How to Use RAY TRACING in Lumion 2023!

what's up guys Justin here with the renderingessentials.com so in this video we're going to talk about how to use the ray tracing functionality that was added inside of lumion 2023. let's go ahead and just jump into it all right and so I did a detailed video on the new version of lumion uh last week which I'll link to in the notes down below that talks about more of the features um however I wasn't actually able to demonstrate the ray tracing capability because I didn't have a machine that could do that and so that's probably the first thing you should know about the new Ray tracing effect and I'll link to both this as well as a another detailed article about which graphics cards you need in order for this to work but basically in order to use the ray tracing capabilities you need to have a card that supports Hardware accelerated Ray tracing so either one of these AMD cards that support the Radeon Ray tracing or a GeForce RTX so a card that has the RTX which started I think in the 20 versions I previously had a 1080 which didn't have that technology built in but I've since upgraded so I can use the ray tracing so just be aware if you want to do the ray tracing you need to make sure you have the hardware that can do that now the other kinds of rendering will still work just not the ray tracing if you don't have that cart but you still probably need to meet the minimum requirements and so let's go ahead and let's use one of the example files and specifically we can open up this new one because this one's kind of designed in order to kind of show the ray tracing and how it works so we're going to open up this minimalistic interior and then I'll show you how to use Ray tracing on it okay so Ray tracing has been added as an effect inside of the camera or the photo mode so um you don't really use it inside of the viewport you use it for a specific photo so if I click over into photo one thing that you're going to notice is that's going to take us into photo mode and some of the presets Down Below have that Ray tracing enabled you can kind of see that when I load this in here I'm going to bring my focal length in a little bit notice that this is trying to do the ray tracing on any scene that we have inside a lumion that has that effect enabled but let's say that we were to create a brand new shot so we're just going to click over here and add a new photo and we'll go ahead and we'll change our angle just a little bit using our keyboard just so that it's something different than the default right but what we want to do is we want to set this scene up so that it has the ray tracing associated with it otherwise you're going to need this kind of raster render which is fine but it's not going to have the detail associated with the ray tracing so you can either find Ray tracing by clicking into your effects and if you click in here right now it's under the featured settings you can find Ray tracing you could also just type in Ray tracing right here and so when I double click on that notice what that's going to do is that's going to add a ray tracing effect to your scene now when you add the ray tracing effect to your scene notice how you're getting this kind of like staticky look in here right that's because this needs to go through and it needs to actually calculate the light bounces remember that the ray tracing is much more um computer graphics card and processor intensive because it is actually calculating the bounces of light in this scene but notice how if I was to click inside of the scene what this is going to do is this is going to update the scene using that Ray tracing in here and in this case it's doing a small number of samples notice how you can adjust the number of samples in here by clicking and dragging okay so you've got four options over here that are going to adjust the way that this works so the first is the number of samples so samples basically refers to the number of light rays that this is shooting out per pixel so basically it's the number of calculations that this is doing for those pixels so if you want this to do more calculations you can drag that sample number up so you could also click over here and type in a value so say I wanted like 525 which is a random number but you can use that in order to adjust the number of samples now when you adjust the number of samples notice how this preview takes longer and this is coming in here and it's doing more calculations now this is more graphics card intensive and does take longer but it also means that you have more data per frame in here meaning that you can get a better result especially when it comes to Reflections off of things like this metal or something like that so adjusting the number of samples up and notice how in these detailed scenes I'm going to save this one real quick but notice how in these detail scenes that Ray tracing is set to like 512 samples or something like like that so more samples equals more realistic but also more work for your computer right so second off you've got your number of bounces I'm gonna go ahead and bring this back down to something low like 32. okay so second up you've got number of bounces and so basically what this is is this adjusts the number of times that the light rays can bounce inside of the scene because when they hit something sometimes they would bounce off and hit other things this just sets the number of calculations that you have in here so for this particular value if you adjust it up to something higher than your Global illumination or your illumination and your scene is going to be better so if you bring your bounces down notice how it's a lot darker in these regions in the corner than if I bring this up right here so it affects your overall illumination of your scene because the light rays will bounce into more corners and things like that so um but again I mean more more bounces equals more calculations equals longer time rendering enable the denoise there that's something that I pretty much always turn on because if you don't what you get in your scene is you get noise right and so noise is basically all of these areas in here that kind of look staticky that's basically areas where the ray Tracer doesn't have enough data to figure out what needs to go on in there that kind of shows up as like these visual artifacts right so if we toggle the denoiser on what this is going to do is this is going to automatically come in here and try to remove that now notice how if you do that like if I was to bring my bounces way down and my samples way down and we have the denoiser on notice how you can kind of get kind of a less detailed result in here because what it does is it'll remove the noise but it ends up kind of removing some of the fine details in your scene as well sometimes if you don't want to use the denoiser because it's giving you that effect you might be able to make up for that by adjusting the number of samples up so um the more samples that you do right the more this is going to calculate and I can go ahead and bring these bounces up I don't really want this to do that full calculation in here but notice how that noise is kind of going away as this does those calculations in here so if for whatever reason the denoiser is