Forget what you know about rendering. Lumion changes everything. It's not like some add-on for your design process. It fits right in and gives it a boost. Lumion breathes life into rendering, making the process simple and enjoyable from the moment you import your model, until you render out a beautiful image, video or 360 panorama. Lumion helps you show the beauty and personality in your project, making the experience of your design visible for everyone to see, long before the project actually gets built. In this video, I'm going to show you how to go from a lifeless CAD model to a beautiful render full of activity and emotion. You're going to learn some tips and tricks along the way, as well as some new features in Lumion 11. Now, every Lumion project can be broken down into five steps. Import your design model. Assign materials. Craft the environment. Populate with objects. Mix effects and render. It doesn't matter what kind of design you are presenting, interior or exterior, commercial or residential, architecture or landscape. This workflow will produce impressive results for your projects at every stage of the design process. Let's get started.
Once you've installed Lumion and started it up, a hardware benchmark will check the speed of your computer. The results are shown here. This computer has an Nvidia RTX 2080 TI card. All the benchmark bars are above recommended, which means this machine is going to handle even the most complex scenes with ease. If you're wondering how your machine would fare, the free trial includes the benchmark, and you can also check out Lumion's system requirements at lumion.com.
Let's take a look at the welcome screen. Click back. The news and learning section on the welcome screen links to helpful blogs, Knowledge Base articles and tutorials. These items update often. So you might find something useful when you start Lumion. Clicking the 'Create new' button allows us to create a new project. You can choose from nine pre-built environments to place your project and start building your scene. Click back. The 'Examples' button takes you to nine pre-made examples, fully textured, lit, and with several professional effects and styles already applied.
In other words, these scenes are built and ready to render. The scenes feature some great classical architecture as well as a variety of different settings. And they're are great places to explore when you want to learn on your own. There are several new scenes this year, and the beach house is one of them. Before we build our own beach house scene, how about we take a peek? Click on the beach house example to load the scene. If it's your first time running Lumion, the first thing you'll see is the built-in tutorial, which currently covers the topics of camera movement and object placement. Let's start the tutorial. Hold down the right-click button and move your mouse to look around.
Click next. To move around in Lumion, use the WSAD keys to move your camera forward, backward, left, or right. Click next. Q moves the camera up. E moves the camera down. Click next. Since we're going to learn these topics together in this video, I'm going to close the built-in tutorial by clicking here. Don't worry, you can always open it again by clicking on the help icon at the bottom right. For a helpful combination that will get you anywhere, hold down the w key and the right-mouse button at the same time, then move your mouse to steer. Let's fly around and have a look.
To move faster, you can hold the shift key down as you're using the navigation keys. If you really want to push your speed, you can also throw in the space bar. Now, as much as I'd love to play on the beach all day, let's get back to learning and finish exploring the welcome screen. Click on the 'Files' button at the bottom right to go back to the welcome screen. It's important to save our work as we build our scenes. First with the 'Save as' button to store the scene on our hard drive, then just 'Save' to continue updating the file with your progress. When we are ready to continue working on a scene we have saved, we can load it from here. Click back, clicking on the 'Language' button at the top will allow you to choose a different default language.
My computer is set to English, but you can choose from many different languages without installing a different version of Lumion. That's it for the welcome screen. Let's jump right into creating a project. Click on the 'Create new' button again. There are several templates to choose from to get the right context for your design. Let's start with the plain scene. We are now in 'Build Mode'. This is where we bring our designs to life. Now, my favorite thing about Lumion is that the sky is blue, the grass is green, and the sun is out. You can load your project in Lumion by clicking the import button at the bottom-left corner of the screen.
There are several options for direct imports and with LiveSync, you can import your model and create a real-time connection for Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD, Vectorworks, BricsCAD, and AutoCAD. Click on the model thumbnail within the imported models, library, then click to place your model. For me, precision is key. So I like to set the exact coordinates of my imports origin. Select the imported model, then click the type-in button to enter the coordinates you want. This will help you keep all of your imports lined up. On the bottom left, you'll see the main navigation has four tabs: content library, materials, landscape, and weather. Let's dive into the weather options, which offers immediate insight into how lighting and shadows will affect your design. It's easy to change the sun height and direction by using the dials.
