How to breathe life into your designs with the Lumion content library
With over 5,600 items and 1,200 materials in the Lumion content library, it’s easier than ever to infuse your renderings with life and beauty
Add context to your designs
Making your architectural renderings more believable often depends on showing the real-life experience and the context of the spaces you’ve designed. This means showing interiors and exteriors as they would look in real life, and not the unrealistic utopia of unbroken sightlines, ultra-sleek surfaces and polished, pristine spaces.
Whether you want to place a few trees and bushes to give the impression of nature surrounding your building design, or you want to furnish a living room with an assortment of models almost as if you were filling out a movie set, Lumion makes it easy to turn static 3D images into living views that touch on the client’s memory, experience and desire.
One of Lumion’s distinct advantages is its wide-reaching content library consisting of over 5,600 items to furnish buildings and landscapes and over 1,200 materials to make all of the textures and surfaces throughout the project feel incredibly real.
How do the models and materials in this Lumion 10.5 rendering give the design a unique personality?
Lumion 10.5 saw the addition of 67 new models in the content library for backyards, garden designs, landscape designs and any other outdoor spaces that are part of your project. These models are high-quality and, by simply incorporating them into your project, you can immerse viewers into the beauty and the experience of your designed spaces.
For a complete look at what’s new in Lumion 10.5, including the new models as well as numerous improvements for workflow speed and ease, check out the Lumion 10.5 Release Notes.
67 new models to elevate your outdoor designs
Typically throughout the year, Lumion gets one major (paid) upgrade followed by a few smaller updates, which are free for Lumion users who are on the latest version.
For example, in the wake of Lumion 9, the Lumion 9.3 release came with LiveSync for Vectorworks and Lumion 9.5 featured wood and brick materials as well as leafless trees and forest wood objects. With most updates, especially the major ones as well as the x.5 updates, the Lumion content library continues to grow. And in Lumion 10.5, you can find 67 new models made especially for outdoor spaces and for creating a connection between interior and exterior, and architecture and nature. In this render made in Lumion 9.5, you can see how the assortment of forest objects and leafless trees heighten the mood of this residential home.
You can find most of the new models from Lumion 10.5 in the Indoor and Outdoor categories in Lumion’s Build Mode. Within each category, you can also find a series of subcategories. To ease the process of searching for models, it can help to first think about which category and subcategory you would naturally find the model.
For instance, when looking for a garden bench to use in your landscape design, simply locate on the Outdoors category and click on the Furniture subcategory. Scroll through the pages until you find the exact bench you want.
Explore some of the new models available in Lumion 10.5 Pro
How to customize objects
After finding and placing models throughout your scene, you have some customization options with regard to the scale, transparency and rotation of the model. For some models, you can change their colors to better fit within your design’s overall color scheme.
Just look for the little color wheel when navigating the content library and, once you place the model, select it to open its properties. From there, all you need to do is move the color picker until you’ve found the color you want.
Using the Lumion content library has countless advantages, but there are some drawbacks with regards to customization. While you can change the color of some models, you may not be able to change a chair’s wooden legs to metal legs, for example, or you might not be able to change the texture of one pillow without changing the other pillows.
Make spaces feel unique
The Lumion content library is a large, valuable asset that can help streamline the render-building process and infuse a sense of personality and uniqueness into your scene.
With the new objects in Lumion 10.5 and the entirety of the content library, it’s easier and more enjoyable than ever to create beautiful renders that draw emotions out of your designs and entice clients to look closer, and better, at your residential, commercial, interior or landscape project.
For more resources about using models in Lumion’s Build Mode, head on over to the Knowledge Base for a wide selection of helpful guides.
