My former colleagues at Lam Partners are incorporating some impressive rendering capabilities into their lighting design work flows, using NVIDIA’s Iray rendering software integrated into modeling packages like Rhino and 3Ds.  Plus they’ve got some fun new toys like a GPU-based rendering server.

Such impressive live rendering capabilities jives completely with the overall trends in the architecture and construction industries to move from static design to computationally intensive simulations to accurately model and predict building performance.