A Comparative Analysis Of Lighting Design Software Commonly Used In Our Country

Because of the standardization of the lighting design industry, the quantitatively description of design results is being attached more and more importance in the lighting design process. Obviously, the available design method can not meet the need, so a lot of software about lighting design are popularized very fast in the lighting design industry. But so far there is not single software that can monopolize this field. These software are either complex or simple and have their own advantages. For the convenience and reference of the users, here are listed several familiar software DIALux, Ecotect, AGI32, Lightscape and make a comparative analysis.The comparison is made item by item, and it follows the procedure of lighting design and computing. The comparison items are as follows: importing model files, texture setting , input of photometric data, organization of lamps and lanterns, artificial lighting computing, and natural lighting computing. In each item, there is a brief introduction to the software respectively and then a comparative conclusion will be made.In the latter part of the paper, there are the comparisons of results of manual computing and software computing of illuminance in suppositional scenes, and of the measurement of illumiance in actual scenes and the result of software computing. In this procedure attention is paid to the influence of different computing parameter setting to the final results, in order to make a evaluation of the precision and speed of the software respectively.After the comparison, final conclusions are made as follows:①in the field of suppositional solar analysis, Ecotect has powerful function, but illuminance computing is its disadvantage.②DIALux is more convenient and swifter in computing in small scale scenes than AGI32, and has very little difference with AGI32 in computing precision and speed.③In large scale scenes computing, AGI32 show its sharp advantages in organization of lamps and lanterns, batch processing computing and other aspects, and the advantage in results and speed is great compared with DIALux.④Lightscape has little advantage in computing precision and speed, while its forte is that the abundant texture information is contributive to improve the quality of rendering result.