Dr Ryan Southall from the School of Architecture and Design has recently been awarded a £6000 grant from the Centre for Education in the Built Environment (CEBE). The LightLab project will works towards a customised workflow for the integration of High Dynamic Range images (HDRi) into architectural education. HDRi involves taking a number of conventional digital photographs of the same scene at different exposure levels, building up a data set of accurate brightness that can be composited into one HDR image. This HDR image can then be ‘wrapped’ around digital 3D models to illuminate them as if they were located where the images were taken. This approach allows architecture students to form a stronger relationship with a site, and enables them to see the implication of their designs on visual and numerical lighting levels.
