How to achieve authentic natural lighting in Lumion
Tips for mastering natural lighting in your renders
Illuminating architecture
Natural light is key to creating visualizations that feel both real and engaging. Since light shapes how we perceive spaces in the real world, accurately capturing it in your renders can make a world of difference in how they're experienced.
Natural light highlights textures, casts dynamic shadows, and adds depth, giving your scenes a sense of atmosphere and life.
As an architect or designer, understanding how sunlight interacts with your design—throughout the day and across seasons—can guide important decisions, making your spaces functional and beautiful.
With Lumion, analyzing and simulating natural light is straightforward, thanks to a few simple, intuitive tools. Let’s explore how they work.
The sun effect
Getting the natural light just right starts with the sun. The sun effect in Lumion is ideal for animating the sun at specific positions in the sky. Different sun positions can evoke various moods, determine the size and direction of shadows, and enhance colors and materials. So, creating an animation showing these changes can be highly impactful.
To enable the sun effect, start in movie mode then find Sun in +FX. With the timeline slider set to frame 0, adjust the Sun height and Sun heading sliders to your desired amounts and click Create keyframe. Move the timeline slider to the last frame and repeat these steps.
You can also adjust the Sun disk size, which will impact the types of shadows cast. With the ray tracing effect enabled, a larger sun disk size will produce softer shadows, and a smaller one will create sharper ones.
Sun studies
In movie mode, you’ll also see the Sun study effect, which is ideal for replicating the sun in a specific real-world location, date, and time.
By understanding how sunlight interacts with your design, you can make more informed decisions about optimizing natural lighting and improving a building’s integration with its surroundings.
The Edit button in the effect will take you straight to a world map, where you can click on your preferred location. Alternatively, you can tweak the latitude and longitude sliders. Once your location’s set, you can then edit the time and date, plus the timezone and daylight saving options.
To create animations of the sun’s position, create keyframes by following the same steps as the Sun effect.
Real skies
While the sun might be the first thing that springs to mind when considering the natural lighting in your scenes, another element not to neglect is the sky. From clear mornings to starry nights, by switching up the sky, you can effortlessly adapt the colors, shadows, weather conditions, and more to your renders, significantly boosting their authenticity.
In Lumion, you’ll find a wide selection of skies suited to all climates and times of day in the Real skies effect. Once you’ve found the one that best fits your scene, you can adjust the Heading, Brightness, Background brightness, and Sun intensity using the sliders, or flip the sky with the toggle.
Don’t forget, if you’re using real skies together with the sun effect, make sure that Sun is above Real skies in the effect stack, that way you’ll be able to tweak the sun’s positioning using the sun effect.
Ray tracing
Nothing says natural light quite like ray tracing. By automatically simulating the behavior of real-world lighting, the effect allows sunlight to cascade across surfaces, reflections to dance on shiny materials, and shadows to align perfectly with their surroundings.
To achieve this in your scenes, all you’ve got to do is enable the ray tracing effect in photo or movie mode. If you plan to use it across all your images and animations, you can save time by adding it to your custom FX stack. This way, it’ll automatically be applied to every scene.
There are a few tips and tricks to highlighting and enhancing elements of your design using natural light. Ray tracing works particularly well with glass, translucent materials, and vegetation – check out these guides to discover just how easy it is to achieve stunning, natural-looking results.
For a more in-depth look at how ray tracing works, check out this guide.
Try these tips yourself
If you’re new to Lumion, you can still follow along with this guide with a free trial. Get yours now to enjoy 14 days of unlimited access to the latest version of Lumion Pro.
Styles
Looking for a quick and effective way of capturing certain climates or times of day? Lumion’s preset styles come in handy here. Choose from a wide range of templates, including day, blue hour, and overcast, to instantly recreate your desired lighting conditions.
You’ll find these in photo mode by clicking the Custom style button.
Designing with light
Don’t forget, you can combine these tips to achieve the exact result you’re looking for. Natural lighting can transform any project, whether it’s through sun placement, realistic skies, or ray-traced shadows and reflections.
Not using the latest version of Lumion? Upgrade to Lumion 2024 today for instant access to all the latest features and updates as soon as they’re released. You’ll discover real-time ray tracing, high-quality PBR materials, lifelike animated characters, and much more.
