Obtaining accurate vehicle lighting simulations requires taking into account multiple factors linked to both the emission and material properties of the system. In addition, the contribution of the external environment modified by the light passing through components, e.g. the windscreen, has to be considered in the calculation as it impacts the global illumination inside the car.
Besides computation accuracy, prototyping lighting systems demands the exploration of a lot of possibilities in terms of light properties: shape of the light, spread angle, intensities, colour spectrum, etc …
Using the virtual prototyping software OceanTM allows both accuracy and multiple iteration requirements to be met. Users can quickly explore multiple design variations, testing and refining until system performance is optimised. This can help reduce the time and cost of lighting systems development, whilst significantly improving the quality of overall designs.
The following example highlights a study on illumination properties in a door pocket.
The goal was to find the best compromise between evenly distributed lighting in the door pocket while limiting the quantity of light reaching the floor of the car. Several tests were made, based on the LED shape (point-like source or band source), the LED spread angle (from 20° to 120°) and the LED intensities. For this study, two kinds of output were provided: appearance renders and irradiance quantification, allowing measurement of the quantity of light reaching the sensor. With automatic use of OceanTM, all tests and results (108 in total) were obtained overnight (14h of simulation time).
