Lumion 8- A Game Changer??

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Keep in mind that this is a marketing video.  It is easy for things to look good when the company if fine tuning for the purpose of making their product look great but that doesn't mean it will translate to real life working environment.

[Juraj]

I honestly really like what I see :- ). Makes me want to fire up some crappy old SketchUp models I did in college and easily turn them around to something semi-usable.

The quality is absolutely great for something that's easy to use for architects and general none-3D populace.

I can't quite find what sort of GI that is, as previously it was more advanced version of LPV only (which is what Twinmotion adopted from UE4), but this looks like sort of SVOGI/XVGI ? Apparently only works when offline computing a video footage out of Lumion, but that's very smart way to bypass the performance limitation of good looking real-time GI.

[melviso]

I'm not sure how it is with Lumion, but the reason I prefer to work in a cryengine viewport is because everything is in realtime. So the shadows and lighting updates instantly. Just like working in a 3ds max viewport except you are seeing the final look.
Well, not quite final, but 80% final and without antialiasing. In my cryengine the final render can also take about 10 seconds or more for the final depth of field and motion blur and area shadows and so on.
But the possibility to work with the final look is quite satisfying and very important. It encourages you to make changes and refine the result.
It's also easy to tweak animations and camera moves.
It will be a game changer when you'll be able to do that in a 3ds max viewport. I dream about that day.

I'm imagining in Lumion it is the same like in any gaming engine. You work with real-time updates and seeing almost the final look. And then hit the slower render for the final quality.

Exactly, Are you using the latest Cryengine  version? How well has it improved? I tried giving Amazon Lumberyard a go but got discouraged with the lighting (wasn't good enough for photorealism, no soft shadows either or proper bounced lighting calculation). I will try looking up Cryengine's license. My problem is the way you import assets, material editor is old fashioned e.t.c
Nah, That would be in 3dsmax 2034- Viewport with ue4 capabilities ..haha. Blender has eevee though and it's shaping up nicely.

Reflections seem to be correct as well compared to ue4. I think these guys are going to keep what makes the rendering so fast close to their chest. Or I am suspecting they hired some former employees of redshift who have come up with something like this?

@Crazy Homeless Guy   
I have seen some demo videos of Lumion 8 in action on youtube. The scenes in the trailer hold up very well in those demos. If they can find a way to make things interactive, then there is competition against game engines.
 

UE4 is still dope though. I wonder if we would have dynamic GI realtime in UE5 but I am not sure if that is possible or we know when next generation engines will be introduced.

[sebastian___]

Exactly, Are you using the latest Cryengine  version? How well has it improved? I tried giving Amazon Lumberyard a go but got discouraged with the lighting (wasn't good enough for photorealism, no soft shadows either or proper bounced lighting calculation).

Actually I'm using the version from 2007. Cryengine 2. But I modified it. It lacks a few things compared to the newest engines, but other graphic features are better even compared to the latest Unreal and Cryengine. Hope I will have some time to create some new demos with it.
 Way back when I started, the editor being very similar to 3ds max was the other thing I found attractive.

[melviso]

Actually I'm using the version from 2007. Cryengine 2. But I modified it. It lacks a few things compared to the newest engines, but other graphic features are better even compared to the latest Unreal and Cryengine. Hope I will have some time to create some new demos with it.
 

That's really cool, mate. Looking forward to those demos. I had a feeling you weren't using the latest version. I have seen some of your earlier works with it. Very nice work :- ) Are you planning to use this for movies or games? or just experimentations/workflows?

@

I honestly really like what I see :- ). Makes me want to fire up some crappy old SketchUp models I did in college and easily turn them around to something semi-usable.

Any plans to try it out? :-)

[Benny]

For a non-programmer it appears magical that these guys can have final renders in less than a minute with a realtime preview while working. Is everything somehow pre-baked or something? What is the major differences between Lumion and something like Corona? I'm sure this is a stupid question for some, but I'm also sure that there are a lot of us wondering.

[sebastian___]

That's really cool, mate. Looking forward to those demos. I had a feeling you weren't using the latest version. I have seen some of your earlier works with it. Very nice work :- ) Are you planning to use this for movies or games? or just experimentations/workflows?

I'm using it sometimes together with 3ds max and compositing. It would be quite difficult to get the typical interior look lighting, but it could be great for background vegetation heavy animations.
Hope I'll have the time to render some proof of concepts. Maybe using Corona to render "hero" objects and hero closeup plants and everything else a real-time engine. Probably with some real filmed objects composited in to sell the shot.

And about how they can get such high quality lighting in near real-time... I think software like these are programmed very differently.
I mean in programs like these you can model and build stuff while having insects flying around, trees animated by wind and so on. Turned on all the time.
Imagine that in 3ds max viewport - having things in playback all the time while you would try to model something.. Sometimes even just a single animated tree playback would slow things down, let alone having multiple trees animated together, flying insects, particles, lighting and post processing effects.



