On/Off Switch for Lights

After working with the light management browser for a while, here's my feedback. This is a fantastic feature, and I appreciate all the amazing work at Enscape to bring it to life!

• First off, here are the things I really love about the feature so far:

  • Reset to CAD defaults - I love the ability to reset to the values pulled from CAD in case adjustments don't work

  • Multi-select - This is indispensable since it's extremely uncommon that only one light is edited at a time

  • Presets - Love that you can link a light preset to saved view. This is very useful when setting up different scenes and looks.

  • I also do like that double clicking an icon moves the camera closer to the light source

• Now, here are suggestions for the feature's improvement:

  • Color temperature (Kelvin) - Need the ability to easily set the color temperature of lights since the majority of all light in the world is white. There doesn't seem to be any way to adjust this intuitively without memorizing the RGB values for common color temperatures.

  • Save light "groups" for future use - For projects with lots of lights, it would be nice to save multiple lights in groups so that you don't have to re-select the same 20 lights, for example, that will be commonly edited together

  • This is small but I think would be very helpful. If you were to double click a light in management browser, think it would be nice if the camera navigated to that light's location instead of editing immediately. Maybe a single click would "select" the light and then you could hit the edit button like in multi-select

  • Edit emissive materials in light management browser - Saw someone else commented about this but thought I'd reiterate. Since emissive materials do play a larger role in light rendering with artificial light ray-tracing enabled, it would be nice to be able to edit material light properties in the browser as well

  • Light names pulled from CAD - I assume this is already being worked on but the naming for each source needs to relate in some way to the CAD object otherwise it's kind of pointless since you wouldn't know what it means.

  • Light indicators hidden by space or distance - when zoomed out, the indicators become overwhelming. Ideally you would only see indicators in the same space or nearest to the camera so that the view doesn't get too cluttered. I think I saw a post that something like this is being worked on which is fantastic!

This is a great direction!

Are you able to include LEM materials into the light system so that you can turn in on or off. That would be awesome!

Secondly. Let's be able to assign Lumen in stead of Candela :-)

Love it! Great update with version 4.14, thank you guys!

This one is long but could not avoid it after a full day trying this new amazing light management feature with preview 3:

• Why would I want icons for the lights if I cannot interact with them, select it to change its properties. Please remember that for the moment its impossible to hide the light icons, at least with the Archicad version

• Being able to spot them on the Enscape window is great, but WE need controls for selection, icon size otherwise it’s just noise to our eyes

• The icon symbol works well and it’s easy to distinguish them. The way WE see the icons is confusing, so if I am looking to a blank white wall that I can only see the wall, all light icons are still there, this is very confusing

• It’s good to zoom out and it automatically groups lights that are close to each other, thus simplifying it and being also clickable to expand that group of lights also works. But you need to zoom out a lot. I do understand that icons are larger when lights are closer to the camera and smaller if away from it but it does not work because most of the time I should not see them, only when other objets are not blocking the view

• Light names should have the name that WE gave them with the authoring tool. In Archicad it’s the element ID and it should stay that way. Where did you get the name from lights?!? WE do not want to spend time again to do the same, numbering and naming all lights. In Archicad WE usually group them just like it will work out once built. In example, one switch controls 3 lights in real life, them its a group of 3 lights with a proper name and number to identify the group

• Light presets should preserve the grouping made with the authoring tool, otherwise WE will have to group them again for these presets

• Light color should have presets also, not only a color palette to choose from. The light industry has its own way for coloring light and its intensity. Either use standards or kelvin or something related to technical lighting

• The candela (cd) unit is good to have but in Europe WE use LUX (lx) and it would be great to also have that as a choice for units

• Turning all lights off does not seem to work. It does turn some off but not all. Not sure why but managing them on and off is hard and tricky. Please remember that like with materials, what you do in Enscape happens in Archicad, integration is the key

• Light source radius is good to be controlled from the light properties but should be possible to get wider angles.

• IES light should be possible to upload an IES file. Beam angle for spot lights should not be limited to 90 degrees

• Rectangular and area lights should be flippable to help us out to invert lights

Thats all for now but will be testing it more with the hopes that the final version will come out even better!

Cheers

not on and off you should remove and work in the problem the problem when we used light rectangle planar or spotlight in the mirrror the rectangle doesnt need to show in the mirror as an emissive light cause in the render its destroy the workflow we used rectangle planar and spot light as fake sunlight thats why we need to handles this next update hope the comapany listens to our problems

Any updates to this, it's been "Planned" for a while. Is there a system that gives more info/feedback than the broad stroke of "Planned"? Is there a timeline? Looking forward to seeing this one implemented!

I saw this part proposed a long time ago, but why doesn't Enscape handle it?