Topic: Can Lumion show Excavation Depths?

[isidearmi]

If I wanted to show depths of certain excavations at a work site, can Lumion help me achieve this? Or can Lumion only go from the ground up? I'd like to show an 18 acre site and show the client where we are going to dig deep, where we think some hidden structures are, where the bedrock is beneath the soil, etc.

Thanks for any help!

[Jared G.]

Well you could import a topography model from a program like Sketchup or just raise up the lumion terrain, then depress it as you need.

But as is, you cannot depress the ground plane further than its default location. not sure what I was smoking that day.

[isidearmi]

Alright, thank you!

[peterm]

Hi isidearmi

..Or can Lumion only go from the ground up?

Most visualizations done by users are done for above ground level scenes.  However, you can dig down below the Lumion base height of 0, see pic.  The maximum would be equal to the maximum height available which for a standard terrain is 200m.

How deep do you need to go?  As you can see in the pic, there is an automatic fog setting in Build Mode which prevents too large a depth.

The Lumion terrain is not a solid mass, but a single outward facing surface.  It is not possible to create tunnels within.

Lumion has a brush size minimum of 2 meters (for current technical reasons), so if you needed finer modelling then you would need to use some other 3D modelling tool, and import it as a mesh.

By raising the terrain first then pushing down you could gain extra height.

I'd like to show an 18 acre site and show the client where we are going to dig deep, where we think some hidden structures are, where the bedrock is beneath the soil, etc.

Lumion has an editable terrain square of 2048m.  How would the 18 acres fit to this?

You can have content outside that area (Lumion has a maximum world size of 42km radius), and you do that by creating your own terrain and importing it as a mesh.  

The camera is designed to work above the terrain mesh, so although you can dig a whole and travel down it, you are not able to pass through the terrain boundary.

If you import a terrain mesh as your terrain, Lumion will not know that that mesh is a terrain.  This means the camera and objects placed on the terrain mesh can go below that mesh.  There are ways to prevent and manage those aspects.

[Jared G.]

oh, very good to know! not sure why I thought you couldn't depress it. 

[peterm]

It's because the way objects on the terrain behave when the terrain is raised or lowered, which also get raised or lowered automatically, which I forgot to mention.     

Note to isidearmi

If objects are locked they will not move when the terrain height is edited.