Lumion - Test drive

Gaieus

Hi Remko, welcome and thanks for dropping by to clarify some things... Expect more quesrions however!

I think Pete (solo) was a good choice for this test drive and passing info to us. He uses a wide variety of different rendering applications so we can all "trust" his evaluation and opinion.

So notes...

@remko said:

Focus: Our focus is 100% on professionals creating visualizations. I mean architects and artists. We have no interest in hobbyists with this product.

True that I am not an architect and I would not even call myself an artist. However my work (when I model "professionally" and not just hand around to administrate these forums) involves archaeological visualization (I am an archaeologist by original profession so I am not doing this as a "hobby" although I may be a very lucky person because I like it as much as if it were my hobby really). When I model a Roman watchtower, I need Roman soldiers in there. When I model a Medieval house, I need some Medieval folks and horse carts and such).

I consider myself pretty efficient at modelling however I am far from being very fluent and effective at rendering. This is why I think that something like this "idiot proof" Lumion is (would be) a perfect solution for me. But of course, it also means custom content; people, vehicles, materials and such. I watched some videos and understand that I can import materials with my models and add shaders like normal maps and all but I would like to save these as well as save any custom content I make.

I understand this may be a rather narrow slice of the cake and with a new product you cannot concentrate on weirdos like me but as I also understand from what many gentlemen above added, some customization is indeed a general feature request for many. After all, even architects work with many different materials all over the world and these all need to be "custom" to a certain extent.

So overall, I am really tempted but without the perspective option at least to be able to ad my stuff, I (for instance) cannot indeed justify the cost (for myself, again, and only for what I would/could be doing it, otherwise I think it's quite reasonable). So in this case I may remain a "hobbyist".

Anyway, I hope you hear what I am saying. Here is another example by the way. This person is building Rome and is currently rendering in Kerkythea. However I can already see the potential of Lumion in such a project. (And that is a professional project with his wife, who is also an archaeologist).

Also, see your Private Messages, please.

remko

Hi, I'm Remko, one of the programmers of Lumion and I'm honored this board wants to review Act-3D's little tool I decided to join in on the conversation to clarify things when needed and also to see what's happening here so we can feed it back into the development process.

First, let me explain a bit about Lumion. Act-3D decided to build Lumion because we saw that a huge portion of our customers was using our 3D engine for architecture visualization. We also saw there was only a very small crowd that was capable of writing shaders and other difficult things.

In short Lumion is a tool designed to make it very easy to create architecture visualization. It's not designed to let you do everything but we designed it so you can get decent results very quickly. We are not pretending to be a tool similar to 3DS Max but instead we want to provide an alternative option. The core of our idea behind the product is that it should be accessible to anyone. Anyone should be able to create a movie. Some people might not create movies as nice as highly skilled artists but still we want Lumion to be easy and quick so everybody can use it.

So, that's a little bit of background, here's what you want to know:

Reflections: They can look odd because we do not use ray-tracing. Ray-tracing takes hours so to get reflective surfaces we generate a cube map which is used to approximate reflections. We do have some plans for accurate reflections on flat surfaces. On curved surfaces it's usually hard to see you are looking at fake reflections because of the distortion. In the next update you have the ability to position the reflection map grab position, reducing obvious flaws to a minimum. After that you'll see more improvements with each update.

Animation: You can animate elevators, people, cars etc.. but it's all very simple now. Act-3D wanted to start simple and expand. Right now you can define a linear movement or rotation for each object for every scene. Even though we might expand the animation capabilities you can expect everything to be simple. People should walk automatically and wheels should spin automatically - that sort of thing. There are even some wild ideas about automatic crowd animations and traffic. It's all technically doable so who knows where we will go in the future.

Focus: Our focus is 100% on professionals creating visualizations. I mean architects and artists. I must confess this was a topic that came up several times during development. Because of the GUI and the simplicity people might think it looks like a game. It's not. It's a professional tool with specific professionals in mind. When we started the GUI was more colorful and I mad it minimalistic black and white to make it look a bit more serious. We are quite satisfied with the GUI though. In the end I think people will appreciate what we've done in terms of the GUI. We wanted something that 'just works'.

