Topic: LUMEN RT2 Casuality model demonstration

[Nico RVArq.com]

LUMEN RT2 Casuality model demonstration
By the way, great reflections!

[Michael]

LUMEN RT2 Casuality model demonstration
By the way, great reflections!

Great reflections indeed, even though maybe it´s time to stop nagging about them (note to self). My guess is they must be an upcomiong feature in Lumion due to high demand. I like Lumen's indirect lighting, but with static light sources and baked textures this is doable in Lumion as well. Wonder what´s in store with Lumions 2.0 render engine Remko mentioned in another post. Maybe interactive indirect lighting? Not sure Lumen does that, as the preprocessing indicates. In my mind it involves texture rendering, and if so they are stuck with static light sources. Nice price point nonetheless.

[peterm]

Realtime yes, but not all of it, the lighting or parts of is pre-baked.

Read the page on Purchase: System Requirements quote: "You will experience slow performance if your scenes are over 4,000 m² (approximately 40,000 sqft) or 500K polygons.
"
Oh well there goes adding in a couple of trees and people.   

Nonetheless, interesting, and looks like they are enhancing, now at v2 since mid-last year.

[pierre olivier]

Just going to download Lumenrt 2 : on the paper the software is nice, in reality too much waste of time compare to Lumion ... Make a cube takes so much tiiiiiime ..... with flickering sometimes you have to fix the model again ... and again ... Good point : sunlight is really the best i have seen ....

[peterm]

Coincidence that they just happened to pick the same SkUp house model that has been a main one used in Lumion samples (for at least a year)?

[RT-Visualization]

Too bad that is Sketchup only, I would love a seamless export from Softimage to a realtime rendering engine

[mark0spasic]

(ADMIN: Merged 2 threads with the same topic)

interesting video of lumenrt2 it`s good to have competition  


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx8S8_1TH6s&feature=player_embedded#!

[mark0spasic]

Nope  http://www.e-onsoftware.com/ makes lumenrt and  http://www.act-3d.com/ makes lumion 

[Aliki_N]

Great lighting and great material reflections, however, lumion is still by far the best. What they are not telling you is how long it took to export just a simple animation like that. No readily animated people, cars, trees, and skies. No artificial lights, no...... the list is end less. I wonder whether you can even export large complex scenes as seen in the previous lumion competition.

[arch_bd]

 

[Michael Betke]

Whats this house they are showing in the first video? The same like in Lumion. Can it be downloaded somewhere or so? I would like to run some tests.

[meem]

its a very good presentation but seriously it can't be compared with lumion.. I have bought the lumenRt and now am cursing my self.. it will never complete render even in draft quality..it hangs on some time 1 % some time in 90s.. and it wont go..  i have never tried the best quality... once i did and after 2 hr it was 1% and still hang. so i closed it...

besides these problems what i don't like are their forums.. they sucks.. you cant get any help.. every time you have a problem you will have to email to the officials :/

and it don't have any trees artificial lights.. and there is no news when it will be implemented... when i bought it there was no trial nothing.. but i bought it just because it was looking easy like lumion and was not costly.. but now am cursing my self (

In my opinion if you are going for LumenRt, then first try LIGHTUP for sketchup.. its very great reasonable price and very well integrated in SU.. besides their animation is just like the LumenRt

Thank you

[Ola Stian]

@Michael Betke
You can download the model from google warehouse
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=5065f445750ed480b1405c60da930365

[Remko]

LumenRT basically uses old technology. It's how Quest3d did it 10 years ago. The results can be amazing but there are some serious drawbacks. You can use this technology in Lumion by the way.

First of all you can forget about any vegitation or complex geometry. I think LumenRT is Limited to only 500k polygons. For Lumion we wanted as MUCH polygons as possible because this is always an issue with architectural models. Especially when they are modeled in Autocad or some other CAD tool. They always add masses of useless polygons. I don't think people want to spend time removing them by hand. So that's why you need the ability to add many polygons.

The second obvious problem is that only the final result is real-time so until you get the final result (which can take up to 30 minutes or more) you are in the dark about how everything will look. Good luck tweaking your scene under those conditions. We think that artist input is more important than the actual rendering technolgy. So, you need a tool which helps the artist tweaking and make everything look perfect.

The third huge problem is that this method places severe restrictions on dynamic properties of the scene. Since everything is baked beforehand the bake solution is invalid as soon as you start moving things around like lighting or objects. You can forget about moving cars, characters, waving trees and things like that. Only a fully real-time solution will give you that.

The fourth problem is memory usage. All these light maps take up precious GPU memory. You can probably get away with it for a small building but for larger areas you have to lower the resolution of the lighting or it's just impossible.

The fifth problem is that this lighting model is great for simple lighting but it does not do more complex lighting like specular highlights, transmission and bump maps.

So as you can see these are 5 very important reasons why we have chosen to do everything in real-time. On top of that there are technologies on the horizon which will make it possible for us to get similar lighting quality. We have good faith that real-time radiosity will become a reality.

Now, in addition to this. Lumion has the "lightmap" material. So if you are in need for a radiosity baked interior you can use Vray to render the lighting and output it to textures. Lumion can use this and even combine it with the existing sunlight! This way you can do the interior lights with vray and render everything else in real-time. We notice that very few people use this option though because of one of the reasons above or simply because it takes too much time.

The reflections in LumenRT are quite good for real-time renderin. They use a cube map at times but for essential reflections they use planar reflections. The good news is that with the Lumion 2.0 deferred pipeline planar reflections are a lot easier for us to create. They have serious limitations because they only work on flat surfaces but I'm confident we will be able to pull off a nice solution in the future. I'd also like to see how it combines with bump mapping.

I also heard that you have to define the material properties in LumenRT as material names. So for example you would get a name like:

WoodFloors=30%z=50%

Does not seem userfriendly at all to me. On the other hand it's cheap so you get wat you pay for I guess.