Lumion 11 Rendering & Animation - Architectural Workflow

what's going on everyone this is daniel with dv studios and today i'm going to demonstrate my workflow in lumion 11 pro to create stunning beautiful visual graphics so if you haven't seen my video already where i covered 19 brand new features and walked you through it in lumion 11 i recommend that you see that video first and then watch this video if you have seen the video already which was part two i took a previous project that i worked on in a previous version of lumion and i revisited with lumion 11 pro and i made a lot of edits to it and i upgraded everything and i showed everything from the renderings to the animations at the end just to show you how amazing and stunning lumion 11 is so this is actually the video that's going to demonstrate what my workflow was in order to get those results so without further ado let's hop right into it [Applause] [Music] so looking at my screen there are three important things we need to do before we head on over to lumion so for this tutorial i'm going to be working with rhino 6 as my base program you may use sketchup or any other sort of program maya etc so the three things that we need to do is number one organize everything into layers or groups and give a specific material to each layer the second step is going to be to define a point of origin for our project and the third thing to do will be exporting individual objects so going back to point number one the reason why this is so important and i spoke about it in my previous tutorial talking about lumion livesync and its importance essentially the way lumion distinguishes different objects for example distinguishing this wall from the ground plane is based on the material that you apply to the object so what do i mean by this so if there is no material applied to this object or let's say this has the same material as this lumion is going to read it as one object so when i get into lumion and i try to apply a material to this it's not going to read correctly and it's going to just put the same material for this wall as the material for this part of the ground and that's not what we want so we want to go ahead and make sure everything has a clear material you can use plaster material for everything for example but change the properties of the plastic material make some of it let's say you know maybe one color and the other one's a different color whatever you prefer but as long as it's different and the program can create some type of distinction between the materials so the second thing that we're going to do is put all the objects we want to define a specific origin point for all the objects for this i want to bring everything down to zero comma zero comma zero so i'm going to highlight everything and i'm going to hit m on my keyboard and i want this point here this corner of the porch to be at the origin so i'll hit zero comma zero comma zero hit enter [Music] and now it's exactly at the origin so the reason this is important is because when we export and import everything into lumion you're going to see shortly how we're going to do it because we're going to have to export things one by one we want to have a common space for everything so that we know when we're putting everything in lumion that we're putting it at the exact spot that it needs to be which leads us to the third point which is exporting so is many ways to export your project to lumion you can hit livesync which is what i would normally do but for this tutorial i am not going to use livesync at all and there are several reasons for this reason number one is that when working with lumion 11 pro it does require a lot more ram than the previous lumions so if you don't have a up-to-date graphics card like me for example i don't have an up-to-date graphics card is what i meant you might not want to have live sync running between rhino and lumion because it's going to take extra memory i want lumion to have as much memory as possible to run as smoothly as you can and the second and the next point is that there's something called animated phasing in lumion 11 pro and once again see my tutorial covering the 19 features on this program if you want to learn more about that but for animating phasing we need each of these exported models to be on different layers like the wall needs to have its own layer the glass needs to have its own layer etc and the thing is when you export a model to lumion it groups everything together although you can apply different materials to each distinct object based on the material that you give it according to the layer although it can do that the point is is that when you export the model everything will still be together on one layer so yes there's an object distinction but it won't be on separate layers unfortunately we can't even hit this to export it as a collada file which is going to basically do the same thing as live sync just group everything together instead what we have to do is export it layer by layer this is why i mentioned earlier to put everything into layers along with the materials by having everything on layers that way you will be able to just hide what you don't need and reveal what you do want and what you'll do is hide all the components you don't want to be included in the layer only have visible the components you want to export together in the layer so for example if i wanted just the these houses for example to be visible and i just turn on these layers right here if i just want these houses to be visible then i export that as a group and then once i import into lumion these objects will always be on the same layer but the other objects i'll always have the ability to put it on a different layer and do it like that group by group and that way you'll be able to export everything in the correct layer in lumion then go in your folder directory and then we're going to make this a colada file and then you name it accordingly we can call it houses on site for example i already exported everything into distinct groups so i don't have to do this right now but you can do this if you're following along with this tutorial so once you finish exporting your project or if you use lumion livesync all you have to do is go on create new project and we're going to click the plain environment and once we're here we're going to begin to import our model so one under the content library on imported models click import new model and then if you have one model you can just import that and place it at the origin or wherever you set it in the xyz plane in the previous program otherwise if you did export it in pieces we're going to import it layer by layer so i have some of these imported already and i made a folder but typically what you would do is click on the object and define the folder right and then for each of these objects you want to make sure that it's placed in the correct folder you want everything to be in the same folder that's that way it's easier to group all the exported objects together i'm gonna start placing them by going on place and now we're going to slide on over let's go to the modular housing folder right here and i'm going to start off with the ground plane let's bring the camera up and once you have your ground surface placed what we want to do is actually cut into the ground so we're going to go on utilities and we want to select cut and we're just going to put one over here and then let's begin to drag these little corner points all right that's uh let's actually drag it beyond the extremities and then we're going to just fix it from there all right so i guess a route about here doesn't have to be super precise um at least for me it doesn't have to be precise because i'm not too concerned about everything being at that particular location but even if you place everything into one layer of course at any point in time you can begin to change the layer of each of these objects it's just easier to place everything into the layer as you're doing it rather than doing it at a different point in time because if you have many many little objects that you have to select it's going to be a little bit annoying having to select it individually so if you can try to place everything into its specific layers beforehand okay and now that we have everything imported you can begin to organize what you want to be on different layers each of your objects don't have to be a different layer if you want certain objects to appear together you're more than welcome to do that so i'm just going to begin to organize it into different layers so when you want to put something in a different layer just select a new layer and start placing the object while you have the new layer selected and i'm going to place everything right now and fast forward through it just a bit [Music] so