Using a Render to Evaluate Aircraft Interior Lighting

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

I may be way off in thinking this is feasible, but here’s what I’d like to accomplish. I’ve been asked to look at options for lights in the cabin of a business jet that we’re currently using to test various equipment. I think it would be cool to be able to mock these up with some nice, rendered images, but I don’t know that I’ve got enough data to do this without making too many assumptions to provide a good approximation of reality.

Here’s what I’ve got to work with:
-The plane is modeled in NX, so I’ve exported it as an .stl and imported this into Blender. If anyone has any suggestions for a better alternative to .stl, I’m open to them. NX can make some decent renders, but they take a really, really long time, and there’s much less flexibility in lighting and such. I’ve added an array of spotlights in the cabin.
-For one model of cabin light, the vendor has provided some information concerning the cone of light produced. I know what the brightness is at a distance of 28" along the centerline, as well as at various radii, in foot-candles.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]445610[/ATTACH]

One idea I had was to use this table to mock something up with a single spotlight on a disc. I could dial in the angle of the cone by measuring the light at some points compared to the center until I ended up with ratios like the table provides, but I don’t know what values for falloff, blending, etc. would be reasonable for something like this. I’m not even sure if there’s a way to analyze images like that.

If anyone has any advice for a simple engineer, it would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hi Billpo,

Your attachment is not found.

Blender is not intended for things like evaluating lighting. There are another optical software for tasks like that. Also there might be some plug-ins for NX (at least, there is one for SolidWorks).

I think that the model is imported as hi-poly. So, after importing your model into Blender, try to do this steps:

  • Go to Edit mode and convert triangles to quads (Alt+J);
  • Go back to Object mode, add Decimate modifier, and play with Ratio value.
3

Oh, it definitely comes in with a high poly count. It was originally about 25 million, and was almost impossible to work with. It seemed faster to just export it with a lower poly count because of the amount of time it took to decimate in Blender.

As far as the attachment goes, I’ve tried again, but there may be a problem with our corporate firewall or something.

Capture.PNG1333×611 142 KB

I knew it was a long shot to get this idea to work, but I appreciate the input.