Footcandle conversion for lighting calculations

[andrew_butler]

I've been using V-Ray with 3dsMax to do my lighting calculations for the last few months and have really impressed all of the electrical engineers in my firm with it. Although they are very impressed with my work and want to learn it and standardize it in our office, a big hold-up for them is that I was never able to find a way to use footcandles instead of lux for the lighting calculations. I feel like it would be quite a simple feature to include, so I was surprised I couldn't find it easily. The conversion is easy to do in one's head, but it is important for us to give our clients and architects the lighting calculation renders in footcandles as most legal standards are set in footcandles in our area. Have I missed something, or is this not a feature with V-Ray yet?

[matanov]

Different areas - different standards

Are you referring to the Lighting Analysis RE?

[Vizioen]

My two cents, I wouldn't really use V-Ray for that type of thing. Rather Rhino + Grasshopper + Honeybee/Ladybug. You can make any type of calculation you want with it and you can visualize it how you want. The only limit would be your imagination.

[andrew_butler]

My two cents, I wouldn't really use V-Ray for that type of thing. Rather Rhino + Grasshopper + Honeybee/Ladybug. You can make any type of calculation you want with it and you can visualize it how you want. The only limit would be your imagination.

That does look interesting, thanks! It seems that management wants to stick to the Autodesk suite, but perhaps that is still worth looking into. Would you know how much all of that would cost to use?

[andrew_butler]

Different areas - different standards

Are you referring to the Lighting Analysis RE?

Yeah, it seems footcandles aren't the most popular unit to use, haha, but it's what they want :s

I'm using the render element "VRayLightingAnalysis" to get a point grid showing lux. I can change to candelas or illuminance, but I can't change the units within those two options.


This is what I'm going for, but would like to display the numbers in footcandles.

[Vizioen]

That does look interesting, thanks! It seems that management wants to stick to the Autodesk suite, but perhaps that is still worth looking into. Would you know how much all of that would cost to use?

Only 1 Rhino license (995 euro in my country). Grasshopper is part of Rhino and Honeybee and Ladybug are also free. The cool part about Rhino is that it's a perpetual license. So no subscription. AND you can try it out for 90 days, full version.

[matanov]

Logged as VMAX-14039.