Topic: Lumion Animation

[abudawood]

Hello,

Could you tell me how exactly an animation is created in Lumion? What different ways are possible? Do you import a model, add your objects, materials etc and then just tell Lumion what path to take and it records it or does it need to render the whole animation?

Regards,

Abu

[peterm]

Hi Abu

Thanks for your interest in Lumion. 

You can render the whole or parts of an animation(called clips), or even individual frames, so it's up to the user.  The rest of the steps you mention are right in how it works.  There's a very simple way to record the camera path.

I would suggest taking a look at the Video Tutorials. The main one goes through all main steps to create an animation, and then look at the separate Tutorials on "How To" to get more ideas about how things work.

[abudawood]

Hi Peter,

Thank you for the quick response.

Say i have a PC meeting the system requirements and I have plotted a 60 sec walk through a building at 24fps...how long would a render take? Is it couple of minutes, couple of hours or couple of days? I know it depends on how good my graphics and computer is but as a rough guide, it'll be quite useful to go back to my boss with this info.

Abu

p.s watching through the videos now...cheers!

[Morten]

Hi Abu, the expected render times depends on a lot of factors, so it's almost impossible to say without generalising.

If you render your scene in 1-star quality each frame typically only takes a fraction of a second to render on a PC with the recommended specifications.

If your graphics card is old/slow and/or your scene is very complex (lots of detailed meshes, high resolution textures, spotlights, reflection planes, Global Illumination effect etc) and/or you need to render a video in a high resolution (e.g. 2560x1440) you should expect each frame to take several seconds to complete.

You can see real-world rendering times in the Gallery section of the forum, for example here and here.

If you've already got a PC that meets the system requirements, I would highly recommend that you download the Demo version (Small download but limited functionality and model library) or the 7-day trial version (No limitations apart from the 7 days). You can get the latter by contacting your local reseller on this page.

Once you've installed it, try to import a model and create your own test scene (or load one of the included demo scenes) so you can see for yourself how long it takes to render a movie on your own PC.

[peterm]

Hi Abu

It does depend very much on the hardware, especially the graphics card. And, secondly, on the complexity of not only the building model, but the amount of added objects and entourage to make the scene, and whether some of the higher quality Effects and settings are used.

That said, we tend to talk about producing still in terms of seconds, and animations in terms of (a few) hours, and not days.  A one minute animation might be render at medium quality in 12 minutes (GTX 980 so a fast card) or 56 minutes highest Lumion quality.  For slower cards that would increase by up to 5 times, so we're still only talking about 3 to 5 hours.   

You can get some further ideas on those timeframes and PC specifications used by our members in the Featured and also Finished Projects Boards in the Gallery at the forum.  For very complex scenes I don't think I have ever seen a project mentioning more than one day to render.

Here's an example Lumion scene , rendered on a GTX 980 highest 5 Star quality, 720p, just over a minute of animation, some moderately complex items such as lights and reflections; time 56 minutes. (upload quality is better on Vimeo  ).