i've just finished placing everything inside the model right now and as you can see we maxed out on the layers on lumion you can have up to 20 layers but i just want to reiterate why i said earlier in this video that when you're exporting to lumion it's important to have a common place of origin because i had a common place of origin every time i had the option to place an object i was able to use this origin point as a reference and because each of the exported models had a common origin point by placing everything on that origin point i was able to easily and smoothly make sure everything lines up in the model this does take quite a bit of time but the end results are very nice because now you have so much control over all the layers you can hide different components if you'd like and your maybe your thing is more detailed maybe it's not as detailed that's completely fine it's all about what you want to get out of the project for me i want a very detailed animated phasing so i'm i decided to put everything in layers and it just makes it easier also to work on the entourage like if i need to look inside my building i can go to my roof layer and just hide the roof and also hide the ceilings and that way i can begin to look inside my model and it's just going to make it easier for me to navigate as well so having that origin point is really good but let's say you put everything on the origin point and it doesn't line up well that's not an issue either because for each layer what you can do let's say i want to start off with my ceiling layer or let's say i wanted to start off with my layers for my beams and frames which is this layer right here so everything that doesn't line up all you have to do is select the layer select an object on that layer and the layer will pop up and then what you're going to do is select all objects in the same category or another way to do it is to select all identical objects and once you click that click align positions and then that way it's going to begin to align everything to make sure everything is straight and you can do that for each layer click align positions that way you can make sure everything is lined up properly the way it needs to be and that just to make sure that nothing is floating and nothing is sticking out or place slightly off center inside your model so once you have everything exported and nicely aligned in lumion the next set of steps that we're going to follow is one we want to begin adding materials to all of our existing imports the second thing is to begin to add entourages that includes additional furniture if you don't have in your model adding trees shrubs birds wildlife all those things and after that we're going to begin to customize the environment as well so let's start off with adding materials so we're going to go to our material category and i have a particular material in mind but i'm just going to briefly demonstrate how to add material so this is what i was talking about regarding in rhino you want to export something with a specific material just so that everything is read as a different material you do not want this to be the same material as that so we want to give everything is a distinct material click on the material we want to change go on the category that applies to your material there are various miscellaneous materials for outdoor and age surfaces there are indoor types of materials and outdoor types of materials we're going to go to outdoor i have a particular material in mind for this so let's begin to look at our previous render and see some of the materials that we've used so here we had some type of siding but it's not as heavily defined as the material i selected just a moment ago so let's actually go and change that a bit to me i think this looks pretty good and similar to what i use so i'm going to go with that for the exterior walls and now for the cladding every time you finish adding materials to a particular layer i recommend hitting save because the thing is if you add materials to let's say a bunch of different layers and let's say you look back and you're like well i want to just undo something that you did you won't be able to do it because unfortunately there isn't a proper control z function in lumion at the moment so i recommend saving changes and then go back and continue adding the material you don't have to do this but i like to do this just so i can be sure that everything once i made a selection that if i want to change that selection it's not going to affect any other selection that i might make further down the line [Music] and if we click choose color we can pick the ral color picker and we can make this let's say a type of brown so that now when we do the colorization it's going to be a shade of brown rather than a different shade [Music] an ariel color picker just so helpful because now i can experiment with different shades in this category so super helpful and if i want to edit it further i can go on to rbg and begin to just swish it around just like that [Music] so let's make it a little darker and i like this color and it's pretty similar to what i had in that rendering yep similar enough actually so i'm going to fast forward through the video and repeat these steps for each of the materials that i choose and i'm going to go over some of the materials that i selected for different parts of my design [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so now we've applied the materials to our site for the most part and now we're going to move on to the next step which is working on the entourage including the grass the trees shrubs and all those things so when applying materials to things such as grass and water and all that stuff i prefer to actually go on the various category because this has those 3d animated sort of effect to the grass and the water and it just looks a lot better so first i'm going to select the layer i want to specify as grass which will be this layer i'm going to go on various and we'll go on 3d graphs and i'm going to be honest with you that whole mode checker grass that's not so interesting to me that reminds me of just some sort of gated community you know i prefer uh more clean cut grass for me it feels a bit more natural or even something where it's a little bit wild something like that i mean now it looks like nobody mowed their lawn so actually maybe i'll just stick with the clean cut grass over here and then we could double click on it and we could begin to edit the grass size we can make it a little bigger and we can make the grass taller as well i definitely want it to be taller maybe about this tall nothing too big yeah i think that's pretty good so maybe a little taller and maybe make the size just a bit bigger just like that and what's really nice is that this grass will begin to react to wind and things like that so when you actually do an animation and if you increase the wind speed which i'll show you how to do shortly this is actually going to react to it so it's super cool so let's also do the same thing for our water now we're just going to select the custom material for the water oh yeah hit check hit the custom material for water let's go on various and we're going to select water right here so we want let's say [Music] something something like that you can kind of see the water seeping beneath it so let's say something like that it's relatively clear not so much like a pond but i say like that because this is supposed to be a rain pond technically and if we go to the back we have we have tanks over here and we can also be a little harder okay here let's actually apply the water effect over here as well awesome here it is next we could turn this into soil ah we did we cut away the ground over here begin to just look out in distance and let's go on brush size we could just create a big landscape let's make the size huge [Music] technically there isn't a hilly landscape where this project is actually located but i think it's gonna just look great for the entourage [Music] and we can just go on the not the ocean feature but the water feature we're going to click that ah just like that this might not even pop up in the rendering but um i find that super cool that you can do that and it's super simple what we can do why don't we make a valley of water right before the mountain range let's do that so we're gonna go back on landscape i'm gonna lower it let's change the brush size so we're about to add a lot of trees and i know this is pretty far from the site but it's really good to have like a nice background this mountain and valley is a lot bigger than i anticipated those are some of our trees in the distance and now we're going to go on the layer for the tree and we're going to select you know any one of them and let's actually select let's select all in the same