v-ray light meter - Lighting Design - Lighting calculations

[jamie_norrisgreen]

Hello v-ray masters!

I am a lighting designer, and I'm very impressed with v-ray/3ds max so far for lighting visualisation, especially liking light mix. Most of the models I work with can be linked in from Revit which works well.

What I would really like to do is streamline my workflow to do my lighting calculations in 3ds max with v-ray as well as the visualisation together.

It seems like its not far off being possible with the v-ray light meter.

What is holding me back are a few fairly basic limitations:

I need to make the light meter various shapes other than a rectangle. I need a few other metrics from the light meter; average light level and uniformity (minimum light level divided by average light level).

Is it in theory possible to convert a basic flat mesh/shape into a light meter perhaps with a well written script?
Is it fairly simple to get the light meter to provide average light level and uniformity (minimum light level divided by average light level).
I know this can be done after with the csv file but If I have lots of light meters that will slow things down considerably.

Thanks in advance for any input on this subject it would be very much appreciated.

J

[Vizioen]

Just my two cents as I have no experience with using V-Ray to make these kind of calculations, but I have a lot of experience using Grasshopper for Rhino3D and Honeybee and Ladybug (Ladybug Tools | Home Page). The possibilities there are endless as you create your own method of visualizing the data or just use the ones that are provided.

Here is one that I did recently where I created a custom visualization for the amount of lux, during office hours, from a weather file. I can just about define and change everything to my liking as you visually program this yourself. If you need to do a lot of these than it's really worth looking into.

[jamie_norrisgreen]

Vizioen Thats very interesting! Thanks. Grashopper is something I wish I knew how to use. What your doing is going way beyond what I need!

I really just need simple metrics from a custom shape light meter to satisfy demonstration of compliance with best practice guidance. lm sure someone smarter than me out there could script the custom light meter shape and make a basic plugin to output slightly more useful results.