Working with LightMeter Grids

This tutorial will show how to place lightmeter reading markers on the work plane inside your model.
It will show you how to use LightUp's Dynamic Components to quickly lay out arrays of lightmeter reading points.

The model is kept very simple so we can focus on the techniques for rigging lights and reading grids.

We will start with a simple L-shaped room of 10m x 8m.

Lighting Grids

First step is to lay out our lighting array. We can do this by dragging a PointLightSource Component to each light location or alternatively using the QueryTool to Alt+Click each light location - but for large spaces, LightUp has some custom Dynamic Components that can really accelerate this process.

Open the Component browser and choose the PointLightGrid Dynamic Component to drag into your model.

Place the PointLightGrid at the light plane height in 1 corner of the room

Choose the Dynamic Component Options Tool and you'll get a dialog allowing you to edit the light grid spacing from the default of 5m.

We're going to choose a 3m spacing for our light grid, which we type in and press "Apply".

SketchUp will automatically recalculate how many light sources you need to fill the grid. Now we can use the SketchUp ScaleTool, to resize our grid to fill the area we need.
SketchUp will recalculate how many lights are needed.

NB You may find the Grid jumps in size - just tweak it until it fits the room. And you use MoveTool to move away from the walls.

Lastly, we'll set the luminaire we wish to use. Double-click on the LightGrid Component to open it and Select All the PointLightSources:

We can edit all selected light sources at once now by selecting the QueryTool and choosing an IES file

Here we are using ERCO 14W LED downlighters as you can see from the thumbnail provided by the built-in LightUp IES browser.

Check that the IES profile has been assigned to each light and then close the LightGrid component.

Open LightUp Preferences and set "Lux contour" lighting mode, turn off "Use Sun" as well as enable showing the Lux scale on screen.

Starting Tourtool should result in something like shown below. The IES profiles you choose to use obviously effects the lighting distribution you'll see.

Lighting Meter Samples

Being able to interactively take lightmeter readings is useful for iterating light rigging as well as validating results. However, its also useful to show readings over the whole work plane, and this is where another custom LIghtUp Dynamic Component comes in.

Using a similar workflow as before, we're going to add a LightMeterGrid component to the work plane of our model.
What this component does is allow you to quickly place markers in your model where LightUp will calculate and display light values along side the Lux contours.

Here we've set the LightMeterGrid spacing to 1.5m and used the ScaleTool and MoveTool to size and place at the work plane.

Finally we have our Lux contour display, with a scale on the leftside and at each LightMeterGrid location, the precise lux values.

Optionally, in LightUp Preferences, you can choose to show the PointLightSource IES profiles too by checking "Show Photometrics".

Any questions, you can post on the LightUp forum or if you prefer, emailing LightUp directly.