In this tornado gif, which was just a test, so I didn't placed some strong fans to have a stronger influence on the trees, but the explosion there happened spontaneously. I didn't placed that there.
I think it looked cool, but when I watched later some real footage with tornadoes and storms I noticed things like that really do tend to happen.
I think it's great to have the power to fill a scene with "working" objects and creatures and systems so you'll have sometimes secondary things happen in scenes without you specifically rigging that up.
This happened often in my tests.

[melviso]

I'm using it sometimes together with 3ds max and compositing. It would be quite difficult to get the typical interior look lighting, but it could be great for background vegetation heavy animations.
Hope I'll have the time to render some proof of concepts. Maybe using Corona to render "hero" objects and hero closeup plants and everything else a real-time engine. Probably with some real filmed objects composited in to sell the shot.

And about how they can get such high quality lighting in near real-time... I think software like these are programmed very differently.
I mean in programs like these you can model and build stuff while having insects flying around, trees animated by wind and so on. Turned on all the time.
Imagine that in 3ds max viewport - having things in playback all the time while you would try to model something.. Sometimes even just a single animated tree playback would slow things down, let alone having multiple trees animated together, flying insects, particles, lighting and post processing effects.

Really cool idea. Using realtime for background heavily detailed stuff. I am not sure Cryengine has a compositing plugin but I am sure you have found a way to do this. Ue4 has a compositing plugin, with this you can composite stuff with live footage. It is called composure. In Blender eevee viewport, there are efforts made towards realtime stuff while modelling:

I agree that having things move around like insects flying around, wind blowing curtains e.t.c in realtime does help immerse the creator and help in building up ideas in designing, creating and altering the environment. Gives more control and makes the end result even better because you have first hand visuals of what the final result should and would be.

Very impressive test, mate. That is cool to know. Happy accidents are vital in acquiring useful knowledge. That is why practice/experiments are important because so much can be learnt from them. Can't wait to see the demos when you release them:-)

[sebastian___]

Ue4 and compositing ? Interesting. Too bad that UE4 seems so different and alien to me. And Blender even more so.
I would still prefer to do all these in 3ds max viewport.
Waiting for 3ds max to step into the future :)

[melviso]

No worries. 3dsmax is a great software tbh. Blender offers a better option pricewise and does the same things as 3dsmax so I decided to learn and use it and it is been a great software. I still love 3dsmax.

[Benny]

Going back to the original topic for a second, it almost feels as if this time the industry is changing. I know there has always been the debate that architects and whoever will be able to do their own renderings sooner or later, and that debate has been going on for decades. But really, products like Enscape and now Lumion 8 really do seem to change the landscape, don't they?

[romullus]

Very good lighting quality





and it seems motion blur and depth of field is better than in unreal

Hmm, is Lumion raytracer or not? Appart from cars and glass panes, none of the materials has reflections in it, just a simple specular. As for the lighting quality, maybe it's just me, but i don't see anything spectacular. Exterior image is lit with simple IBL and interior's GI looks very week, boosted with a good amount of AO. I've seen much better works done in UE, in realtime... Can't see where from all that rave is going on.

[sebastian___]

I have no idea but I would guess it's not raytracing, but using some of the same tricks cryengine 5 and UE is doing. But comparing to the older Lumion the lighting in these samples looks way better.
A render done with Corona or Arnold will be much more realistic but also way slower, like the difference between an hour per frame or 20 seconds per frame.
And maybe most don't care about motion blur, but from what I've seen UE can't do this type of motion blur.

[Juraj]

Romullus, it's not raytracer in real sense but it does use some ray-tracing :- ).

It needs to be considered that it has GI that takes few seconds to compute during animation export. So some sort of 'real-time' GI that's not fully real-time, but still 10 000 times faster that ray-trace, so some sort of SVOGI/XVGI (probably single bounce, diffuse only like CryEngine).
Also, reflections are definitely tweakable, and who knows Screen-space reflections, knows how good (if physically incorrect) they can look. They're bombastic. Single thing they totally blew my mind when I boosted them into oblivion in Unreal4.

But main draw of Lumion is that it's basically renderer equivalent of SketchUp. It's software that is as easy to use as playing TheSims is. I.e your grandmother could learn it in single afternoon and produce nice images. For architectural practices, the software must be godsend, and will eventually totally replace entry-level visualization.

[melviso]

The selling point here is it completely eliminates the hurdles ue4 presents when it comes to preparing meshes for the game engine like low poly meshes, uvs for lightmaps, lightmap resolution, normal map baking, having some meshes static, some dynamic e.t.c and very fast render time. This is a good tool for architectural companies. if in the hands of professional archviz people, photorealism can be achieved even more.
But now you mentioned the reflections and gi. I see where you are coming from but it's still a very good improvement from their previous versions.

Advantage of ue4 is interactivity but I did read somewhere about Lumion and VR. Not sure though.