And, you can easily control the number of clouds using the slider. At the bottom right, you can access the Photo, Movie and 360 Panorama studios. Use these to create images, animations, and 360 images. Click the disc icon to get back to the welcome screen to manage your files. It's always a good idea to save early and often. Let's do that now. The save button is disabled because a new project must be 'Saved as' first. Now, just click on the build button to jump back to the scene you were working on. Click the gear icon to access Lumion settings. If you're falling short on the benchmarks or have a large Lumion scene, you might consider backing down these settings here to increase performance. I like to keep my settings maxed out because I know my computer can handle it. Ultra wide or 4K monitors can put a drain on your system. So you may consider switching the windows screen resolution to 1920 by 1080 to lighten the load or to simply resize your Lumion window. Proxies are new in Lumion 11.
These are lightweight replacements for heavy objects that drastically improve performance and navigation. Let's turn them on so we can see them in action later. Input and system settings let you further customize your Lumion experience. Click back to return to build mode. Hovering over the question mark button overlays the screen with some helpful tips. If you are ever lost, look here for some help, and don't forget, clicking on the question mark while in build mode will start with Lumion's built-in tutorial.
With our beach house model imported, it's now time to talk materials. Lumion 11 puts an impressive library of materials right at your fingertips. Let me show you. Select the materials tab. Hovering your mouse above any surface from our imported model highlights it. If you click on a highlighted material, you'll see the Lumion material dialogue appear. There are five main category tabs of materials. Each tab has its own subcategories. Now, you can either swap the imported texture with a Lumion material or assign Lumion properties to the imported texture. Water, glass, and grass are a good place to start, and are perfect candidates to be swapped out and replaced by the animated and realistic Lumion materials.
Click on the pool water. Now, choose Lumion water to swap the static image out with stunning animated water. Adjust the material properties to craft your look. Here's a pro tip. Click the material thumbnail to go back to the material library. Head over to the 'Various' collection where you will find water presets. Just click to get a completely new professional look. Now, check out this glass. If your material name contains 'glass', Lumion automatically applies its 'Pure Glass' material. Click on the material thumbnail to navigate back to the materials library. Here, you can select a Pure Glass preset. Double-click to change the specific properties.
Adjust the sliders to get the look you want. I like a little relief in my glass to take the computer edge off. The 3D grass in Lumion 11 has several configurable presets and you can have as many variations of grass as you like in the same scene. Let's click on this flat grass texture and replace it with landscape grass. This grass is lightweight and best when your project contains large fields. You can see that I already turned the 3D grass on. Stick with me, I'll show you how to do that in just a moment. Let's click on the front yard and add a 3D grass material.
These are a little heavier, but they look so nice. Just like other materials, double-click on the preset to adjust the sliders to make it your own. There are some materials with built-in displacement maps. You can spot these by the D on the icon. These add depth and realism to an otherwise flat surface. I'm going to swap out this flat sand with this super realistic displacement sand. These textures are truly amazing. If you are good with texturing in your modeling program, it is easy to add Lumion properties to the imported materials. Make it a standard material and adjust the gloss, reflectivity and relief. Click this button to create a normal map from the color map, or load your own if you have it. There are several other tabs to adjust position, orientation, transparency, settings, weathering, and foliage. You can also add your own displacement maps to imported materials. Use the displacement slider to get a convincing 3D look. In Lumion 11, there is a new RAL color picker and an updated regular color picker. These can really ease your color selection and accurately connect it to the color standard you're using.
Now, keep in mind, while in build mode, some things look a little different from the final rendered version. This compromise between edit quality and output quality is what keeps you moving fast in Lumion. Alright, time to craft our world. Let's take a look at the Landscape tab. The third tab from the left opens the landscape functions. Here's where you can switch on the landscape grass and further refine its appearance. Using the sliders, you can adjust the size, height and wildness. Let's make some mountains and rolling hills surrounding our site using the height tools. If we move the camera view high up in the air and look down, it's easier to modify a larger part of the terrain. Adjust the brush size and speed. Here, you can raise, lower, flatten, jitter and smooth the Lumion terrain to better fit with your imported design model.