category which will be all those trees and now we want to just go on the randomize tool so we can randomize the size of each of these trees so we're going to click randomize double click on it and here's where we can randomize it let's have everything completely different sizes and stuff i actually want to begin to add some more trees to the background to begin to frame the scene so what we'll do there is a special tree is this the cluster i'm thinking of yes so these clusters what it does is that when you place these clusters in your composition and it renders it renders as many trees in the background we're gonna just place a few of those and it takes minimal memory so this is what i really really like about it barely takes any memory at all and this is a great alternative if you don't want to use the proxies or if you don't want to just uh mass place trees so you could save space as long as your camera is not going to be panning in that back area that should be just fine and actually i'm going to populate everything in the site and then i'm going to actually delete it afterwards delete some of these other trees that i have and there's uh just so many types of clusters you can add you can you can change it up you can mix it up a bit here and there and i actually like that so what i'll do i'll actually go back to the mass placement that i've made earlier and i'll delete those just because it will take a lot more memory than using these trees which is much fewer but it really begins to get the job done so let's the density is all the way up let's just delete all these other trees that i've added once you have all the trees for your background entourage feel free to go to the layer in which you place all the trees in and just hide them that way it doesn't take up so much space and you can continue to move around freely now we're going to work on putting the trees on this site itself and we want to take our time placing the trees here especially for me for this project because the placement of every tree plays a critical role in terms of shading the building cooling the building and also kind of shading this little farm back garden thing that i have going on here so i'm going to start placing the trees and i'm going to skip forward to after i finish placing all the trees and share the final result of my tree placement with you but before i do that i just wanted to demonstrate that so once you click on the tree section under content library find the desired trees that you want and lumion 11 has a very wide library that you can select from from clusters to even confers all these things can be found in this library broadleaf is perhaps the largest category with about 15 pages i believe let's see yes oh well more than that wow 20 pages so by going on that you can find find the species of trees that you like and select your species and of course plant it on the site and once you begin to plant the species on the site and if you really like this species of trees you can also put it in your favorite category that way it pops up here and it will just be easier to find it next time and once you do place the tree on your site let's hit m on our keyboard you can just begin to add apply some basic transformation you can rotate it you can scale it but let's say you wanted to plant a bunch of these let me show you something really cool quickly so we're going to go on our place tool and we're going to have single mask placement we're going to pick this line and we're just going to draw in a line literally you know we could click anywhere anywhere that we want it to begin you can begin to increase the number of items like how many trees you want want to pop up in this row and you can even add different types of trees to add into that if you want to mass place different types of trees that's also something you can do and you can do randomized directions so it's not going to be the same and you could also randomize the spacing just so there isn't like the equal spacing between them so it could feel more realistic and you can also begin to offset it here so that's a really cool way to do it and also actually i want to show you this once again once you place it if you want everything to be randomized in terms of the size put select all objects in the same category and then go on the randomize size button if you click on that and drag this slider you can begin to randomize the sizes of the trees to create even more variation in your entourage so with that use those tools to your disposal in order to create a nice and beautiful entourage so i'm going to skip forward now and i'm going to show you the final result of that and we finally finished making our entourage so no jokes everyone i literally spent 14 and a half to 15 hours working on this entourage and 13 hours i did in a row without sleeping i'm about to walk you through my project and you're going to find out why it took that long in just a moment so first you might be wondering why did you spend so much time doing an entourage and i will explain it this way whether using v-ray corona blender um lumion any rendering software that you have it's good to spend time working to build up everything just so that when you click render there's a little bit less work for you post-production and of course no matter how good your rendering is you should always work on it post-production but why am i saying that so i always mention you can do a 15 to 20 minute setup of the environment and rendering with lumion and lumion is known for his speed which is true because lumion optimizes the process of rendering but one thing i have to point out is that lumion optimizing the process doing so allows you to spend more effort not thinking how do i make this work but rather thinking how can i design this and that's the big takeaway it's about designing so if we look at what i have right here for example this setup i did not just pick random plants oh this plant looked pretty i'm gonna put it here put it there you know that's that was not my mentality but my mentality was actually based on my design so for this project a quick snippet is that rainstorms and flooding is so popular and huge in this area so instead of having everything you know drain right here in the manhole what i did was that i created what is known to most of you as a bioswell and i began to use plants that would sufficiently act as a way to help drain the water some of these plants are weeds and i pick plants that are very um in a way that helps remove toxins from water which is why i have the gutter actually running off here and the water essentially even feeds the plants and help them to grow and the next thing is that i also had to consider what my views were going to be because this is one of my main views for my renderings i knew that this also had to be populated so that should be two guidelines for how you set up your entourage one what is your design trying to communicate and two what are your views that you're trying to render if i'm not going to render everything that's behind me i'm not gonna spend time setting up all those nice greenery and putting so much thought into it some of these plants i had to actually substitute for something a little bit smaller but even when i substituted it i actually made sure i substituted it for something that makes sense so when i substituted it the reason i did that was because i didn't want i knew this was going to be my view and i didn't want the plants to block it but there is a way around that for example if you go on the nature category and select the plant of your choosing over here you're going to see this transparency dialog and as you can see as i drag the slider it becomes more transparent but because one of my objectives is to have a super hyper realistic rendering it makes no sense for me to have some things are transparent it's just going to make it look strange still you may wonder how it took me 14 hours and actually first i just want to show you a few more things the answer to that question will become really clear first we're going to hide this layer with the people and cars and going here i just want to bring you to this little moment this is another moment that i want to render which is why i began to put detail a lot of detail into it and quick snippet number two into the project this is a project i've done with professor nandini bachchi from the city college of new york and she's an architectural professor and a practicing architect and we went to a corporation we were working with corporation jackson in jackson mississippi and uh several of us proposed some designs to them because they want to solve a housing disparity but um i might talk more about the project itself in another tutorial but my point is um farming is a huge part of their culture so i wanted to really begin to