Vectorworks and LUMION Fast Rendering

[NikF]

Would be very helpful if VW would start working with LUMION.

 

Sketch up, Archicad and Revit have already a model sync in LUMION - VW should work with them to get one as well.  This would open up a lot of opportunities.

 

Thank you in advance!

LUMION Fast Rendering for Architects

LUMION Projects

[ericjhberg]

We have been using Lumion now for a couple of years to great effect. With every new release and update Lumion adds interoperability with SketchUp, Revit, and most recently ArchiCAD. I keep waiting for Vectorworks to be next, but not yet unfortunately. I'll keep hounding and asking for it though.

 

Just a quick overview of what is possible with Lumion and VWX integration...

[NikF]

Very nice, thanks for supporting this topic!

 

Enclosed one of my first VW and Lumion Projects I did:

Vectorworks and Lumion | City District Park

[Markvl]

How does Lumion compare with Twinmotion?

[NikF]

Please find endlosed a comparison: https://letsdesignstudios.com/twinmotion-2018-vs-lumion-8-0/

[ericjhberg]

6 minutes ago, Markvl said:

How does Lumion compare with Twinmotion?

I haven't tried Twinmotion yet, but it is on my radar too. From what I can tell they are very similar. The biggest differences I am considering Twinmotion over Lumion for are:

• Twinmotion is available on MacOS
• Twinmotion supports BIM Motion and VR path rendering while Lumion only supports point based 3d panoramas/VR.

 

There are several YouTube comparison up now to view as well...

 

[Markvl]

Thanks for the links guys.  Lots of pros and cons.  One thing Lumion seems to have going for it from an initial observation is better rendering.  But Twinmotion seems to have better intuitive user interaction and is cheaper to purchase.

[NikF]

What I found out in the meantime is the following:

Twinmotion is possible with Windows and Mac. Lumion only with Windows but on a Mac with Bootcamp as well.

Grafik Card must be even better with Twinmotion compared to Lumion.

Price for Twinmotion is compared to Lumion cheaper, but much less 3D objects and additional charge for e.g. flowting license etc.

Twinmotion uses unreal engine, Lumion has its own engine and therefor independent in further development

...

My personal opinion is that I am very happy with Lumion and it is my first real "intuitiv" program (just watch some youtube tutorials). Would be even better if we get a live sync with Vectorworks.

Nevertheless it depends on your personal needs and your own workstyle...

 

Hope this helps!

 

[PVA - Admin]

Feature added in 2019 SP3! Man it makes some pretty pixels:

[cberg]

Almost makes me want to ditch the Mac OS and go back to the dark side. 

[NikF]

Great!

 

Just waiting for the German VW SP3 Version...

https://support.lumion.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016412674-Download-Lumion-LiveSync-for-Vectorworks

 

[Christiaan]

2 hours ago, cberg said:

Almost makes me want to ditch the Mac OS and go back to the dark side. 

 

Twinmotion is on the side of the force

[NikF]

@Jim Wilson

Would be nice to improve VW further: some kind of similar Sketchup Plugin called Oob terrain (https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/oob-terrain)

New drone video (VW to Lumion): 

 

[Guest Alex Sagatov]

@NikF We are looking to add a more direct way of doing this and pull terrain data into Vectorworks! This is definitely a cool video, and it reminded me of a workflow I messed around with a few months back. I will post my workflow shortly!

[Acadia]

Hi, I am evaluating Lumion (which now has this great livesync) and Cinema 4D so to get amazing renderings and maybe walk-troughs.

 

From the 2 latest Demo versions I have these issues and wanted to hear your opinion about them.

 

Lumion demo: Almost always the imported VW model is way far off somewhere in the horizon. I understand, modifying the origin in VW will help

but it seems finicky. I already have every texture assigned in VW, but when I select a wall with a particular texture so to replace it with a Lumion one,

it only selects that wall, not the other walls with the same texture (or color). Is this how it is supposed to be? I recall trying this with the old Bryce 3D and it

would select all the elements which came from same color or texture.  Also, have almost no nice textures to choose from  and test (but this is due to the Demo version).

Moving around (I know, you can use the W A S D etc keys plus shift) seems not very smooth and natural.Can't you just pan and zoom and rotate with the ease of VW? Or is just me not knowing the software yet?

