**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.**