integrate that for the community so as you can see i had like this little moment where i um really had to think of what this is going to look like what does the garden feel like and actually traveling there gave me an idea of what the garden feels like um it might not exactly look like your typical garden but um this tends to look more like the typology for their gardens and um because once again this is the view i wanted to render once again i'm going to emphasize this i i modeled this i modeled the stepping stones rather than having um the material because this gave me the ultimate form of relief and i only modeled it as far as i needed it to be modeled and for the rest i used the generic path with the material but you know let's say you don't have so much time to model it and all that stuff one thing you can do to make your tabs look more realistic is actually add relief to your materials and i briefly touched on this earlier but i'm going to demonstrate again so let's select the material categories and let's click here we're going to go really close and once you click the material that you want to add relief to drag the slider and you can see there's a difference and it may not look huge on your screen but when you render it it's going to look incredible and if you want to add further degree of realism to it if you click this timer you could go and weather the stone a little bit and make it look older and once it renders it's going to look very very nice a lot more realistic and not so much like a jpeg that you slapped onto a surface so that's something that i really advise doing to be able to add some realism and all these things here for the most part is available in lumion's library and it's just so wonderful how lumion 11 expanded the library so much and this is the same principle for the interior and now this is where i'm going to really nail the point so i was working on the layout for the living room in the kitchen and once again i have to tie this back to the layouts the way you design and um populate your place your model for the entourage it all depends on how you want to depict it so do you want to do a rendering do you want to do an animation if you have lumion pro do you want to do a 360 panorama really will be an integral factor in how you begin to do your entourage so if you want to render this place for a client you do want to populate it enough so that you can get an idea that this could be this space could be used for a certain program but at the same time if you want for example to do a panorama and you want your your viewer to feel the space be in the space you want it to feel like an actual space now here's the thing a lot of these things i actually um didn't quite have before when i started the entourage and just a disclaimer i actually modeled all of the um kitchen islands and the cabinets i modeled all of it although lumion does have a cabinet a fixture that you can use it wasn't really according to my liking or my design don't get me wrong it looks very very good it looks very good i am just saying that um i wanted it to have a whole and complete design the thing is before i had the cabinets but i had no drawers no cabinet doors and this was just a flat top right so the thing is i wanted it to feel like an actual space so when you're looking around you're like there's a kitchen cabinet and not just like a floating box on the ceiling so i actually went back into rhino i was modeling the doors i modeled the sink not the faucet lumion actually has the faucets for you and uh actually just to quickly show you that if you go on indoor you go on plumbing you can find all these different faucet types so once again please explore the libraries there are bound to be a lot of hidden gems in there and with lumion 11 pro there are so much more gems added on top of those gems so it's a gold mine you know as i had all these fixtures in the kitchen like that was part of the reason why i felt motivated to do it because i was modeling i was like hey why not make it super detailed so i even have that accent on the door and i modeled the stove of course i even modeled this grill and the more details i added i found that this empty room started to feel more like a space architecture is more so about the design the layout of the space also but also i would say part of architecture is the experience of the space as well what's really remarkable about this and i how i really want to nail the point to each and every one of you is that lumion just makes it so much easier to add these things honestly this level of detail would take days with other rendering softwares because you have to get the model right you have to do this even if you're importing model there's still quite a bit of work you have to do to them to make the model fit right into the environment don't get me wrong this is not a bash on any other rendering software my point is that with lumion because they say hey we're going to do the hard part we're going to do the hard part in terms of you know helping you figure out how to do it this allows me to spend more time thinking about how does it work so i want to really communicate that point with the sliding fixture and the way you add these lights you go on uh your indoor category and then you can see the lighting category and if you go to the second page you're going to get your railing just like that and there are different sizes different specs for the lighting that you can use so much variety and this is wonderful because now i can spend less time thinking okay i need to download the lighting fixture or i need to model this lighting fixture and i have to how do i do this how do i make it work how do i make it glow all these things but then now all you have to really think of because the tools are available for you and you can even import your own models so all i really had to do is really focus on the placement of the light and understanding how it's going to illuminate the room don't get me wrong i didn't do any sort of lumen calculation as i mentioned before but still that's just so helpful that um my time was streamlined in that sense so believe it or not i was saving time you know and that may sound ironic but don't think of the 14 to 15 hours i spent working on the entourage is because it was just hard to place things but think of it as because things were so easy to place and configure i was able to dedicate more of my time to thinking about designing the space interior design basically also modeled the interior doors and i even added these grooves the doorknob though was my limit is where i drew the line but don't let it be where you draw the line model those doorknobs i really had a lot of fun doing that and even um things such as paintings you can access that as well if you go on indoor it's going to be in decoration and there are 15 pages for decoration you can add books candlesticks all these things and it's these different frames clothes and there's just so much so many ways you can begin to make your space feel like it's populated even if you don't add people in the space and even look at this bedroom you can even have clothes in your closet this there's no way to actually um open doors in lumion i actually model it that way and i imported it because i wanted it to just feel a little bit more dynamic because it's a static object and once again furniture certain furnitures you can just change the color just by clicking on it and going onto ral color picker if you want to just pick from a certain category and from that category you can even begin to fine tune it using this so that's a wonderful feature that was added to lumion and i think it's just it's just so helpful in terms of getting the right colors this is actually not even the original color of the chair it was much more of a yellow hue so i was able to change the color of the chair just so it blends in better with the dining table and the last thing i mentioned was weather and i'm going to talk a little bit about that now and i just want to demonstrate something really quickly so if you click the weather tab here you can begin to change different functions in the program you can increase the wind speed wind direction those things are very helpful especially if you're doing an animation the trees will react to it which is amazing i personally haven't used another rendering software which can do that so that's fantastic we have this the sun direction where you can change the position of the sun to your liking whatever best suits your project real skies you can pick uh different types of cloud formation whatever works better for how you want to visualize a project in the workspace and you can even turn on real skies to get a realistic sky with the sun etc i'm not gonna toggle that on though but then there's this switch right here sun