**I've used Lumion 3 & 4 for the past 2 years with great success. The voluntary upgrade cost for small users, $1500 per year, is pretty tough to swallow. It makes great videos & good enough still images at blazing speeds. Some advanced & talented users, like with any software, get great results.

I use Revit to create the building design, export out a dwg to Sketchup, texture the model, export a collada file & then import into Lumion. All of the materials come into Lumion where we then tweak them. Then we add Lumion entourage & weather effects. Then we make still images & videos, very easily & fast.

What has been very difficult to for many users is that some upgrade features don't work 100% as advertised, such as the grass feature where the 3d blades of grass abruptly transition to a texture at a certain distance from the camera.

The arrival of V5 this week did not arrive to cheers of hundreds on the forum like last year. It has been anti-climatic. I lot of former cheer leaders have disappeared over the year. I get the feeling that a lot of people are waiting to upgrade until they see the results & problems of folks who do upgrade. I want Lumion to succeed since I have a lot of money in this program. But sometimes I get the feeling that the developers are really struggling. However, unlike E-on, makers of Lumen RT, the developers communicate pretty well through the forums. Frustrated Lumion users have been posting links to Twinmotion, another realtime software. It has a lot of promise if it gets developed & gets support. Unless it's changed a lot from a year ago, it's difficult to use & costly. I also tried Lumen RT 2 years ago & found no support, but the features seemed to have improved with this latest version.

My best advice is to visit the forums of Lumen RT & Lumion to get a feel for how the users like the software use, results & support. Lumion except for a few cases has always provided great & timely support by answering questions directly on the forums.**

Did you have to do any work on the 3DS XFrog plant files before importing into Lumion.
I can not make them display properly.

Every 3DS Xfrog file that I import into Lumion has Leaves missing.
I have tested about 25 models in 3DS & OBJ & get the same results.

The test photo below shows the leaves missing.

The only way that I have made models display properly in Lumion is to import them into Sketchup & the apply the UVToolkit "Frontface Material to Backface" commend & then export as DAE. I even tried to export as 3DS & OBJ after the UV work & it still was missing the same parts.
The resulting file goes from a 6mb 3DS file to a 133mb DAE file!!!

Thank you.

http://s790.photobucket.com/user/dbaird1/media/LumionTest_zps1a9233fb.jpg.html

All Caps & Bold intended-

TRIMBLE- PLEASE MAKE SU 64 BIT

All,
Thanks for your input.
I guess i should give LightUp another look while I continue to test & evaluate the value of Lumion & Twinmotion.
The investment in these programs obviously means a shift to very powerful & expensive (3gb) GPU's.
We've been concentrating on buying the fast CPU's for our programs (Revit, Indigo, etc.) (dual 6 cores) with avg. GPU's. A 1gb GPU on a dual 6 core CPU workstation doesn't work good enough with either Lumion & Twinmotion. It works..but not good enough.
The other difference I have seen is that there seems to be no need to have network rendering on multiple CPU's (like for Vray or Indigo, etc) since all of the work is being done by the GPU on one computer. Maybe there will be network rendering of GPU's in the future...

Yes LightUp, ShaderLight,Twilight, etc are half measures I guess....& good ones.
They are all certainly worth every dollar & then some.
It's great that these programs can export a rendered model that you can walk round in (& the quality is quite good)
Lumion and especially Twinmotion are truly interactive in realtime. But they are more costly.... $200 vs $2000 for Lumion &$3000 (+$900 per year) for Twinmotion. But these programs have a lot of features (that I assume increases the cost) that most Arch. firms don't use frequently. In Lumion I don't need tools to build complicated landscapes that cannot be made precisely, etc. Although the integrated vegetation objects are great.
It does seem like the companies who developed gaming engines are all waking up to Architectural Visualization at the same time.
Cryengine has a "architectural visualization coming soon" banner on their web site!
Lumion comes from gaming (but that seems to be what is tripping them up since they are not properly addressing architectural design interactions.)
Anyone who has seen some of your kids interactive game graphics are knows they are more effective than most expensive static images & some animations.
Anyway this is a very exciting time to see what design & presentation tools emerge.

Great topic & the wave of the future.....until something better comes along.

I've looked at Lumion, which seems to have promise but they are developing it poorly & just had a disastrous new release yesterday.
Lumion has great site tools but I have found that it needs lots of work.

There's folks out there using gaming engines effectively but they are all full time visualizers (archimmersion, etc)
Twinmotion looks great for an architecture office that uses Revit like us since it has a Revit plug in.

We need interactive realtime rendering tools.
We spend a lot of time in front of clients with sketchup models projected on the screen & designing with them in realtime.

Our present workflow is a pain & costly (since I own the firm).
We design in SU - develop the design in Revit - export to SU then color & add entourage - tour & change design & materials the SU model - Render static scenes with whatever SU plugin program works best - but no - realtime rendering that some clients would like.

Price for any small arch firm is a factor.
Lumion $2250 for the version that does anything
Twinmotion $3000. plus they suck your blood like Autodesk for a yearly subscription of $900/per year for any updates. I don't mind paying the 1 time price but that yearly subscription cost is a killer.

I would be interested in any programs that may be half measures (LumenRT is a 1/10th measure)