@cadmunkey said:

I have the standard non-pro version of Lumion as it is a bit more affordable. One thing I constantly hope every year is for some of the pro features of previous versions to slowly trickle down into the non-pro version, but unfortunately they never do. With yet another price increase I don't think I will continue with it in the future.

Hyperlight is now available also for non pro-versions

I've wrote a review to Lumion V8 but it does not appear. Now another try:

I often hear that the program itself and the updates of Lumion are expensive.

I use Lumion since V5 and every year they give us a big update.

I was a former user of Fryrender and Thearender as hobbyist/semiprofessional.

Now the quality of the V8 hasn't reached all of the possibilities for example of Thea, but overall I have so much more possibilites with an incredible speed.

The library of objects like plants, cars, people, materials, lights grows each update.

The realtime-tweaking of the sun, weather, effects helps me building my scene in very short time. I can work on the landscape, have mass-placement of animatable plants, cars and people, a video-editor, sounds which are placed at certain places and so on.

Lumion is so much more than a renderengine and since V8 nearly comparable in terms of quality to other renderengines, especially for architects.

Now Lumion 8 can illuminate a scene with indirect skylight and that makes the big difference to V7.
See my attached picture. Rendered in 50 seconds on my notebook with GTX 980 for Full HD.

Here an animation, rendered about 7 hours on my notebook. Please excuse the crappy camera-path.
Only lit by the sun.
Youtube Video

Here an animation (a bit kitsch...) for a client:
Youtube Video

Call me a fanboy - I am!

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I started some years ago with Lumion 5.
I was a Fryrender and later Thea-User, but more like a hobbyist/semiprofessional.
Every year there is a new version of Lumion. Every year there is the discussion that it is too expensive.
I only can say that every year Lumion makes such a huge step in terms of quality of the renderengine and also number of objects and usability, that I always like what I see and pay for it.
I had more crashes with Excel than with Lumion.
The support on the forum is superb.
I'm so fast because of a great pool of objects and materials and lights and so on by only drag'n drop it into my scene. People can be animatid, plants are influenced by the wind. I can change the weather in realtime. It's possible to make animations, a kind of video- and title-editor is integrated.
All features usable by a GUI which is for me as easy as sketchup.

I'm so fast because Lumion is fast in rendering.

With the new V8 the render quality even for interiors has made such a huge step that Thearender will get dusty for my projects.
Lumion still lacks of some features (displacement for example), but for me it's my tool of choice.

Here a fast test of a sketchup-scene by Alejandro Garcia: https://youtu.be/B8NzrvWPhC4
I've rendered that over night about 7 hours on my notebook with a GTX 980, 8 GB, Windows 10 Pro with the highest quality-level 5 stars.