# LightGuider: Guiding Interactive Lighting Design using Suggestions, Provenance, and Quality Visualization

## TL;DR

LightGuider is an interactive lighting design tool that guides designers by visualizing suggested improvements based on quality criteria, provenance, and designer preferences, streamlining the creative process.

## Contribution

It introduces a guidance system that visualizes optimal next steps in lighting design using a provenance tree and quality metrics, enhancing decision-making.

## Key findings

- Designers found LightGuider improved workflow efficiency.
- The system effectively visualized quality improvements over design iterations.
- Provenance visualization helped compare alternative lighting solutions.

## Abstract

LightGuider is a novel guidance-based approach to interactive lighting design, which typically consists of interleaved 3D modeling operations and light transport simulations. Rather than having designers use a trial-and-error approach to match their illumination constraints and aesthetic goals, LightGuider supports the process by simulating potential next modeling steps that can deliver the most significant improvements. LightGuider takes predefined quality criteria and the current focus of the designer into account to visualize suggestions for lighting-design improvements via a specialized provenance tree. This provenance tree integrates snapshot visualizations of how well a design meets the given quality criteria weighted by the designer's preferences. This integration facilitates the analysis of quality improvements over the course of a modeling workflow as well as the comparison of alternative design solutions. We evaluate our approach with three lighting designers to illustrate its usefulness.