March 04, 2014, 02:38:01 am
Hi, thanks for your interest and time spent with Lumion.
... As landscaping is such a vital part of Architectural visualization it is necessary to use custom trees all the time as even speedtree's massive library does not have the species that different projects in different countries require...
Many visualizations can, and have been achieved with non-specific species. I suppose it depends on the nature of the project and landscaping/species accuracy required.
That said of course, there's going to (almost) always be a gap between plants provided in the Lumion Library and those required by users, so using custom plants can be required.
For your comments 1 and 2; you should be able to make the plant mesh double-sided and mapped so the textures show both sides. What software for the plants have you been testing import to Lumion?
Lumion by default for real-time culls backfaces so models need to be specifically imported already with those additional mesh elements created. Once you do that, they should import OK. That does add to the weight of the object for real-time, but can be done.
re 3: yes, thanks for the feedback on this one. It is only SpeedTree plants that are linked to the Wind system. It requires specific programming to link any other sort of tree library, some tree libraries only provide the mesh and no capability for wind motion, although there are some that may do so now. Of course that can also mean special licenses to access such features as well. Some are also only suitable to other rendering environments and are not optimised for real-time, so may work for a few imports but not large scale usage, as does SpeedTree.
Certainly it would be interesting in the future to see such extended capabilities, time will tell.
Please note that if you can import those other plants and they are not too heavy (for real-time), then lack of wind may not be a defining factor. Selective camera views, use of library plants to show some wind, whilst others are static, can work and give great results.