Streamlining electric lighting with Enscape’s new light management feature

Summary:

Design Technologist and Enscape expert Dan Stine introduces Enscape's new light management controls feature. Learn how you can explore lighting designs more fluidly and how to ensure electric lighting remains the focal point of the architectural presentation.

Key takeaways:

• The Enscape light management feature ensures non-destructive design exploration, as visual tweaks do not disrupt official design documentation or engineering data.

• Users now benefit from the ability to bypass linked model restrictions. Lights that were previously "locked," can now be adjusted within the Enscape environment.

• Thanks to this update, a single model can be used to tell various stories. By saving configurations as presets per view, you can shape atmospheric settings without having to manually reset the fixtures each time.
  

Lighting plays an undeniable role in making architectural visualizations feel vibrant, accurate, and immersive. Getting it right, however, has historically presented a few unique challenges for design teams—especially when navigating complex BIM workflows, linked consultant models, complex nested Revit luminaires (families), and auto-exposure settings.

With the recent release of new Enscape features, a highly anticipated workflow has been introduced: Light Management. This feature fundamentally shifts how we handle electric lighting during the visualization process, giving designers unprecedented control without disrupting the underlying building data.

While this new feature works seamlessly across all Enscape supported platforms, such as SketchUp and Rhino, we will evaluate it through the lens of a real-world Revit model to highlight the specific workflow benefits.

The real-world challenges of Revit lighting

In an ideal world, every light fixture in your model is perfectly tuned, accessible, and ready for rendering. In practice, architectural models are complex ecosystems.

One of the most common hurdles occurs when lighting fixtures are housed within a consultant’s linked model (such as the electrical engineer's MEP model). Because these elements are linked, their individual lighting settings—such as intensity and color—are locked and inaccessible in the host architectural model. Historically, this meant relying on the consultant to make visualization tweaks or duplicating fixtures just for the rendering, which clutters the project.

A similar challenge, not being able to adjust lighting fixture settings, occurs with complex lighting fixture content. Some manufacturers’ content or company families may include nested light sources, which make their settings inaccessible from within the Revit project environment. Editing these complex families can be tricky, even for highly experienced Revit users.

Another frequent challenge involves Auto Exposure. This is an incredibly important feature for improving the overall ambient quality of a space, particularly early in the design process when no luminaires have been placed in the model. However, once you start adding actual lighting fixtures, this automatic exposure tends to aggressively wash out the light they emit.

The following image highlights the less-than-ideal results that can occur. There are three Cooper Cambria accent fixtures aimed at the wall and artwork. One, on the far right, has a generic Revit light source with the lumens set extremely high, set directly in the family. The other two, intended to wash the artwork with light, have real-world lumen settings based on the manufacturer's product data, but their light is undetectable due to Enscape’s auto-exposure setting.

The new light management feature allows designers to control this situation beyond the original global Artificial Light Brightness setting (found in Enscape Visual Settings dialog), which would make the already too-bright fixture even brighter in this example.

Accurate light distribution: The power of photometry

Before diving into the new overrides, it is important to remember why we want these fixtures to be visible in the first place. High-quality Revit lighting families rely on IES files to dictate their light distribution—a concept known as photometry.

Instead of a generic wash of light, an IES file mathematically defines the exact shape, throw, and spread of a fixture based on real-world laboratory testing. By ensuring these photometric webs are visible and correctly balanced in your Enscape render, you are not just making a "pretty picture"; you are accurately representing the manufacturer’s intended lighting design.

📝 For a deeper dive into setting up these photometric web files and the fundamentals of artificial lighting, check out my previous post: Electric Lighting in Revit and Enscape Explained.

Notice the Cooper accent light has an IES file specified in the image below. Also, notice that the brightness (Initial Intensity) and color temperature (Initial Color) are also specified here. We will come back to this, but note that the brightness is close to accurate, but the color is not correct.

The solution: Non-destructive light management

This is where the new Light Management browser changes the game. It allows you to adjust light properties—intensity, color temperature, and even on/off states—directly inside the Enscape window. Simply toggle on Light Management, select the icon associated with a light fixture in the Enscape scene, and adjust its settings.

Here is why this workflow is so critical for modern AEC practices:

1. Bypassing Linked Model Restrictions: You can now grab those previously inaccessible lights from the MEP consultant's linked model and adjust their visual output directly within Enscape.

2. Combating Washout: By utilizing the Light Presets, you can easily scale up the intensity of your artificial lights to overcome the global washout effect of automatic exposure, ensuring your photometric distributions are clearly visible.

3. Protecting Design Documentation: Perhaps most importantly, this feature facilitates deep lighting design exploration without ever affecting the design documentation. The original CAD values, Revit model content, and engineering data remain completely unchanged. You are modifying the visual interpretation of the lights, not the BIM data itself.

With a few quick Intensity adjustments, notice that the art wash is brighter, and the fixture to the right is less bright. It is also possible to rename the fixtures if desired. All of these Enscape-specific adjustments persist between sessions because they are saved within the Revit model.

Adjusting color temperature

The default Revit lighting fixture families and light source elements have a less-than-ideal color temperature: Halogen (3200 K). Using the Hex/RGB values from the table below allows the light’s color temperature to be tuned. The difference is most noticeable when two lights are side by side, as in the following image.

Both the intensity and color can be reset to the “CAD Defaults” by hovering your cursor over the setting and clicking the reset option that appears. This makes it easy and safe to explore options without worrying about messing up the main model.

Compare and contrast: Shaping the atmosphere

Because the Light Management tool lets you save these configurations as Presets per view, you can use the same Revit model to tell completely different stories. You can efficiently grab multiple fixtures in a large scene, apply proportional adjustments, and toggle different lighting zones.

Notice in the following image that I created a Light Preset called Daytime Holiday to show an example that lets colored light settings be toggled on and off easily. This save feature can also turn off lights and adjust their intensity.

Conclusion

By decoupling visualization adjustments from the strict parameters of the authoring software, Enscape enables a much more fluid, creative, and non-destructive approach to architectural lighting. Whether you are dialing in an interior space in SketchUp or balancing a complex, multi-link Revit project, the Light Management tool ensures your electric lighting always takes center stage.