Topic: complex Architectural Scene test

[zinoarchi]

Hello,

This is may first test with a Complex Architectural model with complete interior furniture setup and everything. The project is designed in Archicad then imported in Lumion via 3ds Max.

Some test Renders: Render Times (3840*2160 resolution) = 5-6 seconds





Same buildlng model rendered in vray & 3ds Max; Render Time (2880*2160 Resolution) = 25 Minutes



and here is the animation:





There are plenty of positive things about Lumion: Amazing real time engine, easy, intuitive, stable, nice libraries, quality shaders, fast rendering output etc. The most impressive thing to me was the ability to import very high poly models that many softwares (like Twinmotion even with the update!!)have failed to import and handle properly.

During my test, i have encountered a few limitations:

1. The cars in the animation remains nonanimated because it was very frustrating to move the cars one by one (the slow panning also wasn't helping the cause). In the road junction what the cars will do…just crash with each other in the corner or in the road junctions rather turning to left or right. There should be a path tracking sytem where the cars would follow a path and loop. Another related matter, i didn't try it yet but do i have to animate cars for each movies sequence that i record? That will just ruin the magical experience with Lumion if you decide to do a busy urban animation.

2. A paint brush is a must especially for the small plants and grass. The "alt" + Dragging and "Ctrl" + Select are fine commands, but very irritating when you have to again individually select and reposition every misplaced small plants groups both vertically and horizontally.For a large landscape scene, these commands do a ok job but paint brush is a must when you have designed planter box, designed landscape area with curvilinear shapes etc.

3. May be i am mistaken but it seems the walking character's axis may be rotated. As a result when i create a walk sequence they seem to move to designated direction but looking at other direction. No matter what or how i try, it remains the same in the movie window.

Thank you for an outstanding job though. My best wishes for future development.

[Ferry]

Amazing work!

 

Of course we agree with your points. 

 

1. We will add more complex animation options as movie effect. We want the car wheels to rotate. We will add whole movie effects for easier animation with multiple clips.

 

2. We will have to think about how this brush should work. Maybe people can give some ideas.

 

3. We will test your rotation problem.

[EHAB]

Great Work, Amazing!

 

I have a little question for you about the cars. I imported some cars from Evermotion Collections, but I have problems with thier V-Ray Materials. So, how did you handled that, how did you import car models with thier reflective realistic materials.

[RT-Visualization]

Did you use lightmaps for interior lighting?

Nice work by the way

[zinoarchi]

Thank you guys, glad that you liked it. Credit goes to Lumion, actually.

 

To EHAB, cars are from Lumion Library. Reflections are prebuilt.

To Rt-Visualization, No lightmap for interior, just played with Lumions built in options a bit and the result was good to my eyes..

 

Take care.

[RT-Visualization]

Well, I must say that the results are pretty damn good, considering that the interiors are not done with lightmaps...

I suppose that you just exported the whole scene from 3ds to Lumion without any optimizations, is that right?

If so, I mean if Lumion is able to manage larga amount of polygons without any FPS drops, most of my problems are solved, since lots of problems comes from making low poly version of high poly meshes...

What is the polygons count? I'm really curious how much you can push Lumion.

[zinoarchi]

yes friend, no optimization, directly from max, just made sure to remove unwanted elements like vrayproxy, vraylights etc from the main .max file. After importing, i decided to remove the imported texture due to the fact that Lumion does not give you the opportunity to add the Lumion shaders to that material (not yet, but tutorial 4 shows the upcoming update does support that , including some cool!! improvement in the material section).

The Polycount is nearly 1.8milion with 1.35 milion vertices. Now i am testing a huge Building complex, which is atleast ten times the volume of this building. Lumion has already imported that quite easily…..no crashes or screen flicks. The real test will begin when i start adding vegetation and other effects and stuffs.

BTW, if you are curious about my PC in which i am using Lumion (That's the best part!!):

Intel core i7 860 2.8 GHz

Windows Xp pro 64bit

RAM: 8GB

Graphics Card: Sapphire Ati Radeon HD4870 1GB (this is what Lumion uses most and if i am correct, this card is positioned below the recommended HD5850 series.)

Now, i am begining to see why the developer has decided to leave the stand alone .exe exporter and release the application as it is. Though i am not a very technologically sound guy, i think  Collision detection does demand a lot from Graphics card and not everyone has physx card installed in PCs. This software is intended for Architect and Architectural Visualizers. Games like Crysis, GTA4 gives the most extensively powered PCs a hard time even though they have been optimized for gaming purpose. Think of importing your high poly models (not optimized and in most of the cases not clean enough meshes and ploys) into Engines like Lumion, Twinmotion etc and presenting your client with standalone with 5-6 frame per second…..definitely not going to make a good impression. Stand alone exporter can be something that Lumion can  look into in future and concentrate on upgrading and updating what they have right now.

[RT-Visualization]

Sounds really good news!

Well that was my main concern, so finally I can import the whole scene without thinking about optimization...I think that now the only annoying problem now are 5 sides polygons

About the standalone I think that a solution can be achieved quickly, since everyone has its own workflow.

Its true that collision takes lots of memory to elaborate all that stuff, but, unless you want a fully interactive scene ( windows, doors, shelves, everything ) or an interactive apartment, you don't need a perfect collision, because mainly is just about visualization itself, not functionality.

More or less you're using the same hardware I'm using ( I'm running Windows 7 and 6Gb RAM ) the ATI is the same ( 4870x2, right? ) so I'm really curious to push Lumion and see the results.

About the standalone I'm really worried about that, because the main "problem" is that your customer needs to run a powerfull workstation to see everything smooth without loosing quality...but that is the point, if you want very good quality you need a powerfull hardware, there's no other way.

 

I wonder what will be the result if you import a huge low poly scene and you just use normal maps to achieve good details, and compare the results with the same high poly version...I mean, what will be the FPS difference between the two.

[Ferry]

On polygons alone the FPS difference on new hardware will be very small. The amount of materials and textures are of bigger concern. So might be that your low polygons scene is actually much slower.