Add and Adjust Lights

Each light you add to the model is listed by name and type on the Lights tab in the Autodesk Rendering window. The sun and sky lights are not included but you can adjust the sun and the sky properties on the Environments tab.

When a light is selected in the Lights view, it's also selected in the Scene View, and vice versa. The properties of the lights in the list are saved per file. When a light is selected in the model, you can use gizmos to move the light and change some other properties, for example, the hotspot and falloff cone in spot lights. You can also adjust the light's settings directly in the Properties view. You can see the effect on the model as you change the properties of a light.

Note: By default, up to eight lights will be used in your model. If you have more than eight lights, they will have no effect on the model even if you turn them on. You can use the Options Editor to use unlimited number of lights, if needed.

Photometric Lights

Photometric lights use photometric (light energy) values that enable you to define lights more accurately as they would be in the real world.

Autodesk Navisworks supports photometric workflow for point lights, spot lights and web lights. You can set their distribution, intensity, color temperature, and other characteristics of real-world lights. For web lights, you can also import specific photometric files (IES standard file format) available from lighting manufacturers to design lighting based on commercially available lights. If you do not use IES files, the effect of using web lights will be the same as if you were using point lights.

Note: Photometric workflow is not supported for distant lights.

Lighting Units

Autodesk Navisworks supports both International (SI), and American lighting units. Both lighting units can be used in photometric workflow. American differs from International in that illuminance values are formatted in foot-candles rather than lux.

The lighting units are read from the original CAD file, and cannot be modified, unless you change them in the original file, and re-open the file in Autodesk Navisworks.