Visualizing Lighting for Cultural Arts and Heritage Projects—Our Experience

Lighting design has always been a difficult discipline to communicate; it’s a challenge for clients and project teams to produce the lighting design in their mind’s eye. This is especially applicable with refurbishment of cultural arts and heritage projects, where the complexity and intricacy of such internal spaces makes the way in which light interacts with surfaces and finishes particularly difficult to convey. From the outset, we've been keen advocates of using visualization tools, such as 3ds Max software, to demonstrate the lighting approach with clarity and photometric accuracy, using a range of 3D mediums—from traditional “static” images to in-house developed interactive tools and experimentation in virtual reality (VR) to “show and tell.” In this session, we’ll provide an overview of these visualization processes through selected case studies of our heritage projects for the likes of Historic Royal Palaces UK, as well as University of Cambridge and University of Oxford.