How rendering can be a rewarding experience
Discover how rendering in Lumion can unlock stress-free creativity
Finding your creative flow
Think back to those early experiences you had as an architect, an intern, a student, or even just a connoisseur of beautiful designs. What did you feel? Were you perhaps filled with wonder and excitement at the thought of one day becoming an architect?
Maybe it was the time you were overwhelmed with delight upon entering a building by your favorite architect. Maybe it was the friendship you made with a colleague during an otherwise intense internship at the big firm. Perhaps it was simply the late nights talking design concepts with friends, or the hours spent at your drawing table, sketching your passion project from an abstract thought to a fully-fledged design.
“Hanging by a Thread” rendered in Lumion by Jeremias Dabbah, Camila Crudo and Sofia Di Tomaso. Student winners of Architizer’s One Rendering Challenge 2021.
Rendering with Lumion can feel like a reminder of all the wonderful things that led you to become an architect in the first place. With its smooth and intuitive environment, Lumion helps you clear your mind and find your creative flow. With time-saving features, one-click effects and thousands of materials, objects and nature items, Lumion gives you all the tools you need to explore your designs real-life potential and give shape to your artistic vision.
Let’s take a closer look at a few of the ways you can tap into your passion for architecture and design with Lumion. In this article we'll look at rendering from a new and exciting perspective and explore its potential to unlock creativity.
A simplified experience
Among the older, more traditional architectural rendering practices, lofty feelings like ‘stress’ and ‘calm’ weren’t really part of the equation. Complex software interfaces with hundreds of buttons used to be badges of honor for software packages, and ‘user experience’ was never ‘architect experience.’
Lumion is designed to work seamlessly with your CAD program. The entire process becomes intuitive, guiding you as you import your model, build a detail-rich scene around it and render a beautiful result. Right from the start screen, you can check your computer’s hardware, create a new project from one of nine templates, explore Lumion workflows with example scenes, or load your own projects.
After starting a new project or loading a current project, Lumion only shows the most relevant buttons when you need them, reducing clutter and giving you more space on your computer screen to comfortably view your project and its surrounding context. As you open Lumion’s Build Mode, you can access all of the project-building tools, including Lumion’s large content library of objects and materials, the wide range of landscape sculpting tools, weather options and more.
There’s a lot more to the Lumion rendering experience than what’s immediately visible on the surface, and for good reason. Rendering should be an enjoyable experience, with software that recognizes your visualization needs and provides a straightforward, direct path to making it happen.
Visualize design choices in real-time
Lumion LiveSync makes it incredibly easy to test your design ideas. As you make changes to you 3D model, you can instantly visualize them in Lumion's immersive environments, giving you insight into what the final result will look like.
LiveSync is available for Sketchup, Revit, Archicad, Rhino, AutoCAD, Allplan, BricsCAD, Vectorworks, and more.
Let your creativity flow
Much like a blank piece of paper, Lumion offers the opportunity to create without limits. To express without barriers. And let the creative juices flow.
By freeing you from the constraints of complex interfaces and clunky workflows, Lumion acts like a canvas for you to capture not only the aesthetics of your architectural design, but also the mood, style, atmosphere and emotion of the design in its future setting, symbiotically connecting it to the surrounding environment.
“Organic balance,” rendered in Lumion by Suraj Karki (@_yesk).
To help you capture the content of your imagination in all its rich detail, Lumion features thousands of objects, materials, dozens of landscaping tools, and other effects — all easily accessible from Lumion’s simple interface.
With the landscape tools, for instance, you can shape the low rolling hills of the distant horizon, sculpt the jagged mountain peaks, or a desert landscape
You can change the environmental lighting and add a Real Sky to create a striking sunset or a starry night.
You can create an ocean with the click of a button. Change the style of the rocks, modify the color of the dirt, make the grass look lush, or add a forest in a single sweep.
Cabin in the forest, rendered by architectural visualization studio D.Wulf.
Capture the soft glow of a the wine country...
Wine country, model provided by Ten Over Studio.
...or the frozen stillness of the tundra
Winter cabin in Norway, rendered in Lumion 11 by Bartosz Orliński and designed by Vårdal Arkitekter AS
No matter where you want to go, no matter the landscape or the environment, you will enjoy making it in Lumion.
