Topic: Wooden house

[mateuet]

This is my third test with Lumion and I have to say I'm very surprised with the speed and quality. The things I miss are reflection maps on the materials and better environment reflections on the glass.
On this video I had some strange green reflections on the glass (I understand it's reflecting only the environment and are no real reflections) Is there a way to load custom reflections on the glass?
The possibility to reflect an interior environment on interior glass and exterior environment in extrior glass would be greatly appreciated.

Here's the video:

[Morten]

Is there a way to load custom reflections on the glass?

Not at the moment.

The possibility to reflect an interior environment on interior glass and exterior environment in extrior glass would be greatly appreciated.

This is already possible. But first I need to explain how reflections work in Lumion, as that's one of the hardest concepts to come to terms with.

Since the hardware is not fast enough to calculate raytraced reflections in real-time, there are just 2 options:

1) Planar reflections: This is perfect for mirrors. The downside is that the render engine basically has to render everything that is reflected a second time (mirrored), and depending on the scene complexity this can drastically reduce performance. This is the reason you typically only see planar reflections in small scenes in real-time 3D graphics. This feature is not (yet) available in Lumion.

2) Cubemap reflections: Also known as "faking it" What you are seeing on the glass in your scene is a 360 degree panoramic reflection texture which is rendered from a single point in the scene (this point is set by adding the Lights/Utilities/Reflection Control object to your scene).

If you haven't added the Lights -> Utilities -> Reflection Control object to your scene, it will be placed high above the terrain in a default position.

This 360 degree panoramic reflection texture is then projected onto all reflective materials in your scene, including the glass in your video.

The downside is that it is a rough approximation, and you will never be able to achieve perfect reflections with this method, but it's all we've got in Lumion for the time being.

Advice:
My advice is to place the Lights/Utilities/Reflection Control object inside the building, and try rendering it again. I also tend to reduce the reflectivity amount of reflective materials in my scenes, to try to hide the fact that the reflections are "fake".

[mateuet]

Thank you for your fast reply, indeed if I can manage to reduce the reflections i'll be happy enough.

I've been working with Vray and Octane render for some time already and I have to tell you guys: I can live with the fact that reflections are not raytraced! mainly because with the time it takes me to render a good picture in those renderers with lumion I can render a whole video. Much more fun and interactive.


Thx guys, keep up the good job!