Lumion 8 rendering teaser video

[TheKitchenAbode]

9 minutes ago, mrscott said:

Graham,

I respectfully disagree. If anything has a challenging "Learning Curve" it is Chief. I learned more from than anything else I have seen from the MFG. Frankly I am SICK of all the Marketing videos Chief is posting all over YouTube. If you want to see how easy it to use LUMION go to Lynda-dot-com and watch Brian Myers' Lumion Essential Training. Best 4:47 min I have spent on any training product. His courses in REVIT are some of the BEST in the industry, too.

 

I know Jintu commented that Lumion may not be up with Chief now that Chief has PBR, and that has elevated the product, but there are still far too many issues with Chief that have steered me to seek other products. I only come here a post like this raises my BP. Like you, many have mastered Chief, but for me, I just cannot get my head around this vast number of issues (workarounds) required to accomplish the end result. I have posted videos from my YouTube channel but for some reason they get pulled or rejected. If you want more...call me. you know how to reach me.

 

All the best,

 

Hi Scott, great to hear from you.

 

I fully agree and take those marketing videos with a grain of salt. There is no doubt that even with the new PBR feature it still has it's limitations and definitely needs to be worked on to make things more intuitive. Even if all of this is done I doubt that it will ever come close to the capabilities of a program such as Lumion. My comments where based on the fact that Edward indicated that this level of rendering was only needed once in a while for marketing/promotional purposes. Just thought that in this case it might make more business sense to just farm out the rendering work as needed instead of putting up $3,000 at the front end.

[VisualDandD]

Chief PBR is terrible right now.   I refuse to even waste my time with it.  It looks and behaves like a pre-release beta version.   I dont think it was ready for release....not by a long shot.   More bugs than a cheap motel.  They need to have a MUCH easier way to manipulate and adjust materials, normal and bump maps...etc. 

 

In lumion, you can do this 'on the fly'.  In fact, I just use most of chiefs native materials and just adjust in lumion.

 

This was just done for a concept and I have ZERO added lighting.   The "lights" just are material defined as having "emissive" bumped up. Just default single light source.   Probably took about 15min to set up and takes about 30 seconds to render each image.

 

In the last one, I added some lights under cab and where the fixtures were.   Then lowered the sun.  That took about 5 minutes, and rendering was about 45sec. (cant remember what my global illumination settings were)  

 

If I 'decorated' and played with adding lights, it could easily go to a presentation level in no time.....

 

No hate on chief....but to me the PBR resources would have been better spent on producing tools that allow us to produce CD's and maybe.....fix stairs.    How many years of complaining about stairs (a part of EVERY two story home you draw).

 

[TheKitchenAbode]

This in my opinion is what's terrible concerning the CA PBR feature.

 

View from CA Lake Point plan, sample plan default settings.

 

After adjusting the lights and some materials.

 

As with Ray Tracing, I have never found the default settings to be conducive in demonstrating the potential of the rendering engine. 

 

What's perplexing is that the changes I made are not very complex. Lights where only adjusted for intensity and drop rate, material adjustments were just to increase their reflectivity(reduced roughness), the sun intensity was altered and the back drop replaced, some emissivity was added to the glass and the camera exposure and brightness levels were adjusted. The actual rendering time was about 3 seconds.

 

I really think there needs to be a much greater effort to provide users with proper documentation and examples. Currently users are left entirely on their own using a hit or miss, trial and error learning process.

[TheKitchenAbode]

This X10 PBR uses only the generic sun set at 10,000 lux, there are no active lights.

 

 

[Chiefer]

7 hours ago, mrscott said:

 

I know Jintu commented that Lumion may not be up with Chief now that Chief has PBR, and that has elevated the product,

 

 

Where did you get this?

[mrscott]

Jintu,

From this post. I too was shocked to read it. Please tell me I miss Read it?

On 2/13/2018 at 1:46 PM, Chiefer said:

PBR is getting there, Lumion is not as good as it is now either,,,

 

BTW, PBR exterior isn't there yet.

 

[VisualDandD]

6 hours ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

This in my opinion is what's terrible concerning the CA PBR feature.

 

What's perplexing is that the changes I made are not very complex. Lights where only adjusted for intensity and drop rate, material adjustments were just to increase their reflectivity(reduced roughness), the sun intensity was altered and the back drop replaced, some emissivity was added to the glass and the camera exposure and brightness levels were adjusted. The actual rendering time was about 3 seconds.

 

I really think there needs to be a much greater effort to provide users with proper documentation and examples. Currently users are left entirely on their own using a hit or miss, trial and error learning process.

3

Nice work and point well made.   It is hard for me to understand shipping with 'defaults' that are so far off.   That is what I meant about it not seeming like it was ready.   I have not even messed with it at all, but your work shows it has potential.   There is a lot of work yet to go as well.  The shadowing, and materials devoid of and depth due to lack of bump/normal.  Sure they can update the cats at some point, but they are just so hard to work with from a manual standpoint as well.   Making your own involves going in and getting the zipped files and then altering the image files to create your own maps...etc.   It takes A LOT of work.

 

Have you played with making bump or normal maps with PBR?   That would improve the look tremendously if they would work. 

 

I can applaud the effort, but it is almost like chief has an identity crisis.   It is trying to be everything.    Pretty pictures sell software maybe....?   But Those of us who have been with chief for a long time, have stayed NOT for the pretty pictures.   We use it because for residential design, it is a great platform.   If I want photorealism, I will use a specific rendering engine for that.   Guys have used Thea for years that wanted a step above ray trace.   

