I’m tuning a museum gallery in Minneapolis with 3000K accents and tight 10° beams; Dialux evo 9.3 gives me gorgeous visualizations, but AGi32 seems to nail the footcandle targets on the pedestals. When you need both poetry and precision, which one gets you to a clean submittal fastest, and any tricks for wrangling quirky IES files from tiny track heads without flattening the drama?
I lean AGi32 for clean submittals — evo 9.3 is my render pass — but the time-saver has been pre-cleaning those tiny-track IES: in Photometric Toolbox, remove any TILT=INCLUDE, reset to nadir, and renormalize to catalog lumens so the ‘10° beams’ keep their peak on the pedestal plane. Small caveat: I still send the final aims back into evo for the hero visuals.
AGi32 gets me to a “clean submittal” fastest on pedestals — drop a tight 2 in calc grid and use Automatic Aiming to a target point so those 10° beams land dead center. I still rough it in evo 9.3 for the poetry, but bump render quality and kill auto-exposure or your 3000K accents read flat, . Building on @monique_lee21: in AGi32’s Luminaire Manager switch the tiny-track IES to Absolute and match the spec-sheet CBCP with a luminaire multiplier; that fixes the footcandle math without flattening the web.
I get to a clean submittal fastest in AGi32 on those 3000K pedestal accents by making the calc object the pedestal top itself — trace the top as a calc surface and lift it about an inch to avoid edge roll-off from the narrow spot, so the avg/max matches what you’ll meter. Evo still gives me the “poetry and precision” visuals, but if the top is glossy I nudge specular reflectance up in AGi32 or the numbers drift.
On a Minneapolis gallery recently, the time-saver was flipping questionable files to Absolute in AGi32’s Luminaire Editor and pasting the catalog lumens — ‘relative vs absolute will bite you’ and often explains why evo looks lush while AGi32 under-hits the pedestal. For quirky small-head IES, I resample vertical angles to 1° before import to keep a tight-beam hot spot without flattening. @OP, are your files absolute?
Quick tip: if your accent IES looks flattened, open it in AGi32’s Luminaire Editor and check for “TILT=INCLUDE” — I’ll switch it to NONE and set the tilt in aiming, which preserves the punch. For speed I run a “Direct Only” calc to aim pedestals, then kick a final interreflections pass and pull the pretty view in evo; @william_smi69’s target-point note pairs nicely with that. Also watch multipliers — if the file has dimming baked in, your pedestals will mysteriously drop 10–15%.