April 22, 2013, 01:44:24 am
Hi IdeaImmagine
Inserting a duplicate model could mean importing each wall of a building seperately? Probably that's not the most comfortable and practical way...
Well generally you would not be building your scene in Lumion of the building one wall at a time. That construction (creating the model) is done in a 3D modelling or CAD tool such as SkUp, Revit, Max, AutoCAD etc.
You use Lumion to import the building with all its parts/components already assigned with materials, and use Lumion to do what it is good at, and that's building the scene and fast rendering.
That could be a solution, but it means hundreds of materials for a single object like a house, for example. Again, think about walls, openings or any other repeated "component" of a building.
It all depends on what design iterations you need to go through with client, and at what point Lumion is used in the presentation of the design. AFAIK, most houses would have, if not hundreds, then lots of materials, in Revit and some other CAD tools BIM lists and materials can extend well in to the hundreds. Unless of course, they are being designed as a minimalist design, but even then there's all the differences between interior and exterior as well as all the interior appliances etc
You would set a new material when you think the look or usage is different, or it is likely to incur a change from some other similar material.
Lumion has the advantage that when it is importing the building, it looks through all the surfaces and makes single common materials for all surfaces that share the same material reference. This means when changing the material, such as using the material sliders to tweak how it looks e.g. brightness, then you do not have to go through 50 or 100 individual materials in Lumion, all surfaces sharing the same material are updated at once, nice
Isn't it easier to just assign mapping coordinates to different surfaces of the objects?
That could be done. If the user is familiar with UV Mapping methodologies such as those used in Max/Maya, then single textures can be created that act as an atlas/diffuse map. They require to be rendered then finalised with a UV Map Editor. Of course very time a material look design change occurs, you would then need to redo the single texture map. Lightmaps from Max are a similar concept.
As RAD mentions, it is actually a detailed and complex skill area of modelling (in Max, Maya, Cinema4D, etc), and best explained by searching for tutorials available elsewhere.
Hope that gives you a few pointers that assists in understanding about Lumion materials.
