Topic: Evaluation Questions - Satelliteimage import, roads, blocky shadows

[mbe]

I started to evaluate lumion and have some question.

In general its a nice tool with good stuff for real-time viz. I dislike the UI. Looks blotchy and not very slick like I'm used from other (game)-editors.

Some of the supported buildings are looking like from 1995 too.

 

Anyway, overall I like it and have some question before I consider buying it:

 

1. I noticed very blocky shadows in the viewport. Like if the shadowmap is 256px or even less. Is this a normal appearance? What rendering is involved in Lumion? Deffered rendering? My clients likes to navigate the project in real-time but with such a low-quality of shadows the showcase effect is not that impressive as in a rendered movie mode. I hope I can turn on all the beauty in a real-time presentation too and not just in a movie-mode.

 

2. Can I build my own roads and rivers or just using imported meshes?

 

3. I work with large scale terrains in my projects usually. Around 2km x 2km or even 4x4km. Can Lumion handle such a scale with huge amount of vegetation? One of my projects had over 1.2 millions of vegetation assets so this needs to be in it. Whats about vegetation billboarding and LoD meshes in general?

 

4. In the context of question 3 I would like to know if Lumion has the possibility to import a satellite image and place it over the whole terrain.

 

One suggestion: It really would help to have some technical fact sheets somewhere around the website so professionals can get a first impression.

 

Thanks for answering my questions.

[See3D.be]

1. Did you use 4* for the editor quality? under settings

2. There is no road builder now, but possible plans for a basic road builder. Rivers can be made now with the terrain editor and adding water.

3. Large landscapes are possible, but you have limmits of what your video card can handle. 1.2mjl assests, vray instance? This will be an issue in realtime. If you use lumion objects they are optimised and have LOD, but still it would be an issue.

4. You can load any texture, but i guess this is more a task for in a modeling package. Still keep in mind max size of textures and there memory use.

 

http://lumion3d.com/wp-content.....ure-v4.pdf

[mbe]

No the large amount of vegetation objects isn't from Vray.

At the moment I use Leadwerks Engine which is also real-time and I'm very pleased with the engine for viz.

But Lumion offers a more specific tailored setup because it's not aimed at games of course.

So I want to expand my tool set and consider Lumion at the moment. 

 

I don't understand why loading a stallite image for terrain coloration and reference is a modeling task. Using a satellite for it is very intuitive.

 

Can I paint vegetation like with a brush or only object by object?

[See3D.be]

Lumion is not a modeling tool, so anything related to precise texturing i would do in a modeling tool.

If you want to swap texture, maybe consider using the layer system.

 

For now there only a paint individual objects, but sure the will be a real bruch paint function in future versions.

[mbe]

I think I made myself not clear enought.

I use a stallite image for reconstruction of real spaces and heights.

On this shot I have a 4k x 4k image to place my modeled buildings, vegetation and so on to match the area with exactly 2048m.

I think most people don't do phantasy like worlds with lumion but real places which need some kind of reference and I doubt the tool will allow me to export a huge collapsed mesh. How do I know where I have to place a tree if I don't have a reference?



 

I have the demo now and the shadows are blocky in the viewport but rendered smooth and fine if I do a screenshot.

I guess I can life with that.

 

One strange thing are the cow animations. They act like marching soldiers raising their head all at once. No randomness like cow01 starts at frame 100, cow02 at frame 50. I guess all models do it the same way....but seems this is done in the movie mode. So for real-time presentation it looks strange.

[See3D.be]

I also use Lumion for real word project/location, but i will do my terrain and texturing with satelite image in a modeling packages, because you have better control.

For the moment you cant change the texture on the lumion terrain.

If you import the terrain from a 3d modeling package, you can also load a custom texture then.

If the texture have the same size, then the mapping will fit.

 

The cows will render random animation in the movie. And if you want them, the animation is sync, but once you switch to weather, its will be not sync.

[mbe]

Thanks for your time and answers. I played around with lumion for some hours now and it's really nice out of the box.

Clicking around the mouse all the time is a bit time consuming. Some more shortcuts would be really fine. I'm more the shortcut guy. 

 

I guess I can do some really good stuff with it after some working time.

[See3D.be]

Probably we need to setup a list of available shortcuts.

And once the could be added in the future.