Notice that the steep terrain is automatically rendered as cliffs. Slick. You can paint the train like this. Get the look you want by adjusting the pattern, brush, size and speed. You can change the overall style of the landscape here. There are several presets that represent just about every geographic region. Now, brace yourself for this one. You can add an ocean with just one click. Adjust several properties, using the sliders to create the right look. Let's take a moment to take it all in. It's amazing how easy it is to immerse your design model into a lively Lumion environment, but we aren't done yet.
Let's take another look at the content library tab at the bottom left so we can start populating our scene with realistic objects. To see the object library, make sure to click on the 'Place' button first. Then select a top-level category to find the perfect object for your scene. Within each of these categories are several subcategories, and within each subcategory, there are often several pages of results. In total, the Lumion content library has just over 6,000 models. These other icons in the object area allow you to select and move, rotate, scale and delete objects. Let's go back to Place. Click on the effects category and then hover over to the fire subcategory. You can see the new volumetric fire options here. Click on one of them and you will notice that the model is now attached to your mouse. This is how you can place any model from the content library. Move your mouse into the scene and click anywhere on the ground to place it.
Adjust its properties to get the right look. This new volumetric fire looks great. Now, let's add some lights. Choose from spotlights, Omni Lights and area lights. An Omni Light placed above this fire can cast a nice warm glow with some more brightness and a little color. A line light down here will really highlight those rocks. Now, let's add some spotlights to these track lights. Click here to select all identical objects. Then, adjust all of their cone angles, brightness, and color at the same time.
In Lumion 11, you can now click here to load your own custom IES spotlights. Simply upload the relevant IES profile and recreate the exact lighting arrangement you need. Next, we're going to place a few fine-detail trees, which you can find in the fine-detail nature category. You can use keyboard shortcuts to rotate and scale to get the object just right before placing. All of these objects are pre-animated, truly optimized for Lumion. They even respond to weather. You can see this tree gently blowing in the breeze. Heads up, these fine-detail nature models are much richer than the other nature objects in Lumion. As a result, they will make your scene heavier and can slow down render speed. So use the fine-detail nature models sparingly. You can grow your landscape really fast using the mass placement function. Let's go back to the nature category and choose a plant model. Click here to activate the mass placement tool. Click to start the line, then hold CTRL to continue to add points. This menu pops up for you to adjust the number of items, direction, spacing and offsets. It's easy to add additional objects to the mass placement path.
Click on another object in the library, then click on the plus sign. See how it gets mixed in. Click the checkmark to confirm. Let's add more trees even faster with the paint placement tool. Click here to activate it. Pick an object, set the density, then hold your left mouse button and sweep your mouse like a brush across an area to place hundreds of nature objects in your scene. Switch to erase to thin out the paint placement and achieve a more realistic result.
See the new proxies kicking in? They keep the screen frame rate up, and your frustration level down. If you headed into a client presentation or showing a live walkthrough, remember you can disable proxies in the settings here. With these powerful placement tools and extensive library, your model will go from barren to lush in minutes. Use the other object categories to further your design narrative. The select, rotate, scale and delete tools give you full control of the objects in your scene. Click here to edit all categories at the same time, or choose a specific category to isolate while editing. You can always edit an object's properties by clicking on it with the select tool. Adjust the transparency of a tree to help your design show through.
If you move the mouse to the top of the screen, layers will appear. You can have up to 20 layers. It's a good practice to assign different object types to different layers. Being well-organized with layers will be especially useful when we use phasing animations, one of Lumion 11's new effects. Our scene looks complete. Now for my favorite part. Let's mix a few effects, and snap a few photos .On the bottom right, clicking on the camera icon will take us to the Photo Studio. This is where you can take snapshots of the scene you've built and add effects to make a more compelling image. The interface of the photo studio is a bit different than build mode, but you still move around your scene with the same camera navigation controls.
