The Quick Start Interior screen is designed to create your project using one screen. The model, the lighting, and the calculation grid can all be created using this screen. Lumen Designer will even determine the quantity of luminaires required to meet your design criteria and automatically create a layout.

For this project, we'll select a rectangular space with a sloped ceiling. Note: We've entered a negative slope so that the ceiling drops from 12' to 8'.

We're only interested in natural lighting. Thus, we'll select just Create Room.

After selecting Create Room, our room is created along with an associated calculation grid. You'll note the sloped ceiling.

Note: We can change grid elevation and point spacing easily if needed.

The next step is to add a clerestory window along the West wall. To do this, we'll need to be able to select the West wall (so that Designer knows where we want to add a window).

Often times it is easier to select objects in the Filled (Solid) View mode - rather than wireframe.

In the Filled view, we can easily select surfaces by clicking anywhere on them (rather than just boundary lines in the Wireframe view).

We're now ready to Add a Window.

First, we select the West wall...

Once selected, Designer automatically positions the construction plane (the gray snap grid) onto the wall.

Now, switching back to wireframe view, we simply draw our clerestory window along the top of wall.

Note: The window (or aperture) can be any shape.

Once we've completed drawing the window, a right-click tells Designer we're done.

Lumen Designer cuts an aperture in the wall (based on our shape) and replaces it with a single object placed on the Window layer.

The default material for the Window layer is Simple Glass. You can modify the transmittance and reflectance of the glass via the Material Manager.

We're now ready to define our daylighting settings. Access the Calculation Manager screen, we can click on the Daylight Settings button.

Here is where we turn ON the sun! We can specify our site location anywhere in the world. We can specify the time of day, date, and one of three sky conditions (based on the CIE).

A Site Rotation is provided to accurately orient the site with respect to North. By default, the Site is oriented so that +Y is North.

More detailed maps are available for major regions within the world.

We're ready to calculate!

For this example, the Standard Calculation template was selected and calculations were run. About 10-15 seconds later...we have our illuminance values and...

A rendering allows us to quickly visualize the daylit environment.

In this example, we're looking at 2 pm in Denver, on the summer solstice.

How does the space look at 4 pm?

Change the Daylight Settings and quickly find out.

In the above renderings, some artifacts from the Radiosity calculations are visible (the light / dark patches along the left side of the daylight patch).

We can use the Hybrid Rendering to smooth out these artifacts.

For some projects, you may need to determine if you can achieve LEED points for daylight harvesting.

A project can obtain one LEED point if more than 75% of the space has a daylight factor of 2% or greater. Lumen Designer helps you determine this based on your calculation points.

Sometimes you have enough daylight...