New scenarios for lighting design tools

The lighting project comprises several steps, each of which involves using tools (and skills) that can vary in the process phases. A designer should know the fundamentals of lighting to design in full awareness, but numerous software tools can provide valuable help beyond this. The negative aspect of this variety is that heterogeneous outputs can be obtained due to individual designers’ skills and preferences. Although diversity is a value to be achieved, it is also true that the results must still be correct. For example, the most common three-dimensional modelling software is not explicitly designed to take care of the lighting project. By contrast, software specializing in lighting design often provides results that, although correct from the point of view of the calculations, are inadequate in reproducing reality. An alternative is to adopt a Building Information Modeling (BIM) type of software, manage complexity, and integrate them with other programs that can somehow interface. This solution allows managing the project to comply adequately with the directives that promote BIM as a mandatory methodology for future projects. This hybrid approach, albeit imperfect, is functional, hoping that specialist software developers and product companies (for their catalogues) will quickly adapt to the BIM system. While waiting for a perfectly integrated methodology, some fundamental problems for lighting design must be addressed. The reproduction of the products and their associated characteristics (outside the context of specialized software) is not easy to achieve. The correct simulation of the finishes, which involves implementing standard procedures to acquire the project’s colors digitally, is another topic that needs further discussion. This chapter describes original solutions at the Light Lab of Politecnico di Milano to search for the best method to achieve photorealistic and photometrically correct results.