Adjust your focal length with this slider. You can double-click on any slider to enter precise values. 35 is nice for exterior shots. Click this button to set your eye height at five feet. Click this button to level out the horizon. You can save camera locations by clicking the 'Store Camera' button above each camera slot. Let's add a few cameras. Clicking on any stored camera takes you back to that spot in your scene. These numbers below get you access to additional photo sets. There's room for 100 shots. Click on the viewer window to render a quick high-quality preview.
This feature saves us a ton of time and guesswork when adding effects. In Lumion 11, you can now open up the Theater Mode by pressing the F11 key. Then, click on the high-quality preview to see a large, almost-finished view. Keep in mind that our final render will be even better than what we see here. Click the checkbox to return to the Photo mode. Before we get into adding individual effects, let's explore the Styles. These are truly the 'easy button' and Lumion. When your project needs to be finished very quickly, all you need to do is click on a Style to get a fairly good result with very little effort. Check out the preview. Now, take a look at some renders of this project using only Styles. There are several options, from realistic to sketchy. Clear the Style by setting it back to Custom. The FX button at the top left is the door to Lumion's effects. You can blend several effects to build your own custom style. There are several different effect categories: sun, weather, sky, objects, camera, animation, artistic, and advanced.
The best effect to start with is Real Skies. This will set the mood of the entire image with beautiful natural lighting. There are about 60 Real Skies with preconfigured Sky Light settings. Let's start by building out three different custom styles, or effects stacks. A rainy morning, a sunny afternoon and a starry night. We can completely change the emotion and feeling of the scene by simply adding a different Real Sky. Nothing else. Now, let's layer in some complimentary effects to embellish our design story. I'll add the Precipitation effect to our overcast morning. Notice how the raindrops interact with the 3D model and even Lumion's water. A new feature in Lumion 11 is raindrops that streak down the Pure Glass materials.
Stick with me, I'm going to show you how this small detail is even more impressive in animations. On this beautiful sunny day, the sun is casting really harsh shadows. Add the Shadows effect and turn on 'soft shadows' and 'fine-detail shadows. That's much better. If you have spotlights in your project, Lumion 11 has an updated micro shadow technology that includes a soft gradient of shadow into all the tiniest details around the spotlight. Now, let's add a few more effects that go on every scene, regardless of the mood we are setting.
We'll add another advanced effect to all of our stacks: Reflections. Lumion invented speedray reflections. Switching it on improves reflections without much of an impact on your computer performance. The pencil allows you to add reflection planes to specific surfaces or click the auto add button and Lumion will add them for you. These are perfect reflections, but they have a bigger impact on computer performance. Add the Color Correction effect. I usually warm the image up a notch to balance out the blue light from the sky. Click on the preview area to get a quick render of the results. After you add a handful of effects, you can save your unique stacks of effects to Files, then load the effects on other cameras to save yourself a ton of time and tedious clicks.
In just a moment, I'll show you how to use these effects stacks in the Movie and 360 Panorama studios. Let's make one more image, a floor plan that we can use to compliment our other renderings. First, I'm going to load up the sunny day effect stack. Then, add one more effect, the new orthographic view effect. You can enable the view by clicking here, and then click and move around in the viewer window here to align the view, the zoom, the heading, and the pitch. You can also align the camera to a surface by aiming the camera at the surface, then clicking the crosshairs here. You can slide the near and far clip planes to slice away the roof and reveal the interior space plane. Save the camera just the same as your perspective views. At each stage of the design process, the new orthographic view feature in Lumion 11 lets you embed life, color and texture into all of your technical renderings. Click the green render button to export the current shot or the entire photo set.
Check out these final renderings. Each one took less than a minute to render at 4k resolution. With Lumion's effects. It's easy to give your design the feeling of a stormy morning, a sunny afternoon or a wondrous starry night. To make an animation, switch to the Movie studio by clicking the filmstrip icon at the lower right. This is where you become a director. Let's record a camera path. Like before, you can move around your scene, clicking the plus sign to store camera locations. Click the play button to see a real-time preview. Lumion fills in the camera path between the locations to make a movie clip. You can change the speed of the clip with these arrows or double-click on the time to type a specific duration.
