Hey everyone, today’s video is a
little experiment that I wanted to do. Use Lumion and Vray to do similar tasks. I
thought of a quick physical model render to get a volumetric study, so that should give us
plenty of interesting insights to talk about.
By the way, this past month I’ve been working on
some commissioned images and I challenged myself to use Lumion as my main render to see how I could
use it professionally. Here’s a sneaky peak of that, but I’m planning to get a full video on them
out, or some Photoshop breakdowns to continue the series that we have here on the channel.
But that’s for another video, today we’re going to compare these two programs in the
same workflow to what we can take out of it.
And now no more talking,
let’s jump into the video.
Alright, so first things first, I got say
that the goal here is not to decide which render software is better. Because they are
both different engines. And one is a real time renderer and the other a typical CPU
renderer. So that’s not a fair comparison.
But we are here to understand the
process in each one and talk about that.
And the project that we have here is Quinta
Monroy from Elemental, from Alejandro Aravena. I think most of you already know this, but
if not, I highly recommend checking it out.
Alright so, let’s start with Lumion and leave
good old Vray for later. I’m going to show you a sped up process, and highlight some information
that I think is important. So I used the design showcase scenario for this one because it comes
with an infinite plane already set up, plus some settings that can come in handy. And it’s more
focused to these sort of diagrammatic images.
Not that I really recommend
using the presets that they have. It’s important to get to know each effect
and learn how to tweak them to your liking.
But as general guide, I’d say if you’re looking
for a realistic result and if your computer can handle. Use all of the effect in the advanced tab.
They each take care of a single important thing, but overall they all help out with lighting,
reflection and shadows and a few other things.
So usually I start by defining your scene, in my
case here I already set it up back in Sketchup since I wanted them to match them up later.
Instead of applying rendering settings to the model, in Lumion they happen only inside
each viewport, or scenes as they call it.
And the idea here was to use the default
materials that come with each software to see how quickly I could get a final result without
having to go after high quality PBR materials.
And I’ve this on other video here on the
channel when working with physical models, physical maquettes, but the trick is to enlarge
the textures so that they look out of scale.
And talking a bit about the process here, I
find that using the Lumion live sync plugin allows me to be much more experimental with
my model and then I use Lumion as a renderer, instead of a standalone type of software.
But I guess regardless of the program you use. You got to understand that it is after
all just a tool and the less it creates friction in your workflow, the more you
can focus on creating and visualizing, right? Well, at least that’s how I think about it.
Now, the last Lumion update, they fixed a lot of bad things that happened with Omni lights, they
didn’t cast proper shadows and went through walls and stuff back then. And apparently they
fixed that, so I was eager to test it out.
So with this experiment, I saw
many disadvantages in Lumion, as I’m going to talk about later. But a big win for
this program is the ability to see in real-time how the effects and objects are affecting your
model. Here lights aren’t as advanced as in Vray, but they can certainly help
you focus on the creative side instead of getting too fixed on technicalities.
Another tip for realistic maquettes is to use an alternative source light instead of the sun.
I simply create another Omni light on the side and made it very strong, cranked the
brightness all the up. Now, I wish I could’ve had further options here, more advanced
options, but it kind of worked out in the end.
And there’s one thing about lighting in Lumion
that I got to say. If you’re looking for a diagrammatic result or some volumetric result
like this that we’re doing right now. It’s important to know that Lumion will always find a way to
illuminate your scene, like no matter what. So if you want to isolate the model and have that one
source of light be the only one. You might need to create this sort of box around it. Because I was
seeing the night sky affect my model, even though I set the sun to the lowest brightness possible.
So that’s sort of a workaround that I had to do. So I think it’s important for you to know.
But I think the biggest take out from Lumion is that you get really fast previews and you can
literally tweak every single slider to see what it does and find the best settings for your scene
and your model. That doesn’t really happen on Vray, although you get a similar approach. I think
that’s the biggest take away from Lumion here.
So, working with lighting to create
these volumetric studies is pretty easy and straightforward. The process
is much smoother and enjoyable.
But… as I already mentioned a couple of time,
some realistic settings aren’t as good as Vray or other CPU renderers. At least for now I guess,
like they fixed the Omni light that I showed you, and they might work with other flaw later down the
road. But that’s what we have now to work with.
