Lumen vs. Path Tracer | Twinmotion

hey and welcome back to another twin motion video in this video we're going to look at the differences in export quality between the path Tracer and Lumen Lumen the new Global illumination built into twin motion but before we get into it if at any point in this video you happen to learn something please demolish that like button also consider subscribing that definitely helps as well okay a few videos i' recommend you check out before first of all the path thres video and there's plenty of those that we've done previously on all the updates with path Tracer there's quite a lot um it's not that in depth but there are quite a lot of videos covering a various levels of topics looking at the path Tracer but definitely look at the one of my most recent videos which had to do with Lumen the new Global illumination system within twin motion and the total difference in between them is you can see clearly if I press this button to turn the path tracer on it's going to act as if I want to render this specific still the specific shot and granted it's going to look pretty good at the end of the day it's going to look okay I don't like some of these materials but granted I've got this is on low quality we're we're here and so you can see what happens as soon as I move it's going to render this is nothing new it's a ray tracing and it's going to calculate all of these pixels to various levels of detail that you determine based on the path Tracer settings and that's that so basically you could say it is real time but it really isn't because you don't want it to be you don't want to operate like this there's just no way you you need this needs to be off so what are we left with otherwise we have ambiance and then if I expand the properties here then we can find within the renderer I have real time of course that we want instead of the path Tracer but then I've got Global illumination and standard or Lumen so this video is all about Lumen but clearly you can see the difference in the shadow primarily um and this is in real time so clearly they're plenty of prerequisites but obviously check out the Lumen video that I did we covered everything Lumen that you need as far as hardware and everything every setting that you need and every setting that Lumen is involved with so what I want to do is I want to save you the trouble of determining which one of these is better now I can't I'm not going to run through every interior exterior like possible application that this might look look best but we're going to export a couple of still images and a couple of videos not too long videos but we'll move move across the scene and so we can see some variations across the scene itself but I want to use specifically just Lumen as like a global lumination system when I export both the video and the images comparing that to exporting using the path Tracer and I'll be honest and end up front with you I honestly would expect the path Tracer to look much better I really do and that that's just because of what is happening uh Lumin is built to be a real time renderer which is great for literally working in real time as I move around the scene I want to see things as accurate as possible but basically instantly so um in contrast the path Tracer as we just saw as soon as I click it is is not that at all it's not meant for that instant gratification of I'm I'm looking and moving around my scene it's give me a second and I'll I'll give you a nicer looking image now whether you think that not based on this is okay but it's on medium so you'll see all right so what I've done here and if I go to my media tab as well I can see I've got this shot and I picked this shot because there's a decent amount of contrast and shadows and you know we should get some decent reflection all that it kind of covers the basis and what I want to make sure to do is let's set up this scene first of all um I want parallelism and what I'll do is ultimately duplicate this and I'll have one version that is the path Tracer and and one that is specifically for uh Lumen and so where do I do this again in the renderer for the obviously I'm in medium mode you can see this is all pink if I go to render you can see I'm on real time and I'm even on standard so let's click Lum in here and it immediately changes you know like the quality of the lighting obviously the reflections need some work because this is real time and part of that again it might be some of the materials being me like not the greatest materials or the reflections are too high whatever those are things we're not necessarily going to troubleshoot in this video but for consistency's sake let's go ahead and save this uh what we can do is this little icon here this little triangle is indicating that I am in fact using Lumen you can see whenever I go from standard to Lumen I'm getting that icon which apparently is the Lumen icon I was not sure and so at this point you know I'm fairly happy with this but because I want the highest quality then I'm going to put my scene detail to four obviously that's going to export obviously the heest detail there um again of course the lighting update speed does not matter so I can leave that at one that's fine but you know in case it happens to matter which everything I've read tells me it doesn't I'll put it at four there uh looking at the Lumin reflection settings obviously it want the quality maxed out so it's looking at the reflections and then bounce count again this is totally going to have uh the most impact when you max that out obviously we've looked at bounce count uh what that does and really the impact there it it's as far as Shadows that's all good if I'm talking about maxing everything out okay now I really