Helpful tips:
While building a scene from scratch in Lumion can be fun, you can also find several tools to skip a few steps and create the exact environment you need. With OpenStreetMaps, for example, you can choose anywhere in the world — Tokyo, Amsterdam, Honolulu — and download the building masses, height maps and satellite maps of a specified area.
Want to skip the scene building in Lumion altogether? With the Photo Match effect, it takes just moments to plant your design right in the center of a photograph.
Want to show your design for a home in a small northern Norweigan town at three in the afternoon on October 12th? With the Sun Study effect, it’s a matter of point and click.
Build stress-free collaborations
Architecture has always been a collaborative endeavor, requiring teams of professionals to develop designs, choose materials, connect with vendors, submit tenders, keep clients happy, seek out new projects and so on.
On a smaller scale, just think about everyone involved in developing and constructing your average project. Typically, you’ll have to work with your Colleagues, the Client, the Communities who will live near the project, City Hall, Corporate interests, Construction teams…and that’s just the letter C!
By adding Lumion into your design and communication processes, you can create a more stimulating and inspired collaboration flow, using quickly-made renders for the insightful feedback and constructive criticism needed to drive the project forward.
For instance, let’s imagine you want to carve up the Lumion project’s rendering tasks, giving the building and its interior furnishings to one person and the landscaping and context-building to another. With Lumion’s Merge Project option, you can bring your Lumion projects together in a single master file.
Lumion LiveSync is another collaborative tool that provides real-time feedback for the design options your team may be reviewing. Let’s say the buyer wants to make sure the bedroom window isn’t visible from the street. With LiveSync between SketchUp and Lumion, for example, you can test different window placement options and ensure the best choice for the client.
Finally, because Lumion is able to render static images in minutes and animations in a few short hours, you can enjoy the benefits of a quality render whenever you would like, at any phase of the design process, for any reason. It’s this unique blend of utility, freedom and flexibility that allows Lumion to bring a lightness to the task of rendering.
Connect through beautiful visualizations
Like many other things in life, communication is key to a positive and rewarding relationship with clients.
It’s the small miscommunications that result in angular walls that drive misery into the heart of the visitor (“Oh, you wanted a single skin wall? I thought you said a Libeskind wall!”). It’s the storage space located in the living space. The oversized bedroom for the newlywed couple who do not own any furniture yet. It’s the placement of the window above the kitchen sink so that, at seven in the morning after the family has had their breakfast, the bright sun blinds anyone brave enough to do the dishes.
Because Lumion gives you the ability to render any design idea or question in a simulated, lifelike situation without causing any interference with your other tasks, these mishaps of miscommunication can be a thing of the past. Renders that show the building design with its textures, colors, surrounding context, entourage and more, provide a common ground for you, your client and any other interested parties.
Let’s say your client is a touch on the nervous side. It’s a big budget project with a lot on the line, and the client demands absolute perfection from every angle — the design, the budget, the timeline, the way the HVAC system remains completely hidden from view anywhere in the building. With Lumion, you can offer this client a level of comfort and assurance by connecting them to the process through the easily understandable medium of images and videos.
In less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee, you can show multiple perspectives of the exterior form, demonstrate how sunlight lands on the balconies on the third floor, and what the building will feel like when it’s alive and full of people.
By speaking the same language as the client, perhaps something even special can happen. You might just end up knowing your client, their family and their children, and the best part — you’ll have the chance to see the excitement and joy on their faces when you reveal their finished home.
Simply have fun working in the Lumion world
It all comes down to this. Stripped of any of the generalizations about joy in the work of an architect, Lumion is a professional tool and it’s fun!
While working in Lumion you explore endless creative possibilities, build scenes from nothing but your imagination, or recreate real-life places from a photograph, a site evaluation, or a memory. You can plant trees and construct a landscape to bring your idea to life, or capture a feeling or mood with lighting, people, and objects.
You can lean into your artistic side and show your building design from the highest mountain or at the bottom of the deepest sea. The Lumion world is a place where architectural dreams come to life. A place that bridges the gap between the reality of the profession and the aspirational reasons why you joined it in the first place.
A new relationship with rendering
Lumion takes the age-old notions about rendering and flips them on their head. No longer is the process dependent on the sweat, blood, and tears of the architect; Lumion makes rendering enjoyable. It’s designed to remove stress from the very beginning, giving you the opportunity to tap into your creative potential and produce your best work yet.
So, if you haven't experienced Lumion software yet, you can easily try it for free with our 14-day trial and explore all that Lumion Pro has to offer.
