See your lighting before it's installed
Lighting Planning
Lighting planning closes the gap between what a designer sees in their head and what the client signs off in the meeting. A photometric heat-map is correct but unreadable to most stakeholders; a render generated from the same photometric model is correct, photoreal, and immediately legible. Our lighting-planning practice produces night-time renders, day-to-night transitions, and scene mock-ups that let clients experience and approve the lighting before any fixture is procured — so the room everyone sees on installation night is the room everyone agreed to in the review.
How we work.
Photometric base
Lighting plans start from the same DIALux / Relux / AGi32 model that the simulation deliverable is built on — the lighting in the render matches the lighting in the calculation.
Geometry & materials upgrade
Architectural geometry refined for visual fidelity, materials authored from real-world references — concrete, stone, timber, fabric — instead of photometric placeholders.
Scene composition
Camera angles, time-of-day, and reference points chosen with the client — the views that decisions are actually made from, not the most flattering generic shot.
Render & post
Photoreal night-time renders, day-to-night transitions, and scene comparisons rendered out and colour-graded for the final review package.
What this service covers.
Why lighting planning matters
Most lighting decisions are taken by people who do not read photometric reports. A heat-map proves a scheme is compliant; a render proves it is the scheme the client wants. The two outputs are complementary, not interchangeable, and a project that ships only one of them is leaving half its review value on the table.
The other case for lighting planning is risk reduction on schemes where the lighting is the architectural moment — a hotel lobby, a façade up-light, a hospitality terrace, a retail flagship. Those are the projects where being wrong on installation night is most expensive, and where a pre-build render is the cheapest possible insurance against a re-aim or a full reinstallation.
Photometric truth, photoreal output
Our renders are not stylised. They are generated from the same photometric model as the simulation deliverable, with manufacturer IES / LDT files driving the lighting and architect's material specifications driving the surfaces. The lighting in the image is the lighting that will install — the same colour temperature, the same beam distribution, the same dimming level.
The trade-off renders make against pure photometric calculation is geometry detail and material fidelity: the architectural model is refined for visual quality, surfaces are authored from real-world references, and post-production handles the narrow gap between physical accuracy and how a real camera would record the scene. The lighting itself remains a one-to-one match with the calculation.
Where it fits in the workflow
On hospitality and retail projects, lighting planning usually lands at concept-design stage and again at value-engineering — the two moments where a client is being asked to commit to a scheme they cannot otherwise picture. On façades and public-realm projects, it lands at planning submission, where a night-time render is often a regulatory requirement.
Day-to-night transition videos are the highest-value format for projects where the architecture works hard at both daylight and night. A still render shows one moment; a transition shows the design surviving sundown, the moment when the lighting actually starts doing its job.
What you get.
- Photoreal still renders at presentation resolution (4K+ on request)
- Day-to-night transition videos for façade, plaza, and hospitality projects
- Scene comparisons — same camera, different lighting scenes — for in-meeting review
- Pre-build previews for hospitality, retail, and façade approval workflows
- Walk-through animations for larger sites where stills cannot tell the spatial story