like where all these settings are again they're all kind of maxed out at this point but regardless of what you're able to do with your system I would always check the visualized mesh conflix and whenever I check that we can see yeah there's a lot of yellow and the yellow again means that it's not going to be calculated by Lumen so whatever it is will not be contributing to the light in the global illumination that L can provide this is unfortunate but um it has to do with a a lot of this being water water just will not and then also anything applied with vegetation scatter or painter will not as well I don't know what's up with the roof but it happens and it's far away I'm not so worried about that another thing is the magenta is um not calculated at all also because of the size uh and scale of the surfaces I'm again I'm not exactly sure what's wrong with some of these um if I cared about being perfect I would definitely go investigate those on a Model triangulation standpoint maybe scale it up scale it down that type of thing but I'm not so worried but really this is just there to check you know is this working um is this are you going to get what you expect obviously as I reduce the scene detail we get less that is calculated within Lumen and I want to Max that out of course so I like the way it is we don't need to visualize that anymore very good okay one final thing I want to mention and it's fairly new and yeah as of 2023.2rpm reducing the saturation actually reducing the contrast in this case will decrease the Shadows or as in like lighten up the shadows and then kind of darken the highlights so it's you're literally you're losing the contrast between the shadows and highlights now I don't want to affect this so much I think the default is 5050 uh but I want to go back to the environment this is a new feature as of 202 3.2 and that is the local exposure this is default not enabled uh but when you enable it it's going to allow you to freely affect the highlight and shadows independently which is fantastic and you can look and see you know the highlights don't do a whole lot like I probably want to reduce it a little more um because I want to see some of these clouds and the detail there um but the Shadows up front here that we saw previously if I unchecked this this is kind of ridiculous it's way too dark and it's unnatural but you could see boosting those Shadows is going to allow me to really see some of the detail that's actually there and that's fantastic so I I'm going to keep this on for both lum and path Tracer okay so we are done with everything that I have put together I really like these settings uh for our Lumen so what do we have to do next well we have to duplicate this so let's go in here and duplicate this it's going to show up all the way at the bottom and we can rename this obviously please rename so people know what's going on we're going to rename this to path Tracer because that's exactly what it is okay and if I can click on this we can see yeah we're we have everything it's all the exact same but now now the only thing I have to do is go to render path Tracer and Tada so um obviously we are trying to compare highest quality still images to highest quality still images path Tracer versus Lumen so let's at least start with high so I'll go to high and it's clearly going to take longer than the preview and I don't care about the preview uh but let's expand these details so this is kind of up to you how how many pixels do you want samples per pixel 256 it's fine it's totally fine you could do 1028 10 20 48 anything really up to 10,000 I think it goes obviously it's going to take longer if you do this um but there's going to be more samples it's going to be more detailed and then likewise how many bounces you know I think this goes up to 100 but 50 is fine as well so again this is just going to take longer and longer I like to keep fireflies at 30 it really don't need to change that so much so really it's these few things here but you'll also notice and I want to point this out for sure that there is no low medium or high set this these settings I believe are taken from your preset settings that are you'd find in the preferences for these different qualities and so there's really nothing special about them because it's just a different variation of really the samples uh per pixel and Max bounces just kind of be aware of that um so I am happy with this obviously you can see it is still trying to render so this might take 10 plus minutes uh to get out of the path Tracer but at this point now we can look to export these and so how do we do that well obviously we're going to go to the export and we can see that I in fact want to export a couple of images we have uh options for PNG JPEG and exr uh my choice is always uh of these if we're just going for basic still image PNG because it's going to give you the highest quality image for the lowest file size and we can go to details here if you want motion blur that really works for videos obviously it does not work really work for uh still images unless we had moving objects which we do not have uh refinement I've gone over a video previously about how refinement really works and if it's worth doing I'll be honest J's out on that no way to know um because it's so hard to tell the difference um I like to keep on high because again we're trying to Max this out so this is going to apply to both of my selections here both images both the Lumen and the bath Tracer then I need to actually select my images the nice thing up here is that I've got real time I've got luminum path Tracer so obviously right now every single image I have is going to show up but if I uncheck real time I can see that I just had my Lumin we can see it based on the icons there and then my path Tracer that's great I can isolate them that way just real easy way to select so I've got both of them select now I can click anywhere else and I've got that and I can start the export so I'm going to start this export and I will see you in just a few minutes I'll let you know how long it takes of course but then we will compare these two still images see you in a minute all right and let's take a look at our results so I will be honest I've tried this a lot this is Lumen and I'm not impressed with it at all like clearly it's it's grainy there's a lot going on and I I have a lot of Reflections I mean a lot of materials with um reflective values and unfortunately I just I don't think there's a whole lot we can do about it just kind of it is what it is um and this might be just the first sign of more to come in this video that the using Lumen for export is just not the way to go and maybe certain scenes work out like obviously you can see it did not take into account the the vegetation because that that was I placed that by painting and if that's the case it's not going to take into account uh Lumen at all so that's why it looks better which is kind of sad to say but let's jump to the path racer clearly a huge difference here this is the type of thing we're looking for now I'm not going to say this is the best image in the whole world cuz clearly um a lot could be improved still but nonetheless just the overall quality and what you would expect out of an export from Twin motion is very very solid it's there and so I'm pretty pleased with this and so clear winner path Tracer like obviously when it comes to exporting a still image take the extra time export it using path Tracer whatever level of settings you could do and my guess is whenever we get through with the video I'm going to end up saying the exact same thing but uh obviously for the sake of this video we need to go through and in fact make a video let's go ahead and quit mode here and so let's where do we want to make this well first of all let's go to drone mode get off of pedestrian and then we will come into the media and start making a video all right media and then my video I don't have one here but let's create one and so all of a sudden yes we're in Media mode um let's go ahead and start I don't know let's say right here and and we'll kind of fly in and then back out and I want I don't want this being any longer than 10 seconds something like that um put this at five and we'll make one more refresh this make one more go to this one maybe we want to fly in here refresh this and then one more maybe we're out looking at everything kind of like this so a bit Dynamic a bit interesting we'll see if it even even looks good we'll we'll scrub through this and see what happens with the total video at 10 seconds actually and we'll see so we're dipping in out and you okay that's fine it's it's a video so I've covered editing videos and getting everything worked out between the different frames uh in previous videos so check that out for sure but um what you can see is if I select a frame I can I have all the settings here but you can see it's part one well all of these are parts so part one 2 3 um when I come into settings here I just want to select all of them and so that means everything is selected as far as me getting all of these levels as far as Our Ambiance for the path Tracer and Lumen consistent and if they're not for any reason and you just end up editing one part you can copy the Ambiance and then paste it onto another one so don't feel like you're out of luck in that case but I'm going to go to settings select them all here and like we said before let's come out here U I want uh I don't care necessarily about Auto exposure being on uh for the sake of this and the fact that we're moving around I'll keep it on but I do want um local exposure on I want to bring the Shadows down a bit and you know it you can I would scrub through it and see as long as you're seeing uh these types of things that you want to see you're probably good to go and you'll know you'll have a single Ambiance chosen because that's what we want in this case if I go to the details here then single Ambiance I can choose between single and start and end basically it goes from one to the other um so choosing settings will allow me to get everything that I want to exactly um go ahead and turn auto exposure on it makes sense for a video not necessarily that I want to uh but it is what it is bring it down just a bit looks fine right there okay and then with that obviously we need to go to our render and real time Lumen um this is where the lighting update speed really matters because uh obviously I'm moving and if this light is not updating but you know this again not once a second but um one times the speed versus four times the speed basically you're going to have higher quality and the reflection everything is going to look better more crisp um while being obviously softer at the same time more realistic if you have that lighting update speed maxed out at four perfect okay and then obviously if we want full there um obviously yes I want the quality there and then the same with the bounces I'm trying to Max all this out I can probably put my Shadows to 400 that's perfectly fine so there we go I have all of my Lumen settings as I would hope to see them this is great so what I can do is come back to my videos and again I want to rename this to Lumen and of course once again we will duplicate this one call this one path Tracer and I know everyone's going to get mad at me for doing this and I'm honestly mad at myself for doing this but because because this is the path RAC because we're exporting video I am not