AE 466 - Computer Aided Lighting Design
Basic Course Description and Projects Completed
AE 466 is a computer aided lighting design class where the main goal is to help students become more proficient in the programs that are used in the field. Even though becoming proficient is one of the primary goals of the class students are encouraged to hone in on their lighting design skills with real life project scenarios. Up to this point in time students have completed two assignments and are working on the third. In IP #1 - Outdoor Sports Lightng students were asked to research lighting practices for a football field and track. With that research they were then asked to determine a lighting solution which would meet the minimum requirements. Since this project was located outside students needed to take into account spill light, sky glow, and light trespass. In order to illuminate a field most luminaries are placed on a pole so, the students also needed to determine how many poles were needed, the location of the poles, the number of luminaries on each pole, the location of the luminaries, the aiming of the luminaries, and other considerations to insure that the lighting on the field and track met minimum requirements. The next assignment was IP #2 - Schematic Design. This assignment was more so based on learning a computer program than learning about the design process. At this point the students have learned all the required knowledge to produce a schematic design that incorporates Richard Kelly's layers of light - ambient/general light, focal glow, and sparkle/glitter. Since the students had a good understanding of these layers of light from a previous course they were able to focus on learning different techniques to create a schematic design in Photoshop. In order for the students to do this they were asked to find a high quality photograph so that it would not become pixilated when they started to edit it. Once the image was selected the students removed all of the light from the picture (daylight and electric light) to neutralize the image. After the image had been neutralized, they started to add their lighting design to the image. Now we are on IP #3 - Lighting a Vertical Surface. This assignment revolves around the use of AGi32, but it also encourages us to look at different ways to illuminate a vertical wall. To be more exact we will be comparing wall-washing and wall-grazing as well as different lamp choices to see how the results vary.