A quick lighting sketch — without paper
LightPlanner is a small desktop app for quickly sketching out a lighting setup. The kind of plan you'd otherwise scribble on the back of a call sheet — just on a 2D canvas with a little 3D preview on top.
It is not a replacement for Vectorworks, or Capture. It's the tool you reach for when you just want to think through where the lights go before you start rigging.
✔ Runs offline on macOS & Windows ✔ Drop in fixtures, drag the aim point, see roughly where the light lands ✔ Save the plan as a single file and move on
- Pan / zoom canvas with a metre grid
- Drop fixtures, drag them around, drag the aim point
- Multi-select, group, undo / redo
- Stick a stage, a podium or a person on the floor for reference
- Drop in a floor plan as JPG, PNG or PDF (multi-page PDFs let you flip between pages)
- Calibrate the scale: drag a line along something you know the length of (a wall, a scale bar), type the real distance, and the whole plan snaps to the right size
- Nudge it into place, dial the opacity down, and lock it so you don't move it by accident
- Now everything you draw on top is to scale
- A simple Three.js view of the room with the cones drawn in
- Useful to sanity-check angles and heights
- Screenshot button for sharing
- A rough lux estimate on the floor based on the fixtures' photometric data
- Switch on a target value to colour the floor by under / on / over
- Not a replacement for a real photometric study — close enough for a sketch
- Source Fours, PARs, Fresnels, LED panels and a few moving heads
- Current Elation LED range built in — KL Fresnel 8 FC, KL Panel, KL Profile FC, KL PAR FC, Fuze, …
- LEE & Rosco CTO / CTB / frost gels
- Add your own custom fixture — or let the AI pull the specs from a datasheet (paste the text, it fills the photometric/beam/power fields and shows where each value came from so you can check it)
- Auto-number the rig and auto-patch DMX (universe / address, footprint-aware, with clash detection)
- Equipment list, instrument schedule and an electrical-load summary (kW, A per phase, 16 A circuits) — export to CSV
- Trusses / hanging positions you can draw and label
- One-click 3-point lighting around a person
- "Fill an area evenly" generator for a stage or podium
- Useful starting points — you'll still want to nudge things by hand
- One project file with everything in it — fixtures, trusses, and the calibrated building plan — in local storage, no cloud
- File menu with undo / redo, and export of the current view as PNG, JPG or PDF
Download the latest release from the Releases page — pick the installer or portable build for your platform.
Or run from source:
npm install
npm run dev # web preview in the browser
npm run electron:dev # the actual desktop appElectron · React · TypeScript · Three.js · Vite · electron-builder.
Early. Things will change. Use it for sketches, not for paperwork you have to hand in.
Lars Zumpe
Totally optional — the app will be MIT-licensed and free either way.
MIT