interior lighting design tools

[mtawheed]

Hello everybody,

I am an electrical consultant engineer, i'd like to know what is the software used for interior lighting design and can make a good rendering as well, is it Autodesk VIZ or Lightscape , or what ?

 

thanks in advance

[dbarc]

As far as I know, out of the two you mention, only lightscape offers an accurate simulation of real world lighting (ie entering the real world candella and distribution characteristics of the light fitting). An interior design colleague mentioned another piece of software the other day which did this .. If I can remember what it was, I'll post it!

[Jaguar lover]

Viz/Max radiosity uses diffuse reflections only. (as Lightscape).

You might want to check out any Radiance based software then specular reflections is accounted for as well.

[jackb602]

The final release is not yet available, but Maxwell is the most accurate rendering engine to date. The downside is that the current beta release is very slow.

 

Jack

[AJLynn]

The other downside with Maxwell is that it's designed for photography style rendering, not analysis - but who knows what they'll put in the final version, word on the street is it's a major rewrite. I'm hoping for (and have requested a few times) orthographic cameras, clipping and pseudocolor to be included for things like plan and section views with illumination.

 

Don't engineering types like Radiance?

 

Lightscape and Viz/Max will do renders in pseudocolor where the coloring can be a rainbow or grayscale giving illumination values, and I'm not sure if Max/Viz do this but I remember in Lightscape being able to sample values off points on surfaces. But the radiosity engine being used there is not really accurate enough for precision work.