Slower camera movements are usually better. For better control of your camera speeds at the beginning and end of the clips, just click on the smooth or linear buttons on either side of the timeline to choose whether the camera accelerates at the beginning of a movie clip and decelerates at the end, or if the camera maintains a constant, linear speed. Drag and drop camera keyframes to change the order.
Update, insert and delete camera keyframes with these buttons. Click the checkmark to save the clip and go back to the Movie studio. I've added a few more clips. You can play the clips back individually by selecting the clip and clicking the play button or play the entire timeline by clicking here. You'll see a vertical line separating the clips when you play them back all together. Click and drag on the timeline to quickly scrub through your movie. In Lumion, you edit your video before you render. Instead of building an effects stack from scratch, let's take a shortcut and load two of our previous effects stacks that we created for the photos. We already have a rainy morning and a sunny afternoon with no extra effort. We have a rainy day animation. Just click play. Hold up. Do you see the raindrop sliding down the windows? It's those little details that make Lumion movies really come to life. You can add even more visual interest to the sunny afternoon clip by animating a sunset time-lapse. First, we need to get rid of the Real Skies effect. Double-click the trash can to remove the effect.
Let's now add in the more customizable Lumion Sun and Sky and Clouds effects. Let's start with setting the Sun. At the beginning of your clip, Click the add keyframe button on the sun height slider. Advance the timeline to the end of the clip. Add another keyframe, then adjust the height so the sun sets. Scrub the timeline back and forth to see it in action. Now, if that much time is passing, the clouds can't be stationary. At the beginning of your clip, click the add keyframe button on the position slider within the Sky and Clouds effect. Same deal, advance the timeline to the end of the clip. Add another keyframe, then adjust the position so the clouds are speeding by like a time-lapse.
Click in the preview window to see a high-quality preview. You can also click play to see the camera in motion. So I have one last movie effect to show you. In the pro version of Lumion 11, one of the new features is the animated phasing effect. You can show the process behind your design's development or construction through the power of animation. You can find it here. I've already added it in and animated some objects. This is really cool as you can mix and match various animation effects on the models throughout your scene, creating really unique results. This allows you to tell your design story with much more control and excitement. We'll be releasing an advanced tutorial of this new phasing effect soon. So be sure you subscribe to our channel so you don't miss it. Now, let's render the whole movie by clicking on the green button at the bottom right. Keep in mind, there's a trade off between quality and render time. We're going to do five stars, 30 frames per second at full HD, a very high-quality output. You'll be prompted for a file name and location.
This is a brief glimpse of the rendered output. Keep in mind that render time depends on your chosen quality level, graphics card and the length and complexity of your movie. To make 360 panoramas, which can give you a 360 view of your design on a mobile phone, tablet or many common VR headsets, click here to access the Panorama studio. The interface changes a bit, but the idea is the same. Move around your scene and select locations by clicking on the Store Camera button. Each location will eventually be rendered as a 360 Panorama that you can upload to MyLumion for sharing and viewing online, or for use in a virtual reality headset. We now have six locations. We will load the effects stack that we created earlier to each of the positions. Let's first render this shot as virtual reality output. There's a big difference in the time it takes to render Draft quality versus Production quality. So unless it's really necessary, select Draft quality. View these in your VR headset for an immersive 3D experience.
You can also render the panoramas to MyLumion. This will send your online render and its unique link to your or anyone else's email. This link can then be forwarded to anyone you like. It's rendering a MyLumion now. Fast forwarding, we can now view the renders on the MyLumion website. You can jump between viewpoints by enabling these eye symbols, or you can jump between them in order, using the arrows at the bottom left. Thanks so much for sticking with me through this tour of Lumion 11. I hope you picked up a few tips on how to get the most out of this powerful visualization tool. Be sure to check out the other in-depth, step-by-step tutorials on our YouTube channel and website. That's the best way to learn more advanced techniques. I'll see you in the next tutorial.
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