LiVi has now been incorporated into the VI-Suite. The VI-Suite is set of Environmental Analysis tools written using the new scriptable nodes feature of Blender. The VI-Suite can be downloaded from the VI-Suite site at http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/vi-suite/.
We do not envisage any further development of LiVi as a standalone addon.
The Lighting Visualiser (LiVi) is a set of Python scripts, authored by Dr Ryan Southall of the School of Art, Design & Media that function as an add-on to the 3D content creation suite Blender (www.blender.org).
LiVi enables Blender to act as a pre/post-processor for the Radiance lighting simulation suite (http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/). LiVi allows geometry and materiality imported or specified by Blender to be exported to Radiance format, controls the Radiance simulation, and finally visualises the resulting data in Blender. As such it provides a unique workflow that embeds technical performance data within a digital design environment, allowing flythroughs, animations and accurate rendering of the Radiance results.
LiVi can simulate static lighting/radiation metrics such as illuminance, irradiance and daylight factor. LiVi can also simulate Dynamic Daylight Simulation metrics such as cumulative light exposure, cumulative radiation exposure and daylight availability. In addition LiVi can evaluate glare via the evalglare programme. Animated analysis can also be achieved with the comprehensive animation capabilities of Blender.
Version 0.3 of LiVi is now available. Important changes in version 0.3 include:
LiVi v 0.3 can be downloaded from the downloads page and a simple user manual and tutorial videos can be found on the documentation page.
We also have a video and image gallery page which we will be populating over time.
Hats off to Ton Roosendaal and the rest of the Blender foundation, and it’s contributors, for creating, open-sourcing and distributing for free, the increasingly brilliant 3D content creation suite called Blender.
Thanks also to Greg Ward and the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory for creating, open-sourcing and distributing for free the most flexible and powerful lighting simulation suite: Radiance.
And finally, thanks to National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s OpenStudio team for releasing Radiance binaries for the Windows platform.