height and what essentially this is is that you can go from day to night time by just bringing this dial down and just like that pretty cool right but i'm not showing you this just so um you can see how much of a struggle it is to see at night because it actually is relatively hard to see clearly i don't know maybe your monitor brightness is at 100 or something but it's pretty hard to see clearly but i want to show you something pretty interesting so if we turn on that layer wow just like that and our garden is glowing there is a life to our garden how beautiful is that you can actually imagine yourself walking through the space at night and did i just turn on the light by turning on the layer no well basically what i did was that i had all my lights on this layer and i just turned it on and that's how simple it is to turn my layer my lights on and off and that's also to reinforce why it's important to work on with layers in any program you're working with you know turning off the ceiling the roof actually made it easier for me to look down and i'm going to show you really quickly i can look down into my space and having this vantage point allowed me to easily and more fluidly place certain objects which otherwise might have been a little trickier to see in the space you might say oh how did you do it and trust me my friend it is much easier than you think look this is going to take us literally 30 seconds let's count so by going to our indoor layer we just need to click on lighting and we can put on any fixture that we want we're going to pick this garden lamp and you will notice that it has a glow but it's not going as intensely as it is over here well we'll solve this right now click on lights go on omni light and this will add a nice glow to your light take this boom just like that so what's great and beautiful about lumion and all the lights that they added is that basically when you have certain fixtures in lumion actually reacts to light and these things have different lumen levels right and all you have to do is take a object or fixture that is intended to have light and add a light source to it and it will glow you see if you want to make this brighter you can even add another one if you like but the thing is i just want to preface first by saying you can just click on the singular one and make it brighter but it might feel a little too powerful too washed out so maybe add in another one is the way you want to do it and then you can even reduce the brightness you could increase the fallout maybe it's not it doesn't spread that much so there's so much variety to doing that and that took like 30 seconds to do and i followed this principle for each and every light that i added including these lampposts your lights are under outdoor well there are also indoor lights but we're focusing on the outdoor ones and you can even get traffic lights street lamps all these things in this category under outdoor and go to lighting and then your lighting is literally under lights and you can get omni light area lights and even spotlights and let me show you what the spotlights look like we can see that now is shining down like a spotlight and i reduce the brightness for most of them but all you have to do is literally select your desired spotlight and with lunon 11 pro you can upload your custom ies if you'd like and actually i wanted to share if you don't have any custom ies let me take a moment to share one with you right now you can download manufacturer custom ies for free on this website ieslibrary.com i'll put a link to it in the description you can also go here another good website is leomoon.com where you can download different packs and it's just such a great way to get a variety of light you can get your specific specs you can get your manufacturer's specs and actually put it in your project rather than using some random light in which it probably the space won't be lit like that in reality so i wanted to share that with you i'm going to put both links in the description and then if you want to load your custom ies all you have to do is put any light put any sort of spotlight and then select that spotlight and once you select that spotlight click load ies profile it'll take you to your directory and you select it and then it's going to automatically replace it and that's really nice and this is going to be such a cool rendering and if it looks this good in the preview i can't wait i am excited that's a huge way that lumion streams line the process not only can you get accurate lighting manufacturer lighting but you can do it in literally seconds and spend more time figuring out where does this light go how should i place it this that rather than oh how do i turn on the light if you ever try to do lighting in revit you might know what i mean and that's another major reason to upgrade to lumion 11 especially because custom ies is part of this new version of lumion with all that said now we're able to move on to the final steps which is going to be our renderings and if you want to also do it you can do animation and if you're able to and have lumion pro you can do animated phasing so in order to begin to set up views for your rendering you go here i actually already began to take some desired views from my renderings you set up your view on your camera and you hit store image and then from there you can begin to tweak it further you can make it a telephoto lens or you can make it a very wide lens if you want and you can even set uh eye level height and you can move the camera up down so you can just further tweak it if you want so i already have an example where i began to add effects to it and because in lumion 11 you have a high a high quality theater preview so if you click in the center of the screen you could get a sneak peek of what the final value looks like and already this is looking better than the final rendering that i did in a previous version of lumion which looks more cartoony so going back here the way you begin to get your style is by going custom styles you can do custom style and just edit everything from scratch using your fx if you'd like and if you're an experienced lumion user perhaps this is a good way for you to do it so you have even more calibration you have to go back and change so much of the settings otherwise you can start off with a template uh realistic dawn overcast color sketch etc because i'm focused on realistic this is what i chose and i began to change the real skies and playing around with the heading you could change the position of the sunlight you could put the sunlight according to your liking where it best illuminates your project you could change the brightness of it and the overall brightness of everything including things that are picking up reflection from the light and you can flip your sky if you don't want it you want your sky to be the other way around you can flip it um going back we can begin to sharpen the image make it sharper and uh don't do this unless you have things that are blurry there is a depth of field effects but um that's only really good in case you're just rendering an object and you can bump up exposure which is the overall quality of light in the image and same thing color correction you can make your image cooler make your image warmer change the tint in your image and so on and so forth and i'm going to just go back to the example i already started working on and show you some of the things i've done so this is some of my settings for my real sky i thought this shadows in this position was nice because you get a bit of a reflection on the trees etc and i don't need my whole building to be in the light that's not really the goal for me exposure i didn't really change i left it as it is even though it says modify i made this a little bit cooler vibrance just a bit i wasn't too worried about brightness or contrast or anything um one thing about contrast is the difference between light and dark and you can even put a numerical value in here maybe you want 55 instead of going to the next number so that's one interesting way to begin to tweak it there's also hyper light hyper light more so is um imagine a light coming inside and you have a red carpet and a white wall the hyper light begins to reflect on the wall the color of the carpet so you see like a red hue that's what hyper light is i'm in on the exterior so i'm not so worried about that skylight if you want to um increase that the brightness of your skylight and once again because i'm also working outside i'm just good with my real sky setting and shadows fine detail shadows was added to lumion 11 which helps create a nice variance and minutiae in the shadows in the grass let's click the preview and look how realistic it looks this grass is definitely not one shade because of the light and the different