 

Unless chief plans on devoting their resources to make their rendering on par with render specific products, professionals will use the render specific products if that is their business. (if they produce photo renderings)    This is a mistake in my opinion since we will end up with beautiful pictures and still lack the ability to draw a stair that wraps a wall properly.   And, (sorry Chief)   They are years behind what the best products out there can do.   They will always be in this position as they dont just render.   

 

Sorry for side tracked rant again.....but I just see chasing rendering as a losing battle.   

 

Nice work BTW.   

 

[Chiefer]

13 hours ago, mrscott said:

Jintu,

From this post. I too was shocked to read it. Please tell me I miss Read it?

 

You misunderstood what I said re: "PBR is getting there, Lumion is not as good as it is now either" ( I should have said "was")

Meaning early versions of Lumion started similarly like our PBR now, Lumion is not that good then unlike today.

 

PBR 2 will be better than PBR 1 (I hope), In the sense that Lumion 8 is much better than all the previous versions combined.

 

 

[CARMELHILL]

How is Lumion able to render so fast? Is the entire Lumion program based on PBR? 

 

I remember with the X9 release Chief said they were going to slowly rework all their textures to include bump and normal maps. They released the "Chevron" fabrics, and then nothing. At least I never heard anything being updated after that. Does anyone know if they continued those updates?

[TheKitchenAbode]

10 hours ago, VisualDandD said:

Nice work and point well made.   It is hard for me to understand shipping with 'defaults' that are so far off.   That is what I meant about it not seeming like it was ready.   I have not even messed with it at all, but your work shows it has potential.   There is a lot of work yet to go as well.  The shadowing, and materials devoid of and depth due to lack of bump/normal.  Sure they can update the cats at some point, but they are just so hard to work with from a manual standpoint as well.   Making your own involves going in and getting the zipped files and then altering the image files to create your own maps...etc.   It takes A LOT of work.

 

Have you played with making bump or normal maps with PBR?   That would improve the look tremendously if they would work. 

 

I can applaud the effort, but it is almost like chief has an identity crisis.   It is trying to be everything.    Pretty pictures sell software maybe....?   But Those of us who have been with chief for a long time, have stayed NOT for the pretty pictures.   We use it because for residential design, it is a great platform.   If I want photorealism, I will use a specific rendering engine for that.   Guys have used Thea for years that wanted a step above ray trace.   

 

Unless chief plans on devoting their resources to make their rendering on par with render specific products, professionals will use the render specific products if that is their business. (if they produce photo renderings)    This is a mistake in my opinion since we will end up with beautiful pictures and still lack the ability to draw a stair that wraps a wall properly.   And, (sorry Chief)   They are years behind what the best products out there can do.   They will always be in this position as they dont just render.   

 

Sorry for side tracked rant again.....but I just see chasing rendering as a losing battle.   

 

Nice work BTW.   

 

 

Thanks and I'm in full agreement with your sentiment and have often stated that CA needs to make a concretive effort to fix and clean-up what seems to be an ever increasing number of idiosyncrasies that affect it's core functionality. There seems to be a struggle as it relates to this software's evolutionary process, where is it going, how will it get there and who will it serve. The current approach seems more jack of all trades versus specialist, not sure in such a competitive market that the latter is the best approach, especially for the Pro version of CA.

 

For example, expending time and resources on the PBR feature is fine, but it is severely undermined if I can't build the model efficiently. I had a recent project that required the accurate modeling of an existing home so the owners could explore their remodeling/decorating ideas. It was an extremely painful, frustrating and time consuming process to get core elements such as stairs, roofs and foundations correct. It needs to be understood that designing and remodeling a home today is far more complex than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Todays clients do not want basic and the design software needs to be able to accommodate the required customization and endless material choices. The derived plans and renderings must be accurate, close enough is not good enough. To top it all off I must be able to accomplish this within a time frame that makes financial sense, time is money and the market places a limit on what a client is willing to pay. It seems that there is a lack of appreciation of this when update after update fails to address the many lingering and known core issues.

[Chiefer]

On 4/7/2018 at 8:51 PM, CARMELHILL said:

How is Lumion able to render so fast? Is the entire Lumion program based on PBR? 

 

 

 

Yes, Lumion is based on PBR...and can handle complex scenes.

 

Hoping for a better PBR and of course super fast Phoebe RT in X11

[CARMELHILL]

2 hours ago, Chiefer said:

 

 

Hoping for a better PBR and of course super fast Phoebe RT in X11

 

I think they'll definitively be spending more development time on this for a few reasons.

1. If Lumion continues to develop fast renders and animations, then programs like Chief, Softplan, and some other lower end CAD programs will lose market share to users that decide to employ Sketchup and third party rendering programs. So Chief NEEDS to have an all in one competitive solution.
2. Chief always spends an inordinate amount of their development time on eye candy rendering stuff, rather than 2d con docs tools that we REALLYy need. Look how long it took to get a cad stretch tool.....version 10. Still no keynotes. But we have virtual goggle, virtual panoramic, tablet apps and all that other eye candy stuff.
3. Faster Real Time rendering PBR dedicated video cards are coming out this year.

 

[DMDesigns]

I like to use Lumion with PBR - leads to a nice effect