutions for a building through analysis of different lighting possibilities. With the aid of an interactive interface users are able to modify both light fittings and furniture in the rooms. While these changes are gradually realised, users can pass through the building and view them. From light modification to an object movement, all changes cause lighting updates, effected in a very short period of time that normally takes less than 5-10 seconds. The fast updates of lighting solutions are due to the rapid computation of complex surface shapes in applications that involve models using specialised data usually derived from 3D-CAD. This enhancement of the simulator is aided by integration of another project module, namely the Geometry Multi-resolution Module (GMM). Additionally, the tool features a full collaborative working environment where all participants are able to use the same model, at the same time, but at distant sites. Simultaneously, any model update can be viewed by other participants almost in real-time. Currently the simulator is limited to work with simple scenes. However, it is expected that in the near future the tool will be further optimised to involve complex geometries, such as curved walls, as well as textured scenes.