kind of removing some detail from your scene you might try increasing the number of samples that this is using and so the Firefly reduction is an option to blend the brightest pixels on the screen so if your rendered output has some like super bright spots or something like that you can use the Firefly reduction slider in order to try to reduce that when when I look at this Firefly reduction right here this is very much a stylistic thing because I almost like this result better but um it really depends on what kind of image you're trying to create so you have that option in there if you have super bright spots in your scene Okay so we've talked about how to add this is a singular effect a lot of the time you may not want to do that because there are other things that you may want to add in here as well right you may not just want the ray tracing you may want some other effects and as well what you might do instead is you might actually go up into your custom Styles and notice how there's actually an interior Ray traced preset so if you select the interior raytrace preset notice what that's going to do is that's going to add in some other effects as well so ones that are going to kind of make sense for the scene that you're creating so not only does this add Ray tracing but it's also it's also adding two-point perspective sharpen a lot of the effects that we already know about in lumion it's adding those on top of this so what you might do is you might use this as a starting point because it's going to add some of those other things that are going to make your scene look better as well usually I start with a style like this and then I build from there if there's anything that I need to add or remove from this list of effects so one other thing to know is note that some of the effects in lumion that we've used in the past so things like Global illumination if you bring those in notice how those are going to be disabled so the reason that those are going to be disabled is those were effects that were really working with the regular raster rendering that was going on in here and they were doing things that you don't need with the real-time Ray tracing so notice how these are blocked so reflection is another one of those we try to add a reflection in here it's going to block that because the reflection is being done with the light bounces inside of your scene so the skylight is another so the Skylight effect is one of these and then the last one is the Shadows effect so the Shadows effect isn't going to work because your shadows are being created using the actual Ray tracing in the scene so these five effects no longer work whenever you have Ray tracing in your scene now if you were to remove Ray tracing right so and we can't do that here because it's being used with the style but if you were to remove the ray tracing in here then these would all work because they work together with your raster rendering in order to um generate the results that we've generally seen with lumion in the past alright so one recommendation that I might have for you is if you don't want this just sitting here like giving you this uh noisy look what you might do for your previews you might toggle off the ray tracing what that's going to do is that's going to allow you to do things like coming in here and adjusting the heading of your hdri image or other things like that so say I wanted to adjust where the light's going to go you can do that while you're not actually doing any Ray tracing in here notice how I can click and I can do a quick preview of that so you might think about toggling that effect off until you need it and then just toggling it back on right so now if I enable that effect I can come in here and I can actually preview it based on what we're doing in the scene so I can actually do my work with that toggled off and then toggle it back on and as to actually exporting this so that's actually pretty simple you just export it like you would any other image in lumion so you just click on it you'd click on the button right here for render photo or if you have this set to do video um you could do video but then you would just render your shot just like this so this is going to go through and notice how it's doing the exact same thing that it did before it's going through and it's taking all of these samples and then at the end it'll apply that denoiser to your overall scene so it'll give you a time remaining over here on the right hand side so that you can see exactly how much time is left in that rendering ring note that there are some things like the glass that haven't quite been figured out with this version that's something that is going to be improved lumion has noted that I think water isn't quite working the way that it should either so there are some functions in here that are still uh still being improved and worked on but you can still start getting these Ray traced images out of lumion and so if we go in and pop this up you can see our final result right here so notice how it does have the ray tracing going on in here you can see where the light went and where the Shadows are other things like that and then it's also come in here and it's added that denoising effect so that you don't get the noise inside of your scene and so note that you can we're going to click on OK and we're going to go back we're going to jump into movie mode so you can definitely create a movie using this Ray tracing just be aware that when you create that moving this is going to have to go through and it's going to go through this rendering process for the entire movie so every single frame in here so for example this this is a six second long video I'm depending on the number of frames right if I click on render movie if it's six seconds long you would have to render 180 frames in here your production quality is going to affect your render time as well but say that I was to try to render this out to full HD and we'll just call this movie and I'm not going to render the whole thing I just want to give you an idea so notice how if we were to try to render this whole thing and so I'm running an RTX 4090 so um it's a pretty powerful machine notice how rendering out this six second long video would take approximately five hours just be aware that if you try to use the ray tracing to render animations it's going to take a significant amount of time because of the number of still images this would have produced in order to create the whole movie so you can definitely do that just be aware that that is going to take a significant amount of time um to do something like that with Ray tracing all right so that's where I'm in this video leave a comment below let me know what you think about the new version of lumion if you've tried it I just love having that conversation with you guys as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The Rendering Essentials

Views: 12,908

Keywords: rendering tutorials, SketchUp rendering, Vray Rendering, the rendering essentials, therenderingessentials, rendering lessons, photorealistic rendering tutorials, architectural visualization, lumion 2023, lumion 2023 ray tracing, lumion ray tracing, lumion ray tracing tutorial

Id: c0qkO_MHpsg

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 24 2023