Topic: OptiX GPU rendering in Lumion?

[Michael Betke]

Looks great and can't be so hard to put in with the NVidia's OptiX SDK.



I think this is best out of two worlds. Any restrictions except its bound to Nvidia cards i guess?

[Michael Betke]

Intersting that noone is interested in this tech. I thought of a lot of comments especially because people are discussing a lot about interiour light and reflections here on the board.

[Remko]

It's horrible. It much too slow, even for a small scene. It's faster than vray but that's about it.

[peterm]

It does however seem to be the key base platform to which some new GPU raytrace rendering engines are using and (could be wrong on this) but as NVidia now own mentalImages and iRay is based on the NVidia GPU Cuda raytracer this would seem a useful raytrace strategy to implement in Lumion.

[arch_bd]

Lol, hahaha  

ADMIN: VIDEO DELETED

Iray is new feature in 3ds max and works with standard multi-core CPUs, the rendering process needs time to wait too......
Does not compare with the speed and Lumion realism.
Creating realistic real time images and videos has never been easier and faster with Lumion.
Thank You Lumion Team

[Michael Betke]

Does not compare with the speed and Lumion realism.

Areyou kidding?? iRay is unbiased which mean physically correct. Same like Maxwell and Octane plus some others. Lumion looks like a mikey mouse comic compared to unbiased rendering.
I use Lumion for projects myself a lot but there is still a lot to do until it can even compete with other real-time game-engines like Cryengine.
Lumion is the best in its specialized field for making fast movies but thats it. Lack of terrain editing and vegetation placement (without brushes) eats up time I formerly save on export, and material setup plus scene setup. For most people it's okay and I can make my clients pleased but as soon as a client wants to present his customers things in a live-demonstration I have to switch to another tool because after one year there is still no executable.

So your statement was totally out of place here.

[arch_bd]

My statement had to do simply only for the effect of time, nothing more. time is money my friend

[Michael Betke]

In time you are right, but you also refered to realism which was my point.
Unbiased rendering is always slower of course but the time you click stuff in your tool is also taking time. In some tools you click more in some less.
Lumion is definitly a tool where you spent a LOT time clicking icons. Especially if you have more in it as one building and three people which seems to be more than enough for 80% of the users.

I'm looking forward to Lumion2 but have the bad feeling it will be a indoor solution only this time like the devs state here on the forums somewhere.

I got a good ROI with Lumion so I dont want to complain to much here. Its a nice tools with good devs helping out where they can. 

[smithy]

I am really glad that somebody brought up this topic. I think hybrid rendering is the future and what NDK guys are doing is quite amazing and far from horrible like some people like to suggest in this forum. On the other hand this is a Lumion forum so bias is expected

I did a quick comparison with the same model (sponza) which is publicly available so anyone can judge for themselves.

http://www.archnviz.com/lumion_vs_ndk.jpg

[smithy]

Yeah I couldn't match it exactly but that is not the point. The difference in realism is more than obvious.

Their video is made in 1080p resolution with 2 x GTX 460 (very cheap configuration) and it runs at ~5fps. Even today if you have dual or quad GeForce 580/590 configuration you can easily render most of the interior scenes at real-time speed.

Interior scenes in Lumion or any other real-time 3D engine with "classic" rendering simply don't look right. Screen space AO is an improvement but it is not even close to the OptiX AO from NDK or similar software.

[smithy]

Accidentally they just published a new video.

[Michael Betke]

At the moment it looks all a bit flat due the nature of real-time material setup. Looks like a bad Mentalray image.

For me I use Octane Render as a GPU render engine which also has some kind of direct lighing mode where I get fluent frames per second but with the advantage of advanced material usage.

I really like NDK but I think they did worse marketing this year and really need to make themself a brand. Lumion has the advantage of beeing Quest3D branched and already have a wide user-base. Using hybrid is another great approach and I like to see new possibilities especially with the bad indoor lighting I've seen in Lumion2 previews (looks like from Sims3). A Scene with baked lighting looks much better in Lumion1....

[Michael Betke]

Hehe okay I admit I had Sims3 not that bad in mind. My compairson was a bit too harsh. 

Well, I was exspecting a bit more non-gaming look for indoor lighting in Lumion2 because they told before it will be the power-feature of Lumion2 and all will be about indoor lighs and Lum1 was all about outdoor.

This is what you can do with Unity3d in arch-viz after baking some lights. At the moment you dont even have specular maps in Lumion. I don't want to compare to engines like Cryengine or Unreal-Engine because some people would state it is another price league:



or



Thread here: http://www.ronenbekerman.com/forums/finished-work/1139-loft-interactive-unity-3d.html

And keep in mind: It is realtime, it would run in any browser as as stand-alone (another thing we dont get with Lum2). I think Lum2 indoor-light definitly is not "fantastic". Its so..2007....I exspected more after seeing a good start with Lum1.

[Michael Betke]

There is no. With baked lights you bake them on lightmaps and do whatever you want then in real-time. You get the GI from your renderer you used so as photorealistic as you can handle the renderer to the costs of having the light solution baked. It means if you move a chair then its shadow will stay at the spot.

You have determine if the client wants photorealistic interactive look or if wants to move stuff around or change lights on the fly. If you render a movie, go with light baking for indoor in most cases.

I hope Lum2 will get other good stuff in 2012 for making it worth to upgrade for my need. Until no better indoor lights are shown, or brush based painting then I stay at Lum1 or use Leadwerks Engine (no Unity user here, it was just the sample i showed). 

[Aaron]

I'm pretty confident the shots currently on display don't do the real-deal much justice.

The Lumion devteam is very small and I can only guess they are just way too busy to impress the hell out of us with gorgeous demorenders. Gladly so tbh.
Too many times I've tried to reproduce stunning examples on slick websites
to discover it was all a bunch of bull.
That said, of course its true lighting, no matter what format is chosen, only comes to maturity these days when paired with a proper GI/Radiosity sollution.
Something along the lines of CryEngine3. Yes, apples and oranges, but relatively small ones.

Have a look at this:
http://bac9.imgur.com/lime_hall

Realtime (no lightmaps) with crude but working GI.
Good enough I reckon