Bring ray tracing to 360 panoramas in Pro
Show off every angle of your design
When a flat image isn't enough
You've nailed the layout. The materials are right, the light falls the way you imagined, and the render looks great on your monitor. Then you send it to a client, and they scroll past it in seconds.
A single photo, no matter how polished, only shows one angle. What's outside the frame is left up to guesswork, and that's often where the real idea of the space gets lost in translation.
What actually makes a design click for a client is the feeling of standing inside it: turning their head to see how the kitchen opens onto the living room, or looking up to see how daylight moves across a ceiling.
That's exactly what 360° panoramas are built for. And now they carry the full quality of your best work with real light and accurate reflections.
Ray tracing meets 360° panoramas
Ray tracing has been part of Lumion Pro’s Photo and Movie modes for a while, giving you accurate reflections, realistic light bounce, and glass and water that actually behave like glass and water. Now that same level of realism is available in 360° Panorama mode with Lumion 2026.1.
You can add the Ray Tracing Effect directly in Panorama mode, and it uses a fully path-traced rendering workflow built specifically for 360° output. Every reflection, every shadow, every point of light in the panorama is calculated with the same fidelity you'd expect from a ray-traced still, just wrapped into a format your client can explore on their own.
Get clients to say yes faster
In architectural visualizations, the gap between "a nice render" and "a render that gets a project approved" often comes down to how believable the light and materials feel. Ray-traced panoramas close that gap for immersive content:
Clients get a real sense of scale and light. Instead of picking one angle to show off, you hand them the whole room and let them look around.
Materials read correctly from every angle. Glass and water are always fully ray traced in this workflow, so reflections stay convincing no matter where the viewer looks.
It fits naturally into presentations and virtual tours. A ray-traced panorama slots straight into the kind of 360° walkthroughs you're likely already sharing with clients or embedding on a project page.
Create your own panoramas today
How it works
Getting started is easy:
Open the Panorama Effects window and add the Ray Tracing Effect, the same place you'd normally set up your panorama render.
Choose your output resolution. Currently, that means Draft or Medium, since Large isn't yet available with ray tracing switched on in Panorama mode.
Render your equirectangular panorama, ready to view, present, or embed anywhere you'd normally share a 360° tour.
Important to note that a few settings behave differently than in Photo or Movie mode, and a handful of objects, materials, and effects (things like particle effects, volumetric lighting, and animated characters) aren't supported yet in this specific workflow.
Our support article on rendering with Ray Tracing for 360° Panoramas walks through the full resolution options, VRAM recommendations, and current limitations, so you know exactly what to expect before you hit render.
From render to walkthrough, in one click
Want to take the feeling of immersion a distance further? Then invite the client to actually step inside the design and experience it in Virtual Reality.
Once your panorama is rendered, you can upload it straight to Lumion Cloud and share it instantly as a browser-based VR walkthrough.
There's nothing for your client to install and nothing extra for you to set up. Send the link, ask them to click, and they can step right into the space from their own laptop, phone, or headset.
Paired with ray-traced panoramas, this means the same photoreal light, reflections, and materials your client sees in a still render now carry straight through into something they can walk around in.
Now available for all Lumion Pro subscribers
If you're already on Lumion 2026.1, the Ray Tracing Effect is sitting in your Panorama Effects window right now, and Lumion Cloud is ready whenever you want to share a VR walkthrough.
If you're not on Lumion Pro yet, this is a good moment to change that. Try it free for 14 days and turn your next design into a 360° tour for your client(s) to step inside.
