Topic: Reflections? - Lightmaps working with realtime lighting

[RT-Visualization]

Hello everyone,

I just downloaded the new Lumion demo and I'm playing a bit with it...I'm doing an interior of an apartment, so I just want to ask some questions about the reflections: if I'm not wrong the reflections are not in realtime but are cubemaps, is that correct? so basically i not realtime, but just a texture on the reflection channel....well, is there any way ( I suppose not now, but in the near future ) to have realtime reflections? I was thinking to use the old Playstation2 trick ( a mirror plane that basically mirro all the geometry ) but I don't know is if possible to do that in Lumion...

Thing is that I can't have reflections displayed properly on floors for the interior apartment, and I would like to see if there is an efficient solution to do that

 

Since Lumion does not bake lightmaps I was planning to bake my night time scene in Softimage and import everything into Lumion, then apply texture+lightmaps.

Now, if I want to have a nice blend between night and day, what could be the best solution? I can't "switch off" lightmaps when the day begins, so is there any way to hide them when is day time?

 

I was thinking about something like that:

You have your meshes with your texture and a (hidden)lightmap in the proper slot. When the is almost night time ( so when you move the sun to a certain point ) the lightmaps are showed, so you have bake lighting in the scene...when the day begin you just disable lightmaps again...

Or ( best of all ), since you don't need realtime lighting ( unless you want a moving light ) when is night time, a built in lightmapper will be great!

So basically you can have lights all over the place, bake them, and then just enable the realtime lights you want ( if you have cars, or a character that is walking under the a light )...more or less is the same principles used with Beast and in game engine in general...this, together with realtime day time lighting, will be a wonderfull solution ( at least for me ).

 

Cheers

[Remko]

Light mapping is not something we want to build in right now because of two reasons. First of all light maps require you to uniquely parameterize your model. In short, each place on the model needs an unique UV. For trees and landscapes this is almost impossible. For dynamic objects it is impossible. Also it would require an extra step from the user coming from Sketchup for example. We want direct results and cut away any complex processes. The second reason is that when you want to go with light maps you would probably want to import a Vray solution anyways. There are many lighting engines out there and you can import a solution from any of them. Simply bake your textures and you are done.

Something else we are working on is better real-time lighting. For v1.0 we worked on good sun light. In one of the upcoming updates we will provide local lights and we will implements them so everything runs fast, without light maps.

Reflection is also something we are looking at. Raytraced reflections are always superior but for planar reflections we can almost get similar results in our render engine. Raytracing is too slow for now. For now we just have cube maps and we are doing some research into planar reflections.

[RT-Visualization]

Being able to do everything without lightmaps will be the best solution, I will use Lumion especially for this feature, so I really hope that in the near future there will be the possibility to simulate night lighting!

And I hope to hear good news about reflections, since it will increase realism a lot

 

Cheers guys