Architectural Lighting spoke with Tom Kaczkowski, HOK’s director of lighting design, on the latest visualization technologies in architectural lighting design.
Excerpted from Architectural Lighting:
The ability to see realistic renderings and do virtual reality (VR) walk-throughs enables us to make design decisions much earlier in the process. An owner can react to a light fixture during design instead of after installation.
The ability to create avatar lights is another opportunity. Lighting systems previously depicted as 2D dots, dashes, circles, and rectangles have been replaced by 3D avatars of actual lighting fixtures. However, designers must verify that the lighting vendors’ Revit files are accurate. From a process or fee standpoint, building a lighting Revit family or file from scratch is not desirable. If reliable Revit files are not available, designers may move on to the next lighting vendor.
Additionally, because so much content lives in these models (“It’s in the Revit model” is an unhelpful response among design team members), to ensure effective coordination a verbal or graphic breadcrumb trail is always desirable—and well before the model is created.