Sketch-up integration: Right now Lumion is young. Lumion exists for one month now (our other software is available for 10 years now). As time progresses Lumion gets more users and more users means Act-3D can do more. Act-3D can definitely see the value of tighter Sketch-up integration. One of the key goals of Lumion was to offer quick workflow between Sketch-up and Lumion. The main thing in Lumion now that exposes this is the reload button. If you change your model in Sketch-up you can hit a reload button to update the model in Lumion. Act-3D worked a lot in visualization and I know from experience a lot time is lost updating the visualization of the model to the latest version of the model. With features like this Act-3D tries to make things easier.

Limited options/ customization: Act-3D thinks that Lumion already has a huge variety of models, landscapes and other options. The logical way for the future is more of this. Each update will offer more content and more features. Act-3D sees customization as an advanced feature so more options will appear for tweaking the landscape, providing your own textures but we want to be very careful with our GUI. We do not want to pile feature upon feature to end up with a tool which has enormous complexity. Act-3D thinks even very complex things can be presented in a clear and transparent way.By the way, you can already import any content you want and sue your own textures/configuration for materials. I saw a guy that made a mod, changing all tree textures so the trees had snow on them. Although not our intend it's a creative solution. You could create a custom sky by just importing a huge dome with a texture on it. If you hit the ctrl key you get many options to customize the look. We will expand features like this in the future. Act-3D is doing a lot of research at the moment about lighting, depth of field, post processing and quality improvement. As time progresses you will see a lot more options to create a distinct look.

Advertisement: Act-3D not sponsoring anyone on this website. Act-3D does not believe playing tricks on customers is a good way of doing business. Of course we want to get good reviews but the most sensible way to do this is by making great software. If it's crap let us know so we can make it better. Fortunately the overall the reactions until now are quite positive. Act-3D's approach is that you can find out for yourself. We're too small to do massive advertisement campaigns so our best bet is the software sells itself. Reviews are a great help for this.

remko

I changed my comments on hobbyists just to make you know what I mean. I think it would be awesome if people use Lumion for their hobby. I just wanted to make clear we do not want Lumion to be gimmicky. From the experience we have from our other product people create very interesting things as a hobby. For example this project was created as a hobby: http://www.quest3d.com/download/movies/Quest3D_Azure_Temple.wmv This was made in 2006 and was right up to the graphics level of many commercial projects at the time. I still think it looks nice. The guy that created that demo now works for us by the way and made the clouds and the landscape for Lumion. So in that sense we do have an interest in hobbyists it's just that Lumion is a professional tool. P.S. The materials are fully customizable. You can change texture colors and many other settings.

Gaieus

I know they are customizable (I watched the material videos, too). Can I createmy own, custom material libraries, too, or custom, insertable 3D library?

I mean I do not necessarily want to tweak the same material from project to project all the time.
Also, once I created some 3D objects (let's say "benches", so not necessarily animated ones) with all tweaked materials and such, I would like to re-use that in various projects.

So this is what I meant by "customization", not the properties of given materials.

The video is great.
I think I have seen it somewhere already (I know I've visited Quest3D before so maybe there...)

jason_maranto

Nothing to add other than thank-you... this is indeed a valuable service to keep the Sketchucation forum member abreast of a very fast growing portion of the 3D world.

Best,
Jason.

solo

Lumion released an update last week, a few fixes, and more content. I have been trying to do too many things lately like test SDS2, Thea, (another product that I cannot mention thanks to tight NDA) and Lumion.
Then there was Christmas and New year (still got a bit of a hangover)

Anyway today I loaded up an old model and ran it through Lumion , gotta say the result IMO is great, oh, look out for the kamakazi seagull....my mistake.

