Lighting and BIM

The use of BIM (Building Information Modeling) software is growing, and in some design firms it is starting to replace CAD software for the purposes of architectural and building system design.  We have been trialing the Elum Tools plug-in for Revit.  Elum Tools is the lighting calculation and modeling tool that works within Revit, the 3D building documentation program from Autodesk.

Revit seems to be gaining some considerable traction in our industry with more and more projects being documented in this program. We have done a few projects now in Revit and while there is a bit of a steep learning curve initially, there are some good benefits. For example, coordination between services is much better – the clashes between services (the ductwork clashing with the depth of a light fixture, for example) happen in the screen not on the site. And the new Elum Tools plug-in allows us to calculate the lighting levels within the Revit program, rather than having to export from CAD to a 3rd party calculation program (we use AGI 32), analyse, tweak and then re-draw in CAD to document. Now we are able to draw, calculate, tweak, recalculate and when we’re happy with it the documentation is already there because we did it all in Revit. Not only that, we can automatically see W/m2, schedule of luminaire totals and even a cost summary for the scheme.

One challenge that lies ahead is that most manufacturers do not produce ‘blocks’ to represent their fixtures yet. The block would comprise a 3D CAD drawing of the fixture as well as photometric information. Well done to Concord Sylvania and Eagle Lighting for giving us disks with this info. We’d be interested to hear from others who have this information or at least an update on when/if we can expect it.

Our CAD guru Tomas gave us a demonstration of the program’s capability at our weekly meeting and we felt that we’d just seen a glimpse of the future.  And it was exciting.