Lumen Designer - Parking Lot Lighting Example

Lumen Designer : Parking Lot Lighting

Exterior Area Lighting Online Tutorial

This example provides a how-to for designing an area lighting project - in this case, a parking lot design. This highlights some of Designer's area lighting features such as irregular grid creation, pole definition, pole placement, and auto recalc - Lumen Designer's ability to update calculations in real-time as changes are made.

Follow along, as we guide you through this project:

Start Menu	After Lumen Designer starts, the user is presented with the Start Menu screen. This is helpful to start new projects and open recent projects. For this project, we'll select the Start New Project button.
Import DWG	Next, we'll use Designer's Import capabilities to bring in a 2D AutoCAD drawing of our parking lot site. Lumen Designer can import AutoCAD DWG files, DXF files, STL files, and files from Bentley's latest electrical engineering software.
CAD Drawing	During the import process, you can scale the drawing, crop the drawing, and select a new origin if necessary. We now have an excellent starting point for our Parking Lot design.
Add Grids	Once we've imported our CAD drawing, we're ready to define the calculation grids for the site. In addition to simple rectangular grids, you can also add irregular (polygonal) grids, line grids, surface grids, and other specialty grids. For this example, a polygonal grid allows us to click off a irregular-shaped boundary for a new grid.
Polygonal Grid	A grid is added to the "South Lot" simply by drawing a line around the site. Grid points are automatically filled in to cover the irregular shape. You can control grid point spacing and point elevations. Note: You can also vary illuminance meter orientation and calculate vertical illuminance values - helpful for light trespass regulations.
Polygonal Grid	We can repeat the same process defined above to create the irregular grid for the "Main Site". Note: If the DXF/DWG file contains a boundary line you can select it to define the grid.
Masking Points	So, what about all those calculation points in the middle of our building? We don't want those points factoring into our grid averages and uniformaties. Thus, we need to remove them from the grid. Designer does this by 'masking' those points. Masking allows us to 'unmask' if we want to use the points later.
Masking	Just like adding an irregular grid, masking is as simple as drawing a line around the area of points to mask. You can repeat this process until all the necessary points are masked. Masked points do not attribute to any grid statistics (average, max/min, etc) and do not show up in any output.
New Pole Type	We're now ready to define some lighting. We'll begin by accessing the Outdoor Designer panel. The Outdoor Designer panel contains several exterior-related features for area lighting, flood lighting, and sports lighting applications. The first step is to define a new Pole Type.
Pole Type	On the Pole Type screen, we begin by defining the lighting arrangement at the top of the pole.
Luminaire Selection	Once the arrangement is selected, you need to tell Designer what luminaire type (the light fixture) you want to use. Lumen Designer can import all the major photometric file formats (including IES, EULUMDAT, CIE, TM14, etc). You can also access the included product libraries from participating manufacturers. Designer's product libraries will soon include more than 100,000 lighting products.
Pole Type	Designer's Pole Type screen allows you to define any pole-based lighting combination. This includes multiple head configurations at multiple levels. You can also change the rotation of the heads to define more complex aiming orientations and tilts.
Adding Poles	The next step is to begin dropping poles on our site. Two methods are provided: a simple drag and drop, or the ability to drop the pole and define its orientation - using two mouse clicks.
Pole Placement	This view shows a pole that was dropped (first click) and the cursor moving to define the orientation of the pole (second click). In this example, using a single fixture on the pole, we're defining the direction we want the light to face.
Auto ReCalc	We'll now turn on Designer's Auto Recalc feature. In this mode, as we add lighting, move any lighting, or remove lighting, the calculations will update instantly.
Auto ReCalc	This view shows how the grid values are updated as new poles are added using the Auto ReCalc. No need to click calculate, grid values are updated automatically.
Auto ReCalc	As poles are added, the values are updated. You can quickly see where you need to add lighting - values are color coded based on your design criteria. In this case, the red values define areas that need more light.
Arrays	Here we've added the lighting for the "South Lot". We defined a second pole type, P2, that has two light fixtures per pole. We used the Array command to quick array them across the lot. You can edit array quantities and spacing as needed.
Grid Summary	A grid summary for all your grids is displayed and updated automatically beneath the CAD view - so you know how you're doing instantly!
Parking Lot Lighting Design	Continuing the process above until our design criteria is met - and we're done.
Output	Designer's extensive Output Manager provides several pre-formatted output pages that can be customized to include your company's logo, name, etc. Creating a detailed, professional report for your client is only a few clicks away.

Summary

This detailed example shows how a moderately complex parking lot design can be accomplished quickly using Lumen Designer's features developed specifically for exterior lighting projects.