shadows even within the shade and i like to keep my shadows soft and also have this on and you can begin to correct your shadows if you notice something is not too much in focus everything else to me seemed pretty good so likewise i begin to do the same thing here i don't need sun study however but um there's this effect where it's like a special type of light it's like it's coming from the heavens and be wary how you use this this won't work in every single view for example if i go back here and i add this lighting here to this view it just really doesn't make sense you see that you're able to tell this thing is a rendering it just doesn't make sense you know and it cuts in here because the light is already acting a certain way so double click here to remove an effect we do not need that but in here there are some opportunities so if we click on it and we begin to edit it we can make the light decay a little bit more and we're not going to stop here or else it's still going to feel a little bit you know like you threw in that filter on top you could change the length of it how far does it go right and also begin to reduce the intensity soften the light just a bit and then we can continue to play around with the decay a bit we if you want to increase it you can do it maybe maybe increase it just a little bit and so far so good if we go back we can also go here and begin to bump the exposure just a little bit maybe increasing the intensity of the shadows a bit because this is like a garden setting so creating a bit more variance in the shadows for me makes it look and feel a bit more realistic i'll even put it to 1.3 so this is basically the process that you would follow you can play around with different templates for example here we have an interior shot so maybe things have to be a little bit different for this rendering um you could use interior render but um i don't like it so much because there are a lot of little effects that they add for this that you have to really begin to edit and curate i like to stick with realistic and then add what i need to add to it and just to have a bit of consistency but speaking of consistency if you have a set of effects let's say you work pretty hard to edit it but you want to also apply the effects so let's say videos and all these things without having to do everything all over you can literally click here menu file save effects and when you click save effects just pick the location you want to save it to and then save as and then all you have to do if you want to load an effect into a project let's say i want to load it let's actually make a copy of this right here let's say i want to load the effects here go on file load effects and go to your directory where you have the effects saved and it will automatically be applied on top of your image just like that of course we do not want to use these effects that we use for the exterior in here so we're going to begin to change that just a bit but that's just an fyi and another great way to save time thinking the style could be something like realistic and one of my lights do not have the correct placement so that's something i probably want to change right now so i can go you could hit the model space and we could go into the image and then we could select that light and we can change it so i have an omni light in this area and i think i'm just going to delete this light it's not really working too much for me you can bump up the exposure i think already that's starting to look a lot better over here and let's have a hyper light on in case anything in the view in case there's any different colors in the view like you see right here how now it's reflecting here when i enabled it if we turn that off we barely see it but by enabling it now it's much more vibrant and we can see how the light reflects off the walls and it feels and look a lot more realistic so we have a little bit of light above here coming from up here that we can begin to incorporate shadows make sure my fine detail shadows are on omni shadows if you want greater variance in the shadows for me it's okay i could put this a little bit lower not as important as having that in the garden so i'm going to go back to the build space and i'm gonna go on my lights and we could pick a spotlight and put it at some type of angle i suppose but i think this or maybe here it doesn't make sense because now because of the spotlight we can see a bit of variations in the shadows over here we can we can lessen the angle of the light maybe we don't want it to hit too much of the wall right you can lessen the angle of the light a bit maybe reduce the brightness if you don't want it to be too intense um i think this is pretty good and if i go back to the rendered view for me it's too bright let's go back and let's um let's actually reduce that brightness it's uh way too bright in fact i think this is daytime so we don't need such a huge variance i think shadows should be rel i want to put shadows to high so there's greater variance in the shadows as a result of the light this would be great at night time though don't get me wrong um let's go back to this view and let's update it i think even lower for the brightness could be good and i think i honestly think that is fine but i just realized that now we don't see this light anymore so actually what i might do is move the light a little further down and reduce the brightness just a little bit more try something you test it out you try it again test it out and that's the best way to get the best sort of result from your renderings you don't want to just slap everything on and hit render and say haha i'm done you know but uh take your time take a look at it see what works see what doesn't work and it's this whole back and forth thing so people who say there's like no work in lumion it's completely untrue the only thing is that it's streamlined you know fantastic this is wonderful and exactly how i want my rendering to be i don't mind this area being darker because this is daytime maybe you have one or two lights in your kitchen in the daytime the areas are darker but this is fine for me and i can still see the variation in the light and all the minutia in the shadows so this is great for me and this is really the process for setting up your renders for your photos and all you have to do is click render when you're ready pick the resolution and it will literally take a few minutes in order for the render to be complete i'm going to render everything at the end and i'm gonna have to stop screen recording when i render just so all my gpu is focused on lumion so i'm going to render at the end but for now let's move on to the next step which is setting up an animation so now in order to begin to create an animation or access the timeline for animation instead of the photo icon click on the movie icon and what you're going to do is go on record so basically position your camera where you want to start your animation and then from there you're going to click add to camera keyframe and this will create a keyframe in terms of movement and this is my first keyframe let's say i move in [Music] and go here this could be my second keyframe and just to play that back for you look at it it's like this and if you don't like the way it moves you could smooth it in make it start off slower and you can make it end slower as well [Music] so check that out you can smooth out the way it moves just so it's not so rough now to continue let's go back here and we're gonna walk into this living space pausing and looking at this and we're going to insert the keyframe right there and now when we play it it should be more like this and not just flying through the walls you know and then same thing you don't want it to pass through anything like that so what you do go to the last keyframe and then you move it move it the way you want it to move and position yourself insert keyframe and then if you go to the very beginning that's how you begin to do your animation and smooth things out and of course you can always speed it up if you want to by just clicking that on the frame [Music] and then if you're satisfied hit check and then here's where you can begin to edit it and now here's what i mentioned before you can go on file load effects bring in your custom ies style that you added and if you play it now you're going to have your custom effects edited imported into that that way you do not have to redo everything and wow look at that the floor and everything look at the lights over here look at that so this is definitely why you want to save your settings on lumion and it just makes it easier you don't have to edit it and then you when you want to render the click click up here render clip if you have multiple clips on your timeline and you click here for render it's going