Excellent materials are vital when you need to create convincing visualizations. The Lumion material library has been extended and vastly improved.

123 new materials have been added to Lumion 5, taking the total to well over 648 available materials. But not only this. All the materials in the library have undergone a conversion process and are now all ‘physically-based’ which means the materials look better and more realistic than ever before. Physically Based Rendering (PBR) is a method for calculating how light reacts to a surface and is based on the physics of the interaction between light and a surface. The result is a more realistic looking material.

There are several completely new categories of material, namely plastic, leather and stone. All of the previously existing material categories (20 of them) have many extra materials available. These new physically-based materials, combined with the new, more intuitive, materials interface is a great leap forward, enabling users to find exactly the textures that they are looking for, simply and quickly.

Optimizing materials can often be time-consuming and difficult. To maintain the highest standards regarding usability, Lumion 5 has an entirely revamped materials interface. This reduces the time and work needed to get your materials looking just how you want them. The new materials interface follows Lumion’s PureGlass® user interface approach, which is designed to make complicated technology easy to use. You will find remarkably few icons on your screen at any one moment, providing you with a satisfying and intuitive experience.

This effect is a jaw-dropping addition to the range of artistic effects in Lumion. Switch it on with a single click and watch your scene transform itself into a smooth-flowing oil painting. Users of Lumion will already be familiar with effects like “sketch” and “paint”, which help provide an artistic flavour to your images and films. The oil painting effect is another one in the ever-broadening palette that Lumion provides.

Another super artistic effect for use in stills and animations. Depending on the settings you choose, it can make your scene look something like a chalk or a pastel sketch. It’s another feature to help you breathe life into ideas and present them in an attractive and conceptual way to colleagues or clients. Use it together with the volume lighting and produce a dreamy effect for your interiors.

Tweaking color shades can instantly change the feel of a scene. The new Analogue Color Lab in Lumion 5.0 allows you to tune the coloring within your scene to give it a kind of ‘instagram’ look, which can have a great artistic impact.

The blueprint effect is especially useful for animations. You can begin a clip with your scene looking like a blueprint drawing and then gradually fade in the colors and materials and watch your animation come to life.

It is often important to highlight certain materials in your renders or animations, so that they stand out more clearly relative to everything else. For example, pipes, paths or specific surfaces. The new Material Highlight feature allows you to do this quickly, attractively and easily.

The new Mass Placement feature allows you to build huge scenes even faster than before. Just draw a line and the objects you select will be placed along it. You can also spread them out at arbitrary distances apart, rotate them randomly, mix the object selections and change the number of objects placed. Mass Placement can be used for all objects, making it extremely easy to put traffic on a road, create a forest or a garden, or place a crowd of people . All of this with a couple of clicks and sliders!

Animating objects is essential in bringing your films to life. The Mass Move effect enables you to efficiently animate large numbers of objects. Simply draw a line in your scene and watch the objects close to that line move at the speed and in the direction you define. Super-easy and super-fast. This effect combined with the new Mass Placement now makes it extremely fast and easy, for example, to create multi-lane traffic moving along a wide road at different speeds, or to have a crowd of people walking along a street.

Lumion 5.0 has an expanded capacity for still images. Now it’s 100 photos; a great improvement on Lumion 4.5, which could hold 10 photos. This possibility leads to an improved workflow in making still shots. You can now take effectively as many as you like, without deleting any before deciding to render the ones you want.

Different stakeholders often have different visualization needs. For example, one stakeholder might need a more conceptual and artistic look, while another might require something more technical. In Lumion 5, creating multiple movies for the scene you have created will be easy to achieve and manage. You can make up to 10 movies for a single scene.

Being able to choose from five render options allows to find the balance between quality and speed in your workflow. If you want the highest quality in your final video presentation, then choose 5 star. When the time pressure is on, you can choose a 4 or 3 star with a very small compromise on quality but a greatly reduced waiting time: either 50% or 75% render time reduction. So, if you only have a half-hour to render your film, click on the 3 star option and you’ll get a great quality movie, on time!

Render time is crucially important in the visualization workflow. Due to detailed improvements in the rendering engine, Lumion 5 renders even faster than previously. Tests have delivered render time reductions of typically 20% to 90% for images and animations of the same quality on the same hardware. This is quite staggering, considering that Lumion was already the fastest architectural rendering option available anywhere.

Volumetric Sunlight is the kind of light that seems to hang in the air itself. This is an effect that looks something like a ray of mist with light streaming through it. It can easily be switched on and off in Lumion 5.0 and its characteristics can be adjusted with a slider to give you the exact level you are looking for. This effect is categorised as a ‘weather’ effect but can equally well be applied indoors to help add atmosphere and breathe life into a space.

Lighting can make or break the impact of a still image. Hyperlight® provides a great boost in the quality of lighting in your stills. Hyperlight® was developed using unique in-house technology and is a physically-based method of incorporating light reflections into a scene. Hyperlight® can be especially effective in making attractive images of building interiors. It looks fantastic and adds a whole new ambience to your renders.

The many places and cultures in which Lumion is now used around the world are reflected in the characters available in the people library. With Lumion 5.0, another huge step has been made with an extra 73 (in Lumion Pro) animated characters representing various cultures from around the the globe. The new additions include, amongst others, Middle-Eastern, African and East Asian characters. 60 of the characters were made by the renowned 3D modeling company, aXYZ Design.

High-quality foliage so often breathes life into a scene. Lumion’s native shrubs, plants and trees help put Lumion in a league of its own. Lumion 5.0 contains 87 new trees and 103 new plants from around the world, bringing the total high quality plants and trees to around 1000, and making Lumion an even more global product through its further increased local relevance.

Beautiful reflections from water very often boost a scene’s realism.
Lumion 5 includes the possibility to add plane reflections to water, adding even more realism to the already highly realistic and evocative water available in Lumion.

Very often subtle changes in the skin tone make characters that look more lifelike. Lumion 5 incorporates a new way of rendering skin and facial features of people.
This adds an uncanny realism to the individuals that you place in your scene

Lumion continues to work perfectly with many major 3D modeling software packages, including Trimble® SketchUp®, Autodesk® Revit®, Nemetschek® Allplan® and Vectorworks®, Graphisoft® ArchiCAD® and Autodesk® 3D Studio Max. To coincide with the development of Lumion 5.0, a dedicated exporter has been developed especially for McNeel’s Rhinoceros (Rhino), now making it a breeze to transfer a model from Rhino into Lumion.

*** A selection of the total content in Lumion Pro will be made available the normal version of Lumion. This will approximate to one third of the total content library.