So when working with those commissioned
images I noticed that the reflection are good just where you actually place them,
and you’re limited to 10 straight surfaces. So things made out of glass often don’t look good.
But that’s something that we’re going to talk over when we talk about the commissioned images and
the Photoshop breakdowns that are to come.
But yeah, I think on Lumion once you
get the overall look that you want, you can start playing with some more artistic
effects, like depth of field for example. And it’s all very intuitive and responsive.
Well I could go on and on here, but for now since we’re focusing this process and this experiment I
think that’s more than enough, let’s jump into Vray and talk a little bit about that. And then finish
up with some insights at the end of the video. And then I can also show you the raw renders, plus the
finished products with Photoshop and some insights on that as well.
Vray
Okay, so Vray, and right of the bat I knew
that I didn’t want the Vray Sun for my scene. So I turned it off and that was quite easy. And
I added a dome light, which allowed me to place an interior HDRI image. You can find plenty of
free ones over HDRI haven. I’m going to leave that in the links in the video description.
And Lumion does have HDRI lighting options as well, like lighting options with that.
But you’re stuck with the default ones. And they’re only real skies, which is
sort of a bummer because you don’t have much creative freedom on that side.
So here on Vray I made the hdri really light, so that it just affected a little bit of the
lighting, but mainly the reflections. And later one I’m going to add sphere light to really
light up my model as my main source of light.
And same way as before, only materials
that came with the render engine. And here we’ve got a group dedicated to diagrammatic
materials, which I think is pretty cool.
Now, I felt that the emissive material in
Lumion was a bit easier to set up and affected the surroundings more a bit more. But maybe that’s
some settings that I didn’t get correct on Vray.
So that was basically it, the two processes.
Already talked a little about both, so that those are the two raw renders.
Obviously with all of your images, usually they are not ready straight out of a render
software, so you got to jump into Photoshop. And this time I tried not to do much here. If
this was to be delivered to someone, or placed in my portfolio, or even for a competition I’d
spend much more time during post-production.
Here I just added a bit of water damage over
the edges or some earth layers on the base side just to create some interest. And then
increase the exposure, adjusted the levels, contrast all using the camera raw filter.
And I got to say that I’m very pleased with how the Lumion one turned out, but working with
those commissioned images that I mentioned I felt the need of going one step further on
the settings, like being a bit more advanced on that. And I feel that it’s too focused on
the ease of use and in some way it seemed that they were reducing the settings so that they
didn’t overcomplicate things there. I don’t know, maybe it’s just my take on this. But I wish I
could see more advanced settings as I mentioned.
Yeah, overall good results on both of them.
I think Vray is my preferred way of doing it, at least for now. Again, not comparing both, I
know that I said this many times, and I kind of did compare both of them.
But yeah that’s it, little experiment. Reflections are still better over
a cpu rendering, overall, not that this example really show us anything related to that.
And even though we got more responsiveness with lighting in Lumion, then overall ambience
light can be better fine-tuned in Vray.
Yeah, so that was something that was in mind
these days, especially when working with those commissioned images that I mentioned and I
wanted to do this little experiment so that I could extend this conversation to you guys.
Because not every time I got the answers to the things here, sometimes I just want to
try out and see what I can take out of this and practice. And not share with you guys, right?
So, I’m eager to know what you guys prefer. What’s you take on this? Even with less advanced
settings, are real-time renders gaining ground over CPU renders or not? I don’t know.
And obviously when I’m talking real-time renders, I’m not talking only about Lumion,
but Enscape, Twimotion and others.
And I think that’s basically it, I know
I owe you guys a proper Lumion tutorial, and that is to come. I’m just waiting on the
firm to properly release the project. And do the official launch of that. So that I can share
the final images with you. But that is to come.
And yeah, I’m not going to do a full Lumion
tutorial, because we got tons over youtube already. Like Lumion 101, but more onto how
to incorporate Lumion into your visualization workflow and then use Photoshop in that. I think
you guys would be more interested in that.
And yeah, I think that’s it, if you enjoyed
this one. Don’t forget to give this video a like and if you made till here and you’re not
subscribed to the channel yet, make sure to do so to not miss out on future videos.
And as always, I’ll see you in the next one.