to render everything on the timeline so just make sure you click above here render clip when you're satisfied so that's how you set up the animations there's actually one more interesting type of view that i wanted to show you so if we play this right here we are using the orthographic view fx so in order to do something like this first record your clip you would go on your movie timeline for example here and record your clip however you want you put your first keyframe and wherever you want your second keyframe to be and then take it hit check and then once you do that you know you can import your custom profiles if you want but then we're going to have to add something really interesting so if we go to camera orthographic view we have to hit this enable button and then it's going to take us to this orthographic projection and that's how we're going to get that view the cool thing about this is that there is many ways you can even begin to set up your orthographic view it doesn't necessarily have to be from the elevation if you click edit camera we can change the pitch and the heading of this if we put the pitch upwards we can have this from the top view and what we will do is that well we'll delete these keyframes we want to add a keyframe for this and you can just move your camera however you want you want to go this way that way you can have it move along the screen just like that put your keyframe we don't exactly need these keyframes anymore this was the initial one so if we play it we have it going like this and furthermore we can zoom in zoom out we can make it more three-dimensional so we can rotate it if we want while leave it 2d and then we hit check and once we do this all we have to do is change the clipping plane to begin to cut into it but be careful with that because it goes super fast so you can begin cutting and seeing floor plans from above it is super cool and if you want to animate the figures the way i did in this video what you have to do is add two effects one call move and time warp so if we click fx and we go on animation here is the move effect and time warp we won't be using the advanced move in this tutorial so select both of them add them both to your clip and time warp you literally just have to it shows like the offset of the people moving like do you want a greater offset less offset you can increase it that way for move click the pencil marker and by holding this arrow you pick the end position and this arrow is a starting position so for example if i click starting position everyone returned to their starting position and then you can just click while holding the move tool you can move it up rotate etc and then drag it all the way to position the start position and then when you're ready when you have your start position fixed go on the end arrow and then drag the figure to where you want the person to end on the frame and then as simple as that and do it for each of your object and hit check and that way you're going to have moving objects in your frame so i have a majority of the desired renders and as well as videos that i want for the different sceneries so the final step for us will be to work on the animated phasing which honestly is one of my favorite things that was added to lumion 11 pro but at the same time it can be a little tricky to do it if not done correctly so the first thing we're going to do is go to the movie timeline and from the movie timeline we're going to record a new one so the first step essentially is to record the path of the camera what do you want the path of the camera to be as it's looking at the thing build up i saw a really cool one that lumion did not too long ago where they're actually moving you through the space as everything is falling together we can begin to do something like that let's say we're moving around the block and it's building up and let's say the finishing touches we begin to see that as the camera panned upward so step one we're going to plot the course for our camera to move and then step two through layer visibility and of course the animated phasing effects we're going to begin to dictate what layer pops up how it pops up and the order in which everything shows up maybe the way mine can appear is let's say the overall site pops up slowly and then you start to see everything pop up and let's say the trees start to pop up one by one and then by that point i bring my camera towards the ground let's say i bring my camera towards the ground and that's when we start getting all the interior walls popping up and all that cool stuff so i think this will be the first position for my camera you you're free to do the same with your design just um follow along so we've gotten a little bit closer all right so i'm thinking the position we'll worry about the speed in a while but i like that movement you see that movement and now we're getting closer to the ground now we want to pause it and then the next key frame from here let's actually try to bring ourselves down to the ground right and then by this point we want some of those uh things to start falling into place maybe the interior walls right so we're going to make our keyframe let's put it actually maybe somewhere here and let's just make sure it makes sense so far yep it's making sense to me and then we bring it down we can even speed up that last part if anything so let's go here let's continue forward and let's have this fall into place and i can imagine let's say we go inside this window and then this is when the exterior wall pops up that would be super cool and then we're still moving through the space moving through the space and maybe some of our furnitures and fixtures appear at this time [Music] so let's just review that we're not gonna do something too crazy but um oh yeah that looks good so far so good and then from there i'm guessing the next set of keyframes since we have the exterior walls maybe i think the ceiling has to be on by that point and perhaps through here and well first let's stop here we're gonna go through here stop and then maybe here's when we can add some people and then maybe this structure then appears so let's see between there and there yeah so we rush out the window the boom the people pop up we twist it upwards and you know something i think that's going to look pretty good let's and i think we can just end it off by going up and maybe higher like this and just take a nice look at it like that so the first thing you want to do before anything is add your custom style because if you load your custom style afterwards it's going to reset any effects that you add to it such as you know the animated phasing so do that right now or just create your effects right now from scratch whichever you prefer and i just for fyi i've done a lot of different clips i want to render do as many as you want just follow the same procedures and add your effects so what we're going to do is we're going to go on fx we're going to add two effects first things first we're going to need the layer visibility effect added and we'll we're going to get back to that in just a moment second thing that we want to add is the animated phasing so in the layer visibility effect we can determine what is going to be visible from the get-go and all that stuff but before we actually you know hide layers and then show layers let's start off by working with the animated phasing [Music] so at this point in the video we want everything should be basically invisible at this point right the people cars all that stuff we want just the ground to be popping up so we're going to hide many of our layers up here this is going to help us select everything and this is why it's good to have it in layers the more layers you have the more detailed your animating phasing will be so it's tedious in the beginning but is well worth it as you're editing you have way more control so definitely adding that definitely hiding this hiding that hiding even the properties we don't want the ceilings so we want this to i want it to rise from the ground so it'll be something more like and now we have to select what objects we want to rise from the ground facing animation number one you can also rename this phasing animation site just to make it clear what we're doing on this layer and we're going to add multiple layers what we're going to do is select everything that pertains to this layer so first thing that we're going to do is select the imported model to pop up and that's just about everything in terms of the street pole and what i'm thinking of doing is perhaps even dividing everything maybe i just divide the trees and that into two parts now you see this pop up from the ground if you look here everything here pops up from the ground animate the trees i think that'll be a nice way to divide and have the trees just pop up