How to visualize urban environments in Lumion
Practical tips for detailing cities and public spaces with 3D models & materials
Craft urban designs that inspire
The more detailed a design, the stronger the connection viewers feel. Populating outdoor scenes with lifelike objects and materials adds a layer of authenticity, enabling your clients to feel as though they’re experiencing a real environment.
Well-placed props can tell an entire story about the street, neighborhood, or city in question – creating a narrative that goes beyond design fundamentals and establishes mood, lifestyle, target audience, and much more.
From everyday items like ticket machines and traffic cones to surrounding buildings and stylized assets, there’s something for every project in the Lumion Library – whether you’re designing large-scale urban infrastructure or establishing real-world context for a residential or commercial design. Let’s take a closer look at the range of outdoor items available and what you can do with them.
Find realism in the small details
Fire hydrants. Drinking fountains. Tree pits. It’s the little, often-overlooked details we pass by every day that make for the most realistic renders.
These essential public amenities and infrastructure elements can transform a scene, giving it the familiar, lived-in look of real-world spaces. Items like food carts and street signs invite viewers to picture themselves exploring and interacting with your virtual environment just as they would in reality.
When building your scene, you can also explore:
Transit infrastructure
Bus shelters, stop signs, parking meters, and speed cameras are vital parts of any urban infrastructure. Take your pick from the Lumion Library’s extensive range of transit-related items.Eco-friendly items
Every city needs eco-friendly elements. From recycling bins to charging stations, find everything you need to ensure your project’s as green as possible.PBR materials
Bring any urban environment together with tangible-looking textures. Browse different types of moss, snow, roof tiles, and other materials commonly found in cities.
Save time with pre-built backdrops
Entire skylines and fully built surroundings play a big part in making your design stand out, but can be time consuming to create.
Lumion’s background panels save you the time and effort of building extensive scenes for your project, taking care of the all-important context that every render requires. Choose from striking cityscapes, forests, mountain ranges, dunes, and more, and let your ideal surroundings set the tone – so you can focus on perfecting the foreground.
For slightly more detailed surroundings and close-ups, you’ll find a range of high-quality buildings in the library, ready to be placed into your scenes as you like.
Select just the right fit for your project, whether that’s modern apartment buildings, glass-fronted office blocks, or traditional brownstones. There’s no need to painstakingly search for individual objects – effortlessly build entire streets in just a couple of clicks.
Show a space’s evolution
We don’t always want to visualize the finished project. It can often be useful to showcase spaces in their transitional phases, depicting the different stages of a design’s development.
Incorporating construction site models into your renders is an effective way of achieving this. Find bulldozers, cranes, excavators, and other commonly used construction vehicles in the library, ready to add context and narrative to your scene.
Keep it simple with stylized assets
Detail a scene without using detailed assets. Stylized low poly assets allow you to visualize all the most important aspects of a design, without any of the distracting extras.
Fill outdoor areas with stripped-back benches, trash cans, vending machines, and other items you’d come across in the real world, without worrying about your scene becoming too heavy. Alternatively, use them as placeholders during the concept stage to quickly help establish the context of your scene.
Place assets with ease
Urban landscapes often consist of multiple items, such as lines of cars, traffic cones, or streetlamps. But in Lumion, asset placement doesn’t have to take all day.
The line or cluster placement tools let you position multiple objects, whether that’s vehicles, nature, or anything else in the library. Select a variety of up to 100 items with line placement and effortlessly place them on any terrain in your desired path. With cluster placement, choose up to 20 different nature items or characters, then randomize the placement of up to 50 assets. Adjust their randomized position and direction using the sliders to achieve a more natural, scattered look.
Check out the speediest ways of populating your scenes in this guide.
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