 

Cinema4D demo: It is beautifully integrated with VW and the imported model comes right away at the center of the window (as it should...) and with the same textures

already assigned in VW and maybe lights. But the rendered image (without any in depth setting changes because I am too new to really understand the multitude of options)

seems identical to the Renderworks one more or less.  Would knowledge of C4D make for much more realistic renderings than Renderworks, or because

they share the ray trace engine, you will only get better libraries, better mapping options and natural elements but the overall photo-realism of the rendering is similar

and less convincing than Lumion (or Vray, but that's not an option yet I understand)?

 

Thanks for any advice

 

 

 

 

 

 

[grant_PD]

c4D:

The rendering style will be identical until you adjust the render settings/textures in C4D.  This is not too difficult because you can save render settings in C4D and just apply them, giving you control over: 

• ambient occlusion
• GI settings
• sketch/toon (think artistic renderworks)
• anti aliasing
• your choice of renderers.  By default C4d has 3: Standard and Physical, and Prorender.  Standard is what VW uses, Physical is better IMHO, as it is adaptive (concentrates rendering power on more complex areas).  Prorender is a graphics card solution, and while not as powerful/good as some of the stand alone renderers, is pretty good if you have multiple cards.  You can add in other stand alone renderers, adding to your pipeline.

 

• textures can be replaced fairly quickly by either using the material exchanger function or doing it manually.  Textures in C4D have a LOT more complexity than VW does, and are key to getting better renders (I would say that if VW had more complex textures you would get better renders in VW, whereas getting more rendering engine control would not necessarily give you better renders, you might just save some render time.)
•  lights have much more control in C4d, you can set falloffs and exclude geometry from the light source.  

I tend to apply textures in VW and sometimes lay out basic lighting too.  It's much faster in VW to do this and then tweak the settings/replace in C4d.  

 

I can't comment to whether the renders are "better" in one or the other programs.  I think they actually do different things.  C4d is a product of film and motion graphics, and so has a lot to offer in those worlds, great rendering being one of them.  Lumion seems to be geared towards architectural presentation.  And while that depends on great rendering as well, I'm somewhat put off by the closed environment of it, that the textures and objects appear to be proprietary.  I will say that it is extremely quick out of the box.  I made some pretty good renderings in about 15 minutes.  My first 15 minutes working with C4d was basically "what the F.....?"  But just the other day I rendered out a set in multi-pass (every object exported into a single file on its own layer, composited) and am pretty sure that's not possible in something like Lumion. So it really depends on your workflow.  

[zoomer]

On 8/15/2019 at 9:04 PM, Acadia said:

But the rendered image (without any in depth setting changes because I am too new to really understand the multitude of options)

seems identical to the Renderworks one more or less. 

 

I think that is a very nice feature.

You can import into C4D and just hit Render, without any knowledge of C4D.

From there you can go on testing and learning.

 

 

3 hours ago, grant_PD said:

Standard is what VW uses, Physical is better IMHO

 

AFAIK

VW uses Physical Renderer since many years.

VW RW is just one year behind of R-XX Versions.

 

C4D Standard and Physical Renderer are a bit meh and outdated.

E.g. VRAY4C4D has much better quality and is faster for complex setups,

but Modo's or C4D's in house solutions allow still much faster Renderings

when using simpler Material Setups, like I do.

And you can see a lot of beautiful examples of all kind of Renderings

when people really try to get everything out of C4D Renderer and give

it some time. In ArchViz, Motion Graphics, Films, ...

 

GPU Render Solutions are generally much faster and scalable with multiple

GPUs. But they often don't provide the full feature set of CPU Renderers.

They will get more important and CPU Renderers may starve in the future

though.

 

I think VW RW is easy to use and gives decent results without much effort.

For architects it is great and not too complicated.

 

[grant_PD]

Zoomer, not sure that VW uses physical but would love to see verification from VW about that.  My only reasoning is that in C4D the physical renderer puts all cores into 1 bucket, as opposed to standard which is 1 core per bucket.   

[zoomer]

Here a quote :

 

Also when I went with cheapest C4D Prime version, after VW imports,

it was always moaning about missing plugins (Physical Sky and such)

 

 

Not sure about a single or multiple buckets, like in Cinebench.

I have seen both. Nevertheless all my cores were used.

Edited August 17, 2019 by zoomer

[grant_PD]

Interesting to hear.  

I use physical renderer almost exclusively because you can control the sampling of blurriness/ambient occlusion/error thresholding.  Those options aren't available in any fashion to VW, which is why I thought it was the more standard render, which tends to be brute force.  

[Dave Donley]

Quality settings for those aspects of rendering are in the Quality section of Custom RW Options and in the Edit Render Style resource dialogs.  If you want to see the multiple parameters that are being changed by those settings in VW you can send the model to C4D.