Topic: Please improve the output quality of Lumion.

[robertobatista]

There is no doubt Lumion has great potential and has made great strides over the past few releases. Still there is obviously room for improvement. And while everyone may have different wishes, we can all agree that the output quality is still lacking. Lacking to a degree that most people or firms I speak who looked into Lumion say that everything is good except for the quality output, which is the reason not to purchase the software.  And while speed is amazing and is very useful during the design phase, at the end, the output is the most important. It has been said that Lumion targets users who’ clients don’t demand the Vray quality, but like any technology, people get used to certain standards. For example, the images shows are form a local real estate agent who hired a freelancer to make renderings to sell a few homes. Nothing special about it, but to achieve that quality in Lumion is almost impossible, while these renderings are intended for the average Joe and not necessarily the professional client who is used to high end rendering. So how is Lumion going to even get a fair chance if the bar is set so much higher than what Lumion can provide at this moment?

My suggestion is for the makers of Lumion to concentrate fully on the output quality. It would be really a pity if Lumion would vanish, because it’s a great tool

[BABE™]

hello robertobatista

i think sometimes lumion can be mistaken for vray............but if |TIME IS MONEY|
then vray is gonna cost you ALOT of time.


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[Serget704]

Hi Babe! I like your works very much! Great job! Congrat!
J'aime beaucoup la qualité de ce travail très professionnel! 

[sach]

For exterior rendering lumion can easily match Vray, but for indoor rendering, without all the lighting and effects that Babe can show "no offence Babe your renders are great" Lumion won't compare at all with Vray, and even if time is money, i really prefer to take more time  to render interior renders with "3Dmax Mentalray" than present a fast render made with Lumion that doesn't look natural.....don't get me wrong....Lumion is  really good for exterior renders....except for a couple of things like "not enough reflection planes"

Sach

[Digitalmarley]

The whole point of Lumion is a fast, easy to use, real-time rendering engine, its not meant for photo-realistic quality output. The trade off is instant, pretty freaking awesome looking animation, fly-through's and other features we only dreamed of having in real-time just a few years ago. My clients are blown away that they are getting stunning animations as early as schematic design because its just so fast to go from concept sketchup model to lavish fly-through in a few hours.

Real-time is going to match the quality of video game technology and grow as hardware tech grows. The minute you start seeing v-ray quality graphics in call of duty and your video card take up all 6 slots in your computer, thats when you can expect a real-time render engine to output a photo-real image.

You could opt for autodesks real-time solution 'Showcase' which has a ray-tracing feature, but you'd be kissing all those pretty tree's, grass, sky, clouds and everything else that makes Lumion great goodbye.

[BABE™]

FAST RENDER on vray
start video @2:40. and count how many seconds it takes to render 1 photo

[robertobatista]

We use the term Vray to indicate that a rendering is photorealistic but you can pretty much achieve the same quality with all rendering engines (Maxwell, Mental Ray, Iray, Artlantis, Octane). Speed of rendering is a good selling point, but it doesn't have any value when you present an unrealistic cartoonisch looking interior scene. 10 years ago you might have gotten away with that and some of you still have clients who  except that quality, but nowadays everyone is already accustomed to the "vray" quality. I gave an example on how real estate agency, who typically are the last in line when it comes to technology, have vray quality images to present their unbuilt work. It's everywhere. Drive by a construction site and you will see a vray quality rendering on the billboard. So I have no idea in which market you can get away with Lumion interior stills. And If you say that Lumion is primarily for exterior scene, would be a strange argument because most architectural images produces are interior renderings. after seeing the faces which is pretty straight forward, clients want to see how the building works from the inside. If anything, Lumion is suite better for landscape architects, with their  beautiful realist looking trees, grass and water and where reflection and GI doesn't play a role. .  

So, my suggestion is to either build  raytrace in Lumion or have the ability to export a lumion scene to a software that has raytracing. If I have to built to different scene in two different software packages defeats the purpose of Lumion. And besides, raytracing is the most inexpensive and easiest feature to built in. Apart from the common rendering engines, cad/BIM packages have raytracing in them as well, while it's not even a main feature. Let the user decide whether he wants cartoonish looking images in a zip of time or a high quality photorealistic rendering but the trade off of longer rendering times.  

[IdeaImmagine]

start video @2:40. and count how many seconds it takes to render 1 photo

Many minutes to get 1 image... but what an image!
Can you get the same quality with Lumion?

[BABE™]

Many minutes to get 1 image... but what an image!
Can you get the same quality with Lumion?

Yes Spectacular !................well worth the 4 1/2  hour wait

[BABE™]

Hi Babe! I like your works very much! Great job! Congrat!
J'aime beaucoup la qualité de ce travail très professionnel!  

Hi Serget..thankyou......
i was just trying to make a point regarding the Astronomical length of time
that vray takes to process a basic image...............the image below on my slow 512mb Imac
with 8 reflection-planes, took 15 seconds.

[Jared G.]

What about setup time in Vray, BABE? Faster, slower, or similar to Lumion?

[BABE™]

Well it seems that most users dont use the DEFAULT render settings of VRAY
The car in the video above displayed a render time of 4 1/2HOURS |
for a 1200/900 image.

users appear to test and re-test using different settings.

[Jared G.]

I meant like scene creation, not render settings. So, if you were to redo "Le-Grand Premier" all in Vray, what kind of time are we talking just to get to a point where you could render it? Same amount of time as Lumion? Twice as long? Three times as long? Faster?

[BABE™]

Sorry im not very good at Maths
but to render a video that has 30 F.P.S.....that would mean that:

A 1 second frame......... would take approx 4 hours.....so you would have to calculate
30 X 4 Hours =  ?

the guy in the video managed to get a custom SUB-STANDARD render @ 13 mins per frame

so.......That would be :

30 X 13 Mins = ?

[robertobatista]

Like I said before, the output is the ultimate goal. Not the speed. At the end clients want this quality: