What’s new in Lumion 2023:
Since the inception of Lumion, the idea that 3D rendering should be accessible to every architect and designer – regardless of their technical background – has propelled us forward. Our aim has always been to provide an fast, easy, and intuitive way of visualizing the future. To empower architects to create without hurdles or hesitation and showcase designs that go beyond form and function to capture hearts and minds.
In many ways, the release of Lumion 2023 represents a complete foundational shift for the software. Powered by a hybrid render engine that works with rasterization and ray tracing, Lumion 2023 helps you achieve the highest quality results, no matter your hardware. So, if you don’t have a ray tracing capable graphics card, you can still see a significant lift in Lumion’s rendering quality with the improved rasterization technology for all your building architecture, landscape, or interior designs.
Ultimately, it’s not about the technology itself, it’s about how it’s being applied to serve a higher purpose. Whether it’s developing a design, exploring ideas, or showcasing your vision of the future, that purpose is entirely up to you.
Introducing ray tracing v0.9
Unlike rasterization, ray tracing technology doesn’t require any clever trickery to imitate reality – it calculates the way light behaves in the real world. With the effect switched on, your renderings will automatically feature more realistic indirect lighting, non-screen space reflections, contact shadows, and much more. The new ray tracing effect in Lumion lets you control the number of samples and bounces, giving you greater control over the final result.
The scope of the new ray tracing effect will continue to be expanded and new improvements will easily be available through the new software updater included in Lumion 2023.
See your design in a new light
The new lighting system in Lumion 2023 opens a world of possibilities, allowing for more natural-looking renders.
– Reflections now work automatically whenever the ray tracing effect is enabled. With ray tracing, curved surfaces now show accurate reflections, removing the need for reflection planes. In the first implementation, the ray tracing effect will not support reflections of glass or water materials.
– Soft shadows created by point or omni lights now look completely natural. Simply switch the ray tracing effect on and adjust the light intensity to watch the softness of your shadows change automatically.
– Area and line lights can instantly turn an interior scene into a convincing rendering. Thanks to the new ray tracing effect, they now go one step further and cast lifelike shadows, too.
– Emissive surfaces now emit light and cast shadows just as they would in reality when ray tracing is enabled.
Measure the brightness of your lights just as you would in real life with Lumion 2023’s new brightness values. Set the level of luminosity for your spotlights and omni lights using lumens, and your area lights and emissive materials using nits.
Emissive light and shadows
Make your surfaces feel real
It’s often the smallest details that help communicate your design most effectively. The reflections on a façade. The light passing through a curtain. A wet cobblestone street. When materials feel real, your design comes alive. With the ability to fine-tune these details in just a few clicks, you can create a visualization experience that speaks to all senses.
In Lumion 2023, the quality of existing PBR (physically-based rendering) materials is higher than ever. The material workflow has been converted to full physically based rendering, taking advantage of 8 maps to bring your design choices
closer to reality.
With the new ray tracing effect enabled, the interaction between light and each surface results in ultra-realistic textures. You can also import your own textures or combine different maps to create the exact look you want.
Improved material editor
The material editor has been significantly improved to give you a higher degree of control over the material settings. Lumion 2023’s material editor features the following options:
New settings and map slots: metalness, emissive strength, reflectivity, opacity.
More material properties
Lumion 2023’s raster workflow enables you to control subsurface scattering. This gives objects a translucent effect, allowing light to penetrate the object and be subtly scattered. You can also affect the tint of the scattered light by assigning a color to the material map.
On top of this, you can use the clearcoat property available in Lumion Pro to add a layer of colorless, resin-like finish to your surfaces for a more realistic appearance.
Lumion 2023 also automatically recognizes the materials assigned in your CAD software and applies them to your scene’s surfaces. With 10 new materials now recognized in Lumion 2023, you can save even more time and enjoy a smoother visualization process.
When importing a 3D model, Lumion now recognizes and applies a corresponding material from the library to these surfaces: water (existing), glass (existing), concrete, metal, wood, brick, ceramic, fabric, plastic, masonry, stone, and grass.
Expanded material library
Lumion 2023 comes with 98 new materials that you can use to add realism to your buildings’ surfaces or landscape designs, including: wood, stone, metal, plaster, concrete, brick, asphalt, grass, and soil.
With the new search function in the material library, you’ll save time finding exactly what you’re looking for.
On top of these additions, Lumion 2023 now has an improved glass material that lets you fine-tune every last detail of your project’s windows and other glass surfaces. You can now add a custom texture like relief or frostiness and adjust the distortion to your liking. The new glass material is currently not fully compatible with ray tracing v0.9.
More objects, nature and Characters:
– 100 new 3D static characters
– Fine-detail nature
– 24 new plant and tree models from Oceania
– Office chairs
– Interior objects
– 51 new assets including office chairs, couches, decorative plant pots, and more
A better scene building experience
Adding context to your 3D model is one of the most creative parts of the rendering process. When you’re working in build mode, you don’t want anything slowing you down. With its redesigned interface, Lumion 2023’s build mode prioritizes simplicity, ease of use, and eliminates any hurdles that might stand in the way of your vision coming alive.
Lumion’s scene editor now also features AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2) upscaling technology, for a sharper and smoother interface.
Improved build mode
The brand-new transform gizmo functionality makes moving your models a breeze. Arrange your assets exactly how you want them using the gizmo’s arrows and easily rotate models on specific planes.
You can also align your objects to the walls, floors, and furniture in your scene more easily with the new-and-improved AutoSnap feature.
More creative control
With the new histogram, you can see the color distribution for RGB channels so you can adjust them more accurately. The improved depth of field effect allows you to draw attention to a specific part of your scene by easily placing objects in or out of focus.
Lumion also significantly reduces the time and effort required to create compelling, high-quality visualizations of your design. Control the composition of your visualizations by rendering directly in your preferred aspect ratio and easily create animations with new camera presets. You can also choose to import a camera path from an external program to create more complex animations.
Camera paths
Create smooth animations with orbit path, dolly shot, or follow object
Looking towards the future
Throughout 2023 and beyond, the new rendering platform powering Lumion will enable more frequent feature and content releases, seamlessly delivered through the Lumion Subscription model. We’ve now not only modernized the render platform, we’ve updated the software delivery method (new updater), for a faster and more seamless upgrade experience.
Over the past six months, our development team has almost doubled in size, allowing us to make improvements to Lumion much more quickly. In the near term, we’re focusing on significantly improving the capabilities and performance of ray tracing. There’s more to come soon – we’re just getting started.
source