Everything You Need to Know About Lumen | Twinmotion

hey and welcome back to another twin video where we cover Lumen Lumen is awesome so first of all what is Lumen it is a realtime Global illumination system fantastic so this originally came out within 20 23.2 within the first preview so we're going to dive a bit deeper into it but before we get into it if at any point in this video you happen to learn something please demolish that like button really helps me out quite a lot also consider subscribing if you find this video help okay so Lumen Lumen was originally introduced within Unreal Engine 5 and like a lot of other features that we get in Twin motion it's just kind of a um down not even downgraded or ported version It's just simply a twin motion version of what we see in Unreal Engine 5 I will say it's very simple to use and what we get out of it is amazing so again it is an a global illumination system all happening in real time and we have one obviously we're looking at one um we'll get to it in just a second but um a couple of prerequisites that I want to say that I did point out in the update video but these are very important if I go to edit and preferences and make sure we go to graphic Hardware support and then direct X12 so you'll have to have a certain video card I believe well first of all a ray tracing card first of all which is going to be um in Nvidia cards 2,000 and later so a 2,000 card 3,000 even four especially that will work for sure um but you have to have direct X12 and then whenever we come to the Quality we have to have at least high or Ultra chosen or else it just will not work so if you have some other custom version here as long as you have I would say at least these top few all with Point Cloud at least higher Ultra you're fine um but just know that you're going to have to have the hardware to do this takes a decent amount of Hardware so that is a prerequisite okay so here we go and like I said we've always had a global elimination system within T motion that's nothing new but I I definitely want to show you the difference between what we've always had and Lumen because it's substantially different okay so where do I find Lumen well let's go to Ambiance and we can see that I have real time or path raser so as of last year we know we got the path Tracer we we had it we know what it's like um it's basically rendering this it's really nice and the the difference of course between the path Tracer and the real time is that this is obviously not real time takes time and if I move around I it has to recompute render take time all of that and yes while this might be beneficial for exporting this is totally not what we're looking for when it comes to moving around a scene exporting a gift or video this is not what we want we want it real time so when I come to render here in Ambiance I need to go to real time and so right now you can see I have Lumen on and it looks really nice but let's go to standard so this is standard and standard is what we've had in Twin motion for a very long time basically since it came over um 2019 probably and so it isn't bad you know it's not bad but it's also not great um yeah it's it just kind of is what it is and so um you can see as soon as I toggle from standard to Lumen just immediately like we can see nice ambient inclusion like the the Shadows everything looks a little more crisp a little more real um but what I want to do is start to get into some of these settings because this is what is uh really important in really going to tell the story about how to use Lumen so uh before we really get into it I do want to preface and say that in the description I have a link to kind of the very very detailed version of what this video will be because trimotion has a fantastic article on exactly how to use it the the nuances and every little thing with it and yeah we're going to cover a lot of it in this video but if there are specifics that um you need to know a little bit more I would look there because there's quite a lot even examples about things to use so one more kind of prerequisite but it's more of like a kind of a flag that you need to be aware of is whenever you go to import and we go let's just say we want to import an object and I can import just this test fbx most of this is it's all fine and I've gone on rants before about the way the collapse is set up whether it's through keep hierarchy collapse material or collapse all uh real quick keep hierarchy keeps every object individual it's its own object every wall has its own wall and all of that Collapse by material means every every object that shares the same material becomes one object and then collapse all everything in that import becomes one object so I I'm completely against the last one in 90% of it circumstances of course um but for this and particular particularly Lumen we want to keep hierarchy again this is nothing new of course we want to keep hierarchy because the way Lumin is Computing light and having light bounce off services and whatnot um basically the more elements the better for one but two each element being its own actual element and not just one big model is going to allow uh the global illumination system to compute more realistically it's going to the wall is going to perform more like a single wall that it is as opposed to one giant wall or one giant model filled with a bunch of walls it's hard to explain but it's a type of thing that you again you could see in that article for one but two just it kind of makes sense like you want each model to its own individual each piece to be its own portion of the whole model okay and then moving down uh the UVS and normals that's all fine but um what we really care about is a unit conversion and again this is not the type of thing that you really need to worry about 90% of the time I would say but it it's always on auto and I would usually keep it on auto but just know that auto is one which means it's a scale of one and so that any model that is imported into twin motion whether it is through some sort of geometry direct link or whatnot is going to come in at one scale and that is just the scale that it was exported from whatever program it came from um the thing to note with Lumen is