A Generic Physically-based Approach to the Opening Design Problem

Abstract

Today architectural design harnesses photorealistic rendering to accurately assess energy transport for the design of energyefficient buildings. In this context, we present an automatic physically-based solution to the opening design problem, i.e. the goal-driven process of defining openings on the input geometry given a set of lighting constraints, to better exploit natural daylight. Based on a hierarchical approach that combines a linear optimization strategy and a genetic algorithm, our method computes the optimal number, position, size and shape of openings, using a path tracing-based estimator to precisely model the light transport for arbitrary materials and geometry. The method quickly converges to an opening configuration that optimally approximates the desired illumination, with no special geometry editing requirements and the ability to trade quality for performance for interactive applications. We validate our results against ground truth experiments for various scenes and time-of-day intervals.