How to harness the power of Lumion from concept to final creation
A guide to architectural visualization throughout the design process
Designing with vision
As an architect or designer, efficiency is your ally. From the initial spark of an idea to the moment it materializes, you need reliable design tools that are as flexible as your imagination and can keep pace with your creative process.
Architectural visualization offers limitless potential, but there's no one-size-fits-all approach to integrating it into your workflow. Lumion has been developed to fit seamlessly into your daily routine, enhancing your unique craft and leaving you more time to focus on designing. You can easily utilize it whenever necessary, whether you want to explore how a building will fit into its surroundings, quickly assess how light falls in a space, or produce polished, presentation-ready renderings.
From conceptual to realistic
Lumion does more than just help you produce visualizations of a finished design.
With its time-saving tools and rapid rendering speeds, you can effortlessly experiment with various design choices and representation styles. This video demonstrates how you can visualize both conceptual designs and realistic depictions of the same model.
Let’s dive into some of the ways Lumion can support you through the main design phases.
Streamlining your modeling workflow
The journey from concept to blueprint is rarely linear. It involves dynamic iterations, where managing time holds as much importance as balancing feedback and stakeholder inputs.
While exploring different design ideas and moving from initial sketches to 3D models, having a quick and efficient way of developing designs in context is invaluable.
Lumion helps you do exactly that. Lumion LiveSync, the real-time rendering plug-in for CAD software, establishes a live connection between your modeling software and Lumion’s immersive environments. This allows you to model and render simultaneously as you test various design concepts. Any changes you make to your model will be instantly reflected in your Lumion scene.
Thanks to Lumion’s extensive compatibility with CAD and 3D modeling software, there’s no need to worry about how your tools will work together. You can work confidently knowing that updates made in CAD will be seamlessly reflected in Lumion, allowing you to observe the effects of changes almost immediately.
Seamless compatibility between your CAD system and Lumion allows for real-time design manipulations and rendering
Laying the foundation
A building should be in constant dialogue with its surroundings. To achieve this, you’ll likely begin by conducting a thorough site analysis to determine massing, height, allocated area, urban integration, and more.
Lumion can help you visualize these crucial contextual elements. Thanks to OpenStreetMap, you can import elevation data and satellite imagery of thousands of places around the world, so you can create an accurate representation of the project's surrounding location in seconds. You can choose to import buildings, roads, water, green spaces, and transit infrastructure, depending on your needs and project location.
To further examine a specific setting, you can easily shape the topography surrounding your design in Lumion using the landscape tools. By instantly painting or placing the relevant mountains, grass, terrain, or water in a scene, you can quickly get an accurate idea of your project’s real-life context, affirm if a design will work in its intended position, and highlight areas that need attention.
You can also examine the impact of natural lighting on your design and its surrounding environment using preset or custom HDRI skies. These real skies accurately reflect different weather conditions, seasons, and times of day, allowing you to test how natural daylight will reach and interact with your design.
Making design decisions in real time
With the concept coming together, it’s time to develop it into a more complete, practical plan. Lumion allows you to experiment in real time and observe how different design choices will impact the overall project.
An essential aspect to consider here is materials. With Lumion, you can easily assess the aesthetic appeal and practicality of different materials in specific contexts. By comparing different material options in a true-to-life setting, you can create a clear depiction of how materials will look in the final construction. Doing so can help build confidence in the design choices you make and, in turn, lead to more informed decision-making.
With a wide selection of high-quality materials available in the library, you can instantly apply your choice of lifelike textures to any surface in your design. If you have something specific in mind, you can import your own materials, make quick and easy adjustments, and even experiment with various textures, colors, and finishes, thanks to the complete PBR material workflow available in Lumion.
Collaborating with clients
Presenting your ideas doesn’t need to be time consuming. With Lumion, you can create visualizations throughout your project quickly and efficiently. With these, your team can gain immediate insight into the latest version of the design and easily give input where necessary.
Stylized low poly models offer a simple solution here, by allowing you to showcase the essential elements of your design without having to worry about how detailed or realistic the result is.
Lumion’s own unique set of stylized assets can be quickly utilized to convey scale and proportions, give a general impression of a project, and establish the fundamental elements before consulting your client on the finer details. Presenting stylized content in this way allows for quick sign off on a certain approach before you move forward to the next stage.
Detailing and refinements
When it’s time to delve into more detailed solutions, Lumion’s extensive asset library provides everything you need. By adding context to your scenes, you can create vibrant spaces that are filled with life and invite people to experience them.
Incorporating lifelike characters, objects, and nature items into your visualizations can help show how a space will be used, evaluate functionality and aesthetics, and demonstrate environmental interactions. With more than 8,000 assets available in Lumion, there’s something to add instant context, realism, and visual appeal to every scene. With the right models, your design will start to look and feel complete – and people can start to imagine themselves in it.
You may also wish to integrate environmental context into your scenes and visualize precisely how your designs will appear in reality – down to the detail. This can be easily achieved with highly realistic landscape materials and presets that can be applied to your renderings in Lumion.
Preparing to present
With the design in its final form, you might want to create a final, photorealistic depiction of your design to highlight as many relevant details as possible. If you’re presenting your project to clients or stakeholders at this stage, it’s time to add the finishing touches to your visualizations to ensure it’s shown in the best possible light.
In Lumion, there’s a range of options designed to help you do this effectively. For interior scenes, the ray tracing effect offers one of the most efficient ways to achieve an ultra-realistic rendering. With just a click, renders will feature natural-looking lighting, shadows, and reflections, thanks to the accurate calculation of light conditions.
For a more comprehensive approach, you can achieve the exact look you envision for your visualizations by creating a custom effect stack, saving it, and applying it to a series of renderings or future projects.
When looking to apply a signature style across multiple renders, LUT color grading presets offer a time-saving solution. These presets streamline the process, allowing you to effortlessly maintain consistency, evoke certain moods, and infuse your preferred style. You can choose from 12 LUT presets under the color correction effect in Lumion, as well as the option to load a custom one of your own.
Another way of ensuring consistency is by applying Lumion styles to your images. These style presets feature carefully balanced effect combinations, so you don’t have to tweak multiple individual sliders to get the look you want. Suited to both interior and exterior scenes, they allow for distinct, captivating results at just the click of a button.
Lumion also provides several handy tools for getting your renderings presentation ready. These include animated phasing to demonstrate how a design comes together, a choice of camera path presets for making cinematic movies, and multi-clip rendering for producing several animated clips at the same time.
Visualizing every step
Whether you’re trying to solve a design problem, test material options, or simply get the lay of the land, Lumion is there to support you at every step of your creative journey and ensure effective communication within your team. You can use it continuously throughout the entire process or quickly utilize it for something specific – the choice is yours.
And with regular enhancements and updates being made to the software, there’s always a new tool, effect, or range of library content to discover. Check out the product roadmap for an overview of what’s currently in development and what’s next in line to be released. You can even leave us a suggestion or rate each feature based on its importance to you.
New to Lumion 2023? Put all this and more to the test with a free 14-day Lumion Pro trial.