that there are some cases where the scale is way too high or way too low for the object so that the global illumination system is unable to really compute everything about it or like enough about it and so these are things that we'll get into as we look into the specific settings but if you notice that there are things that are not Computing based on like Shadows and Light and all this um you might want to check your units and so obviously we can do this here by Auto I'm not even going to import this in um but if I were to select an object and I go to properties I can see here the XYZ the scale is going to be the exact same so by default everything's going to come in at one or 100% one is 100% just kind of know that um so here of course what we really care about is the Ambiance going back to Lumen amance here all right so again we need it needs to be real time we need to select Lumen Sor right moving down here we can see the scene detail so there's not a whole lot to say about scene detail other than it literally is the scene detail and if I hover over here we can get a little bit more which is like set the size of which objects are cold and so what does that really mean well that means whether or not a the smaller the object we see will be included within the computation of this real-time Global illumination system so basically the more detail you have the smaller the object that will be allowed to be rendered in real time and then view distance again this is just kind of something I don't typically like to mess with I think the deta uh the this standard is 400 I think so it doesn't matter so much because 400 m is much larger than most of my models that I'm working with and obviously if you working with the huge master plan make sure the distance is here but this is just the distance from the camera that the global illumination again using Lumen will be calculated and then finally here the lighting update speed is I believe default of one it is just how quickly or how often not necessarily how quickly but I guess how quickly and often that Global illumination system is going to be updated throughout and so it's not necessarily one is in 1 second or something but it's just the frequency so if you can put it up to four so this is in theory four times as fast um I will say if you put it down to zero then no matter what kind of lighting updates or whatever you do that will not be updated because in doing this you're technically saying don't update right now so I would always keep it at least one um this is kind of a good standard and scene detail at one is generally fine as well and you can go up or down from there as needed so finally there's this check mark here that is visualized mesh conflicts and this is really important because this is going to start to tell us where Lumen is being calculator and this is what I was saying that we want to use a lot along with these settings even when it comes to the import that shows us whether this particular element is being computed so let's go ahead and check this and immediately this looks ter terrible obviously we're not going to be rendering this out this is more of a check for us to say yeah this element is included in the global illumination or not obviously when I go to standard none of this matters but Lumen is where it does matter so the thing to note here is that yellow is the object itself that particular object is either too big or too small and that just means that the way that the light is bouncing off and that Lumen is Computing light across this element it it just happens to be too big or too small for that to work properly and then finally the magenta that we see and there's a lot more of that than I would have expected especially down here I'm not sure this might be because I've angled sloped the grade a bit and not sure what it is but what this means is that it's too complex basically every single uh model element at least unless it's a solid is going to have some sort of triangulation it's going be tesselated and that's going to be essentially the model data and basically the number of triangles you have or like the more you have which it it's equate to the more detail you have of course if you have more detail it's going to be more difficult for materials to populate correctly and it's more it's going to take a lot more hardware and more backbones for any sort of software to calculate Lighting in this case luminous saying that all of these magenta spaces all these magenta faces are not going to be computed within Lumen itself so there's not a great fix to that but I will say there the example that I leave left in the description of that article it does give a lot of examples that show uh scaling up or down based on some of what you see because it might be that some of these services are just too big and that scaling them down will really help it out and allow Lumen to literally work so that's cool um now let's come in here and I want to actually affect some of these top sliders because these top sliders are going to actually affect what how much yellow how much uh mainly how much yellow you see I don't think magenta so much but mainly yellow and the yellow again means it's too big or too small and really what we're doing with the scene detail and distance is whether or not a particular object is going to be computed by Lumen that's really all we're thinking so whenever you're affecting these sliders just kind of put in your mind is the I'm doing this to decide whether this particular element is going to be calculated by lum's global illumination system so I want to start to increase the scene detail and you can watch and see what happen so doing this I start to have reduced yellow elements reduced yellow faces which is fantastic because that means that we're going to see more Lumen calculated throughout the scene now it might be hard to tell because it's there's just not that much but also I'm going to bring it down and you can see less will be calculated and honestly when I bring it all the way down only very few elements in my scam will be calculated and obviously I don't want this at all um but I want to leave it at one so I particularly want to come in here and I've got this super thin moleon and