[Jan Gouiedo]

Hi, working as a lighting and spotlight designer and using Maxwell for visualize my consepts for customers I have since R1 badly needed a pseudorendring output for estimating LUX values. This can´t be THAT complicated can it? Al it takes is a new material for what I can see.
Everything else is in place and is calculated. The great thing with doing it via a material is that you can use it in a normal rendering and not alinating your customer (showing a Dialux output is sometimes NOT the right thing to do
Please......

[ejc]

Hi Jan,

I saw this post & thought I'd just echo your request and a little more. I'm a architectural lighting designer. I've made this request in the distant past. Because I have to deal with "real world" specifiable lighting, photometric files (ies lights) is 95% of what I have to use in Maxwell. Photometric files represent the only way to accurately predict artificial lighting in a rendering that can actually be duplicated & purchased in the real world. This has really become a low priority in the plug-in . I guess most use Maxwell for the tremendous creative processes it offers. But for us in the business of designing lighting for buildings that actually get built, why not bring on a few capabilities that have been around for decades and would round out what a real "Lighting Simulator" should offer. Here's my minimal wish list for reasonable photometric lighting features. Not trying to get full blown lighting analysis out of Maxwell, just some basics.

Simple predictable handling & use of photometric files within the Rhino plug-in. I suspect (and think I remember) that in the stand-alone version this process worked reasonably. I find the current way of working with photometric files totally unacceptable for such a capable software as Maxwell, including the undocumented need for creating special blocks and precisely rescaling objects. The distribution lobes need to be shown in the interface.

A basic lighting analysis capability like false (pseudo) color keyed to a foot candle/lux chart would really help for those of us who need to verify real world light levels. Camera settings should not affect/influence the calc results in any way. And this needs to be implemented with precision based on industry verification and validation. I know the industry has been lagging on this some time but there are standards to follow like what AGI32 or Dialux would use.

Would love to hear more comments on this subject.

Regards,

Ed

[Jan Gouiedo]

hear! hear!

By implementing it via a pseudocolor material you can "add" it without disturbing / changing the UX for all the other users.
In the best of worlds having a toggble layer with luxlevels in a text matrix would of course be a nice pro feature
If you combine that feature with a transperence parameter for the psedocolor you can easely do a isoline diagram for any hight / position in the room. A toggble color / luxlevel index is a must.
/JG