Rendering with Lumion

Sorry about the lack of posts lately, I have been pretty swamped, and haven't really found the time,

Recently I have been utilizing a third party program known as Lumion to do a lot of my renderings.  Lumion is in my opinion very easy to use and very fast as well.  The program is a real time visualization software meaning you fly around in a rendered environment in real time.
For those interested ---> http://lumion3d.com/details/

Lumion is a rendering tool, meaning there is no modeling in the program itself, you import your Revit/Sketchup/3Ds Max/etc... model into Lumion then tweak the materials and set up the scene.



Architecture: Revit, Equipment: 3Ds Max, Rendering: Lumion, Touch Up: Photoshop



Architecture: Revit, Equipment: 3Ds Max, Rendering: Lumion, Touch Up: Photoshop

The program does come with some entourage to populate a scene such as vehicles, vegitation, and animated people, but the user should bring in at least 90% of the scene from their modeling program of choice.

Where Lumion really "shines" is in its exterior renderings, the program has a large variety of high quality vegitation (I always hated using the rpc trees Revit has to offer)

Here is an example of a project I recently worked on:

The revit file was created/rendered by a co-worker, she was upset with the quality of the rendering and asked if there was anything I could do, I then took the Revit model uploaded it to Lumion and replaced the RPC trees with the high quality 3D trees.  Overall the process took maybe about 2 hours to replace all the trees and tweak the settings, but the rendering took about 20 seconds to export from the program.


Revit Rendering: High Quality 300 DPI



Lumion Rendering

 Here is a file most people are familar with, the basic sample Revit project file:

I took the default file and exported it to Lumion and then tweaked the materials overall the process took less than 5 minutes.

Revit Rendering: High Quality 300 DPI - 16min

Lumion Rendering: 5min setup - 5sec export

Overall, the main focus of this post is not necessarily to praise Lumion, but more to share my experience with it and to inform that there are other programs available, and to not feel obligated to stick to Revit for rendering.

Lumion also has fantastic water effects!