honestly this could never be constructed is way too thin to be the Moon that it is so it's moons like this that even with the detail being maxed out you can just kind of expect that Lumen is not going to calculate all the way in here just the way it is so we can see in here yeah there's a ve these faces are really small there's a lot going on and so likewise if I come over here to this bench apparently these particular faces these particular triangles Within model itself are too complex so I can solve that by maybe increasing the scale of the bench I don't want to do that or if I could X reexport the bench I could have less triangles and it would be a little less detailed and so that the light would work correctly but I wouldn't really only worry about that if that were the whole bench obviously it's not the whole bench the rest of the bench is working beautifully and this looks pretty good um you can see some slight issues here but it really is not that bad where I would start to be a little more concerned is if I saw some of these giant magenta phases I might address this and especially this entire walkway um I don't care about that necessarily because that's usually not what I'm focusing on in this model but I do want to come over here and just start to see like clearly um you can see the distance playing in as well you know as I move closer and further away from the camera I'm getting more or less computed and so one way around that is just to put this much higher than you're scene and that's not going to be an issue at all first of all but but then I can slide the detail and immediately we're getting all of those back and that's fantastic um something to note that vegetation not going to it's not going to matter you know vegetation unfortunately via the scattered tool isn't or paint I believe is just not going to be calculated and that's just too bad it is what it is um obviously a lot of information in here so so that is that top box and again we really want to leverage this visualized mesh conflicts to determine what we're really getting the final thing here is if we wanted to address this yellow I could change the material and so right now it's water and so that that's probably what the real reason if I Chang this to this kind of ridiculous concrete then and go back to my Lumen I could see that of course yeah it's just fine you know it's no longer yellow and it will compute so I will say just kind of expect that with water because it's water like that's all water that type of thing so okay um happy with all of that let's move on to the next here which is uh the reflection settings so I think by default it is set to full and so what is this well if we have it on full then it basically will use real time everything will be calculated in real time and difference between full and optimize is that optimize will used use cached lightning values of elements to hopefully maintain the performance and the quality that you should hope to achieve with Lumen now if I given the system that I have I can run with full no problem and i' recommend you have a system that does run on full here so you're not getting I guess let's say um slightly false values because really when we look at full it it's all real time and it's literally what we see is what's happening and everything like that so let uncheck this first of all and so moving on down uh the quality I mean it's pretty self-explanatory it's going to be hard to see but if I bring it all the way down we can start to see some of the you know lacking of quality in some of these glazing elements you know as as soon as I go off zero that's kind of fixed so I think between 0 and 10 a five is a good place to land I mean really by default somewhere in the middle is a good way good place to land and then uh bounce count I think two or three is the default and simply it is what it is how many times is the light bouncing off of surfaces or how many surfaces does the light bounce off it and if you think about it you can bring it all the way down to one but whenever you go from one to two look at like there's a vast difference in some of these uh glazing elements and why might that be well this is just a theory but when you think about let's say light is coming from a a light bulb or the Sun as it comes down it's going to hit the surface and it's going to bounce just once if it bounces just once then we're not seeing any sort of redirection or let's say a level more more leveling of light it's it's just bouncing once and being reflected and that's it so I think personally at a minimum while the default might be three I want to put that bounce at two because that means all of a sudden we're getting some of these crisscross and like real actions I guess you could say of the way a light might perform because light bouncing just once it's mostly like a mirror and so you're saying the light is going to act like all these surfaces are a mirror when they're not mirrors and we're hoping to see through them and create shadows and all this and clearly that's not the case so that's that's my two cents bounce count at least two honestly the quality at 8 is not a whole lot different than two but it will make a difference in it on export for sure okay and just know that only the settings what the top settings up here primarily the scene detail and view distance will be affected by the visualiz uh mesh conflict so you won't be able to really notice any change uh with the rest if I change the I'm still only seeing what's being computed based on my detail and distance that's just the way it is so another note that there and then finally the Shadows this these types of settings are nothing new it's just these settings will apply directly to Lumen so in this case Shadows basically how far beyond my camera are my are shadows going to populate and if I bring this all the way down to zero or say 10 being the minimum then 10 m in front of me which in case is here I'm really not seeing shadows and it's so weird to see kind of this flat looking view that doesn't have any Shadows so bring this up and have it include your scene it just makes a big difference and obviously I would recommend that and then Shadow bias which it's a bit interesting I'm going