going to put myself or my computer through the amount of time that it would take on full like maxed out High settings like if you've ever exported a video knowing that it's many many many frames a second like we're we're not even done with one frame on high imagine doing that times 30 per second and then a 10-sec video 300 frames you do you can do the math but holy moly so honestly for the sake of this video video I'm just going to keep it on low like I'm I'm sorry but I do want to I want to just clearly see the difference for one but two just kind of know that it it's on low so you could even go higher I know I know I'm kind of going against what I said in the beginning of video but that's going to apply more to a a still image than anything else just because my gosh it would be crazy not to have this on a low setting okay so with that done uh that's really all that we need to do uh we're good to go with with the path Tracer versus um Lumen for the videos and just to confirm again we can see we have our Lumen icon there and we have our path Tracer icon there as well all right yeah and obviously once again we can scrub through here make sure we're seeing everything that we want and you don't want to scrub through here with the path tracer on clearly you can see that um and the final thing I want to look at is the export settings there shouldn't be a whole lot that we need to worry about I don't want to export any more images just these videos so again there's an mp4 and PNG I'm I'm looking at probably MP4 just as good base uh format you're going to have the lowest again lowest file size uh when it comes to a video anyway with MP4 with the highest quality um here's where the frame rate is I want to put in 60 uh but because this is on YouTube and it's probably not going to get a whole lot better I'm going to leave it on 30 um there's other things that we can do here I don't have a reason to have this be 3D or 360 or anything like that just imagine the amount of time if you had path Tracer Beyond low what that would be so do we want some motion blur sure I'll go ahead and keep it U my refinement again because it's the video notest still image I care less about that um it's just going to add extra time and you probably won't even notice the difference so with all of that let's go ahead and add our two videos and again I will report on how long long this took the images for the record took probably 10 minutes for both of them which was way too many way too much um but uh just kind of fine-tune the details and fine-tune all of these settings to where what whatever makes sense to you so I'm going to export this and I will see you on the other side when we look at both of those videos all right first let's look at Lum and that probably took again another 10 15ish minutes not too bad not too bad so here is Lumen okay you know pretty yeah it's fine you know obviously lots of lighting settings you know things need to happen it's not the nicest looking video no matter what mainly from the content not so much the quality of the export um but let's go ahead and look at the path Tracer I have here is the path Tracer okay I don't know exactly what this is I can't I can't tell you for sure if that's the quality whether that is it's too low or too high but there's clearly some material IAL issues I guess you could say more so in here where the I don't know I'm not sure again that could be me choosing terrible materials but that is pretty clear um I think for Simplicity sake and the fact that it was much quicker and there's less kind of details to work out I might if I'm not looking for like literally a perfect video I'm probably just going to export using Lumen which is kind of surprising to say I didn't expect that when it comes to comparing the still images it's like out clearly path Tracer is the winner for still images but videos jury is kind of out it might be a caseby casee basis it could be the frame rate it could be details it could be the low setting for path Tracer but my gosh it would have taken a full day to get 10 seconds off of what you could clearly see as lousy actual content but for the sake of this video wanted to see what it would look like in just direct comparison so yeah I mean take that for what you will I definitely let me know what you think when it comes to the path Tracer particularly in videos because I would like to see if there's a a an instance where it does beat out Lumen I like to think there is because clearly we saw that in action on a still images and if you in all the videos are clearly just lots of still images so let me know in the comments below what you think and what kind of results you're getting with the with Lumen versus path race really curious so again that will do it for this video we looked at exporting a video expor is still image Lumen versus path Tracer it's going to be up to you you know I like path Tracer a lot for images and loom in a lot for videos so that's how I'm going to probably use it moving forward so that will do it and thank you if you did happen to learn something please demolish that like button really helps me out quite a lot also consider subscribing that does as well I hope to see you in the next video we got new videos coming out every single week now have a wonderful day thank you very much for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Architecture Vanguard

Views: 6,793

Keywords: Lumen vs Path Tracer, Twinmotion lighting, Lumen global illumination, architectural visualization, real-time rendering, lighting comparison, Twinmotion features, Lumen benefits, Path Tracer differences, architectural design, 3D rendering

Id: wwCQADaKN0k

Length: 23min 16sec (1396 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023