Towards Smarter University Digital Twins: A Real-Time Rendering Pipeline for Street-Lighting
Ghassen Ben Hnia, Laurent Canale, Pascal Dupuis, Zouhour Araoud, Georges Zissis · Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2025
Abstract Digital twins promise to revolutionize street lighting by combining high-fidelity simulations with interactive visualization. In this paper, we present a modular real-time rendering pipeline for street lighting digital twins, applied on a university campus. We export high-resolution illuminance maps from the lighting-simulation software Relux, then preprocess and stream them into Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP). We implement and compare three lighting modes: 1) analytical “cone” spotlights as a simple baseline; 2) texture-masked “cookie” spotlights for additional spatial detail; and 3) a custom Shader Graph that samples full-resolution illuminance maps for photometric accuracy. Our results show that static simulation accuracy is preserved while interactive performance is maintained, despite challenges in data preprocessing, shader integration, and runtime optimization. By bridging offline simulation and real-time rendering, our workflow lays the foundation for fully interactive virtual reality applications in street lighting.