ahead and read this because it's it is a little interesting increasing the value reduces self shadowing artifact on objects but can also reduce the accuracy of Shadow so I want accurate Shadows but at the same time I don't want to see these kind of random Shadows appearing on kind of objects that really shouldn't exist so one example is are these Rings here when I bring the shadow bias all the way down we start to see that there's like odd Shadows that show up like in the center and again it's very subtle it might be hard to tell if you're not looking for it but as I come off the minimum value of 0.1 you can see that th those shadows and even some Shadows Beyond in some of these metal elements they they start to relax and kind of blend into everything lightingwise and so I wouldn't keep I wouldn't keep anything at a minimum if you have to keep things at a minimum I'd get a better video card to be honest with you but sliding this up it's pretty good you know again this is the type of thing where as the further you go it might you might notice a little bit difference but still right in the middle is probably a good sweet spot so we looked at quite a lot with Lumen a couple other things I want to mention is that um in that article emissive materials tend to throw off kind of the whole scene which is so interesting and I think it's just kind of the way that they the Luminous setup right now it just can't handle that very well so I would minimize if not completely eliminate emissive materials either one in your model or just in the view or maybe just hide them whenever you're trying to do anything like high quality with Lumen that type of thing and you know I'm sure that type of thing will change look into the description for that article it would be really helpful I I gave it a good read and it it really is helpful so the last thing I want to do and this is not necessarily a whole lot different but I want to go to my media and because this applies to Media so I'm probably going to use use this shot for the thumbnail but you can let me know if I do and so I want to look at basically the same settings within here and we have obviously they're the exact same which is really nice but this is specific to Media mode is specific to uh this image all these settings and again I'm able to Max all these things out but a few things I want to mention obviously um I can do standard Loom and this will apply on export which is fantastic and again what I think I want to do in the future is a path Tracer versus lumen video maybe you looking at the same image just one to one and see what happens see what we get um but because I can afford I want the scene detail Max I want my view distance you know far enough out um I want my lighting speed update to be uh this particular value but I do want to point this out with a a still image export the lighting update speed does not matter I could as long as I mean I I probably wouldn't want it zero because I would have wanted it to compute all the values based on the things that I've done like settings have changed in the like actual media um so I wanted off one but maybe one is fine is the point because any value here is going to be completely unaffected by whenever my I export having this at a different value won't matter um it will matter a lot if I'm exporting a gift for a screen share or like a video that will really matter but the nice thing again is I can visualize my mesh conflict and see what am I getting in my actual shop is Lumen even going to contribute to the things that I hope that it would be in my export and if I bring my scene detail down like you there's a point to where I wouldn't see what I want to see as far as luming goes okay awesome obviously I don't want to leave that on but I don't believe it would export like that so don't worry about that and then finally as far as the quality and balance out this is really where lumens will shine uh when it comes to exporting because if you have it on full that doesn't matter as much as the quality and balance count being as high as it possibly can because again op oper for full is just kind of how it's running right now uh to the best of my knowledge I'm pretty pretty sure because this is just how it's running and then this is what's happening when it exports the quality is Max and balance count is there and then obviously Shadows um if you can afford Your Shadow bias of maybe The Sweet Spot 75 I don't know somewhere like that but make sure your shadows are capturing the entire scene but I think I'm going to use this for the thumbnail you can let me know what you think obviously because uh this will be fully using Lumen and I can't say that I am not impressed by this this is it's looking pretty good uh I have to say and for as because it's so easy to use like it literally is as easy as the standard you can see the difference between standard looks good but then this obviously it's a little blown out but um it's the quality is not there because we're looking at it in real time but the export so there might be something to using standard versus Lumen at certain times that'll be up to you to decide based on what you're doing though so that will do it for this video we looked at the new feature within twin motion 2023.2rpm look for that Lumen versus path racer video in the future it will be out for sure and let me know if you have any questions in the down in the comments below also if you happen to learn something please demolish that like button it really helps me out quite a lot and it tells me that you might have even like the video that would that would be nice to know also consider subscribing if you would that would help too well and that will do it I will see you in the next video have a wonderful day and thanks so much for [Music] [Music] watching

Channel: Architecture Vanguard

Views: 4,730

Keywords: Twinmotion 2023.2, Lumen, Global Illumination, Architectural Lighting, Realistic Visual Effects, Lighting Tutorial, Architectural Scenes, Twinmotion Tutorial, 3D Rendering, Architectural Design, Architectural Visualization, Twinmotion Features, Lighting Techniques, Real-time Rendering, Step-by-Step Guide

Id: 8_tm26F50eg

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023