[flash=800,400:718fp7qt]http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=18357568[/flash:718fp7qt]

meak

Bravo!
the model is beautiful.
I think one of the secrets of this software is the quality of texture and detail of the design.
nice use of lumion, perhaps with a very light mist and the camera more slowly, to enjoy the small details.
it lacks a standalone for a walk in the models.

ps: video interresting lighting inside on the forum lumion
http://lumion3d.com/forum/gallery/archinteriors/

Gaieus

@meak said:

I think one of the secrets of this software is the quality of texture and detail of the design.

That's the secret for any kind of scenes in any applications actually!

@meak said:

perhaps with a very light mist and the camera more slowly, to enjoy the small details.

True, this model would deserve it. However it seems that Pete has nicely demonstrated here how easily (and "quickly" ) a cool walkthrough can be set up.

Keep them coming, Pete. No matter there are no romans there, I am more and more tempted!

Rich O Brien

@Pete

How long was the import process for that model? And can you give .skp stats? I know this would be dependant on your rig but it might shed some light on the in's and out's of Lumion/SU integration.

Gaieus

@unknownuser said:

How long was the import process for that model?

Also the setup time in Lumion (well, this of course must depend on routine and expertise, too)
and the export time (and specs) of the animation

solo

Model:

Edges - 1089935
Faces - 590003
Components - 39
Materials - 84 (all photo textures)

Exported to Collada +/- 1 minute
Import Lumion +/- 30 seconds

Quality HD 1280x720
+/- 4 seconds per frame

The setup in Lumion was very fast, first I imported, then in edit mode I created water from texture (not water plane), threw in some trees and a few objects, went to movie mode and snapped 8 key frames and rendered out. I'd say 15 minutes total in setup.
Had I been more proficient in the navigation (which I'm getting better at) I'd have been done under 10 minutes.

I'm using an i7, with 12GB ram and a Geforce 260 GPU.
The question is... how far can you push Lumion3D?

Rich O Brien

Wish I had a look at the model at BaseCamp.

Ecuadorian

Very, very nice texturing work indeed . Was it textured in SU?

Who would have thought a simple combination of SSAO and shadow maps could bring such nice results. No photon mapping, no radiosity, no path tracing or MLT... just fast videogame tech. I tested the updated demo and it's around 20% faster.

So, have you done any tests of workflow going back and forth between SU and Lumion to make changes?

Talking about limits... Have you found a model so complex it won't fit in the video RAM of your GPU?

solo

@unknownuser said:

Talking about limits... Have you found a model so complex it won't fit in the video RAM of your GPU?]

I actually found that Lumion3D (with my GPU) can actually handle everything SU can throw at it, probably more. I tried a model that is 245MB (cripples SU) and was smooth in Lumion.

Ecuadorian

Interesting. Does your GTX 260 have 896MB or 1792MB of RAM?

If you can do everything with the 896MB model, it means any new mid-range to high-end graphics card can handle Lumion pretty good, as most start at 1024MB nowadays.

solo

I believe I got a 1Gb card, at least as far as I remember.

Here is another quick play, takes longer to upload to Vimeo than start to end of entire animation project.

[flash=800,400:1x8u80nq]http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=18370475[/flash:1x8u80nq]

meak

still a great job
to the question:how far can you push Lumion3D?
a person said to have exceeded 16 million poly.

lumion fortunately has no physics engine, if a bird died in a railing to the second 19.
This is a joke

solo

Yeah, I'm killing birds, in the previous one the bird dive bombs the wharf, now it goes through the rails...

Gaieus

BTW what flying birds are there? (There are not too many sea birds around here)

solo

I must say Lumion is a lot of fun to play with, and results are fast. I would like to see more realism in future versions if it means a better grass option, more realistic trees, scalable objects and a bigger object library.
I can use this product for some current clients that want quick visuals, but for my higher end properties they'd probably want a higher more realistic result.

I tried loading up a huge to scale model of Manhattan, but could not navigate in Lumion, the scale was just too high and took much shift+ move to get anywhere.