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.
