Hi, everyone. LightUp was recently mentioned in this forum, so I thought I’d share with you guys a video I’ve just finished:
LightUp Tips:
To make sure the floors and mirrors use LightUp’s planar reflections, I gave them unique materials and made sure they were not inside any group or component.
I only rendered front faces. To make sure the leaves of some plants are rendered with both sides, I applied “no backface culling” to those components.
I made extensive use of IrrCaches inside groups and components.
To achieve the lighting effect in the lamps, I used a single face turned to the inside and then “no backface culling”.
The “video” in the screen is actually four horizontal strips animated using “ramp” in 32 steps.
Thanks! But my humble video is nothing compared to the wonders other users create.
The easiest but expensive route if you want to create interior walkthroughs is to buy a Lumion license and a desktop PC with a powerful GPU. Lumion is really easy to use. I’m using LightUp because my Lumion license is old (version 5) and Lumion 5 wasn’t really good for interiors. Upgrading it to Lumion 8 is about 2,300 euro, so, yeah…
LightUp requires a lot more knowledge to get it right. For example, it uses standard computer graphics terminology instead of layman’s terminology. I still feel like I have a lot to learn about LightUp.
If you want to learn to use it, the first stop is Adam Billyard’s YouTube channel:
After checking that out the next step would be to download the LightUp demo and read the Getting Started PDF:
If you don’t like these two extremes (Lumion and LightUp), you can also try…
Twinmotion, a favorite among some architect friends. They say it’s waaay easier to use than Lumion, but I haven’t tried it: https://twinmotion.abvent.com/en/
And Enscape, a favorite of Pete Stoppel:
These are the only tools I’d use for video creation, because they’re all quick renderers. Everything else would be too slow. But if anyone knows of another good alternative, I’m all ears.
