ABSTRACT
LightGuider is a novel guidance-based approach to interactive lighting design, which typically consists of interleaved 3D modeling operations and light transport simulations. Rather than having designers use a trial-and-error approach to match their illumination constraints and aesthetic goals, LightGuider supports the process by simulating potential next modeling steps that can deliver the most significant improvements. LightGuider takes predefined quality criteria and the current focus of the designer into account to visualize suggestions for lighting-design improvements via a specialized provenance tree. This provenance tree integrates snapshot visualizations of how well a design meets the given quality criteria weighted by the designer's preferences. This integration facilitates the analysis of quality improvements over the course of a modeling workflow as well as the comparison of alternative design solutions. We evaluate our approach with three lighting designers to illustrate its usefulness.
ABSTRACT
State-of-the-art lighting design is based on physically accurate lighting simulations of scenes such as offices. The simulation results support lighting designers in the creation of lighting configurations, which must meet contradicting customer objectives regarding quality and price while conforming to industry standards. However, current tools for lighting design impede rapid feedback cycles. On the one side, they decouple analysis and simulation specification. On the other side, they lack capabilities for a detailed comparison of multiple configurations. The primary contribution of this paper is a design study of LiteVis, a system for efficient decision support in lighting design. LiteVis tightly integrates global illumination-based lighting simulation, a spatial representation of the scene, and non-spatial visualizations of parameters and result indicators. This enables an efficient iterative cycle of simulation parametrization and analysis. Specifically, a novel visualization supports decision making by ranking simulated lighting configurations with regard to a weight-based prioritization of objectives that considers both spatial and non-spatial characteristics. In the spatial domain, novel concepts support a detailed comparison of illumination scenarios. We demonstrate LiteVis using a real-world use case and report qualitative feedback of lighting designers. This feedback indicates that LiteVis successfully supports lighting designers to achieve key tasks more efficiently and with greater certainty.