by themselves so this is what we have so far um i'm going to begin to hide some of the other layers and um we're going to follow the same process for each layer so for each layer you come across follow the same process if there are things that you're not selecting that's on a certain layer and you don't want it to pop up earlier all you have to do is go back to effects and click layer visibility hide the layers you click the keyframe at the point in the clip you want it hidden for example here and then turn off all the layers and then move forward drag this forward in the clip to the point where you want it to appear and then hit the keyframe and then turn on the layers when the layers are blue it's on if it's grayed out that means it's not on from now i don't need to do this but um i'm going to continue doing it the way i've been doing it so far i'll call this buildings and this is where i'm going to have all my buildings so now let's hide the layers that are not prevalent to what we're trying to select just so we don't select the wrong things so uh this is everything over relating to the building layer so let's select everything yeah i think that's good so far so we've done the site the trees the building i think next some of the features that we want around seven seconds [Music] let's have this rise before second seven seconds i think also for the buildings as the building comes up i want also to include the the porch in there the porch and the shared spaces should be included when you import everything in groups into separate groups it's just way easier to select your objects so for example let's hide the beam and frame layer because we don't need it anymore to select my interior walls my interior floors and my stairs boom that's it easy just like that and then here it is right where it needs to be but basically that's the gist so far so i am going to fast forward ahead until the point where i finish it and i'm going to show you my final result and now we are finally finished here's a quick preview of how it looks in low [Music] resolution only thing i think i'm gonna fix is actually put the grass layer on the same layer as the beam i'm going to do that quickly and that is the animation so just a quick overview of how i did it so for me personally i did not need the layer visibility effects and the reason for that is because i organized everything into layers in such a way where i was able to deselect certain things and make it really clear what i was selecting and i didn't really have to go back and forth and really try to get something because everything was in the appropriate layer that it needed to be and that's to re-emphasize that it's important to put your things in layers and the more layers you have the more detailed your animated phasing can look but if you just export your whole model together the entire model is going to fall down if you export your model in three pieces only three pieces are going to come down or rise up so it's really important that you try to divide it into as many layers as you want the more complex you want your animated phasing to be so i just divided it into a series of layer i had my first layer for my site i selected every i clicked here and selected objects clicked everything from my site and chose the way i wanted to animate it do i want it to rise from the ground pop up etc so i chose that animation and then the next set i picked the trees and i wanted it to stagger a bit so not everything pops up at the same time and then i began to choose some of the buildings so the buildings now begin to rise up and i'm thinking of actually maybe delaying that a bit and let's actually stagger it a little bit more and increase the duration if everything's not completely up by them and then everything just falls into place like that we could preview it from here according to my camera path i knew by this point i was going to be in the floor and the way i can tell is by every time i make a change i check and then i just skip forward in the video and see where my camera was at a certain point i paused it and then i went back on animated phasing and then i calibrated the layers or made a new layers and made sure everything would fall or rise right at that particular moment and i did this for each layer so i would do this then i'll go back into the clip move a little bit forward and see um see where i am in space and if i happen to miss anything in the selection the more objects i added to a particular layer the more the uh basically the plot of land started to clear up so if there was any objects remaining that i haven't selected i was able to select it and add it to the appropriate layer and i kept going back and forth like that and you know even this thing with the window at first the window was popping up here so i had to like go back and forth with the the video going up here and then going to animated phasing and make sure that the video timeline by the way you can do more than five layers here are my other pages so i have 12 layers total and some of these layers of course i don't have a layer for all 20 layers but some layers were i was able to group together so i did that and of course you can do that too i had to keep going back and forth and time the window right because when it closed from a distance you couldn't really see it but the closer you got to it you were able to tell what it was and what was happening and so on and so forth and i timed everything had the people i wanted the people to pop around this time too right once you get outside i just time this part as well and that's pretty much all there is to it for doing animated phasing so it's not hard but it does take time this took me uh probably a little bit more than an hour or about an hour roughly to really get it right because i went back and forth calibrated it i wanted the timing to just be impeccable for this we have our renderings here and we have all of our movies over here and if you are interested in doing 360 panorama you just have to click 360 panorama and choose where you want to create your panorama i want one let's say of the street view and of course you can add your custom style as always let's put the realistic render [Music] so i want to create a preview of this moment right here so i just have to take the shot and then just hit render with 360 panorama and the program is going to fill in all the information that's all around it which is very cool and then last one and once you have all your renderings you can just go to your desired view and then click render to render that particular view and for your movies go to the clip you want to render and then render it up here unless you just want to render everything in your timeline and then for your 360 panoramas likewise if you it says render all panoramas if you just want to render one at a time click here and it will render one by one so i am going to stop screen recording so i can render just so all my computer's gpu is focusing on rendering and then i will show you all the final [Music] results [Music] [Music] so what are your thoughts amazing isn't it and it came out so so good and all this is possible by using lumion 11. some of these feature that i showed in the video is available only for lumion 11 pro but if you're a student or an educator you can practically get lumion pro for free just by showing the necessary documentation and of course there's a watermark but that can easily be photoshopped or removed from the photo anyways but if you are able to afford lumion or if you purchase a previous version such as lumion 10 you can also upgrade to lumion 11 for free so what are your thoughts of lumion 11 pro honestly i am in love with lumion 11. it is so nice it streamlines the entourage process and allows me to spend more time to think and actually design my ratings for this program honestly is a 10 out of 10. if that changes at any point in the future i'll be sure to let you all know but let me know what you all think of lumion in comment section below while i still have about a week and a half left for my pro trial let me know if there's any specific tutorials that you want to see so be sure to like share and subscribe if you enjoyed this tutorial and i hope to see you all in the next [Music] video [Music] you

Channel: DanielBlanc_Studios

Views: 19,768

Keywords: 3d models, renderings, lumion 11 pro, rhino 6, exporting, entourage, IES Lighting, Animated Phasing, Animations, Panorama, Lumion render, Exporting, How to make a beautiful rendering start to finish, architectural planning, architectural design, Orthographic views, animated phasing, workflow efficiency, breathing life into your renderings, photo realistic, Lumion 11 Overview, Lumion 11 tutorial

Id: labLPDLDjLM

Length: 85min 4sec (5104 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020