The calculation engine used in Visual photometrically models the interaction of luminaires, sun, and sky in a user-specified environment that may consist of surfaces that absorb and reflect light which have arbitrary orientations and planar shapes. The detail and accuracy of the photometric model is sufficient to predict direct and interreflected illuminances at any array of points.
Surfaces that block, reflect, and/or transmit light can be planar polygons.
For electric lighting calculations, light sources are luminaires that have a specified luminous extent and an arbitrary luminous intensity distribution.
Luminaire data is assumed to be contained entirely within any of the three most commonly used data files for the transfer of photometric information. At a minimum, these files give the luminous extent, specify which of the standard coordinate systems is used to describe the luminous intensity distribution, list the angles of that coordinate system that are used, and list the luminous intensity values of the luminaire at those angles.
The Visual calculation engine assumes that photometric data files are in that form defined by IES/ANSI standard LM-63-02. The user interface to Visual converts any of the user-supplied photometric files to an equivalent LM-63-02 file and submits them to the Visual calculation engine.
Surfaces ("solids") specified by the user are single planar entities with a surface normal (perpendicular) derived from the order in which the user specifies the vertices of the polygon defining the shape and orientation of the surface. Single user surfaces are treated in the calculation engine as two surfaces, back-to-back, separated by an internally-determined incremental distance. They are assumed to have identical photometric properties.
Reflectance is assumed to be perfectly diffuse and can have values between 0.0 and 0. 999. Reflectance is specified in the Visual user interface in percentage form and any value specified as 100% is reduced to 0.999. Perfect diffusion permits the assumption that the amount and distribution of reflected light is independent of incidence direction.
Specular or so-called mixed reflectance cannot be modeled in Visual at this time.
Transmittance is assumed to be either perfectly diffuse or perfectly image preserving. Transmittance can have values between 0.0 and 1.0. Transmittance is specified in the Visual user interface in percentage form.
Perfectly diffuse transmittance permits the assumption that the amount and distribution of transmitted light is independent of incidence direction and that transmitted light has a diffuse distribution.
Perfectly image preserving transmittance preserves the direction of travel of the light, but reduces that amount. The value specified by the user is assumed to be that value of transmittance perpendicular to the surface. If the user-specified value of transmittance is less than 1.0 (100%), then it is assumed that glass is being used, and that the transmittance value depends on incident angle. In this case, the calculation engine automatically determines and uses the appropriate value of transmittance for the incidence angles involved.
If the user-specified values of reflectance (r) and transmittance (t) do not sum to 1.0, then the absorbtance of the surface is assumed to be 1-r-t, and is the fraction of light lost by absorption in the surface.
The Visual calculation engine makes "the gray assumption"; that is, all reflectances, transmittances, and flux from light sources are assumed to be spectrally flat. That is, the photometric property is uniform throughout (and therefore independent of) visible wavelengths.
Although spectral uniformity is assumed, the values of reflectance and transmittance are not entirely uncoupled from a surface color specified by the user. The Visual user interface estimates a wide-band reflectance from the RGB values that define a user-specified color. If the user chooses to keep the color and the reflectance linked, notice is given if the specified color and reflectance are incompatible. For example, it is not possible for "brown" to have a high, wide-band reflectance.
Some surface colorizing effects can be generated in the renderings. See the section of Rendering.