Industry News

Lighting Analysts, Inc., a global leader in lighting design software, is pleased to announce several game-changing enhancements to our ElumTools lighting calculation add-in for Autodesk® Revit®. These changes have been released in ElumTools 2017 as well as backwardly integrated into new releases of ElumTools 2016 and 2015 (for Revit® 2017, 2016 and 2015, respectively).

The latest release of ElumTools expands its calculation capability beyond interior-centric Rooms and Spaces by allowing Revit Regions and Areas to be used to assign calculation points, and as calculation volumes encompassing geometry, luminaires and multiple calculation point grids. This expands ElumTools for use as a practical exterior lighting analysis tool. “It’s very easy to use multiple Regions to specify the various odd-shaped areas to be computed in an exterior environment,” says Dave Speer, Director of Marketing for Lighting Analysts.

ElumTools 2017 is also now capable of calculating more than just illuminance. Users can now compute Luminance (diffuse), Luminous Exitance, Unified Glare Rating (UGR), and Daylight Factors. Different calculation types and different modes (General, Emergency, Daylight) can now exist in separate views and be scheduled separately. ElumTools also has a new automated Schedule-building tool to simplify the process of summarizing lighting results.

ElumTools 2017 has changed to all family-based calculation points. This opens the possibility that users can assign calculation points to multiple volumes (Rooms, Spaces, Regions, etc.) in one command, or edit multiple instances at one time. Calculation points can be assigned to Revit lines as well, opening even more options for the computation of lighting results. “Users can compute multiple lines of points offset from an exterior property line, which is extremely valuable for light trespass calculations,” said Speer. Users also now have the ability to select items in Revit followed by the appropriate ElumTools command, lending speed and flexibility to the program workflow.

ElumTools 2017 is also capable of Climate-Based Annual Daylight Simulations when used in concert with a separate new Lighting Analysts software application. All daylight parameters are set in ElumTools for the Revit model. Additional views are created in Revit to segregate exterior and interior surfaces, and extraneous geometry can be hidden. When these steps are complete, the simulation is passed off to an external application to be executed. Processing speed is extremely fast, with most simulations running in a matter of minutes, as compared to hours or days for the only competitive solution.

ElumTools annual simulations are based on patented and patent-pending algorithms, and can be performed on real building geometry with thousands of windows, skylights or openings. The process utilizes site-specific TMY3 weather data with 4,380 hourly solutions to compute illuminance on as many target grids and grid points as required. The result is accurate daylight illuminance for every daylight hour of every day, for an entire year. From this information, a variety of daylight metrics such as Daylight Autonomy (several flavors), Annual Sunlight Exposure and Useful Daylight Illuminance can be produced. Rendered images, animations and complete graphical and textual reporting are provided. Please see our separate press release describing Climate-Based Daylight Modeling.

Download a free 30-day Trial and explore the latest ElumTools software at www.elumtools.com