jrohrer A big difference between Enscape vs. Lumion you will find, if you look, which kind of reflection are available. Lumion supports three kind of reflections. If I understand right, Enscape supports something like the speedray reflections of Lumion only. It' good to know that this is a hard limit without workaround per planar/cube reflections. Also, not all objects of a scene are shown at the reflections. Doe's Lumion reduce the objects at reflections too?
The reflection difference is more a question of usability philosophy: We do not want to bother users with the choice of which reflection algorithm to choose per surface. It is "everything should look as good a possible by default" vs "By default, it looks like a cartoon but you can tune it with a bunch of options".
Intefgrated with SKP, faster to render your scene. Easy material editor. Lumion has the animated objects that are easy to place. Render times are high once you start to add all the effects needed to make it look good. For my money, I would use Enscape over Lumion. I hate having to go into a seperate app to do something and have to deal with import export issues. That's why my main tools are 3ds MAX and vray. When I need to generate quick animations I use Enscape.
As long as the final client don't ask why something looks totally wrong it can be a question of philosophy. At the moment we have the "looks like cartoon" effect for reflections in some situations without a workaround. In this situation the advanced user should be able dive in advanced options and enable special reflection mapping types. So, the result could be nearly perfect looking without to bother the not advanced user. My hope is, if the needed quality can't be reached by additional reflection types, that the mysterious RTX will help in the future.
I never used Lumion in school as I wasn't a fan of the overall output aesthetic. I had the VRay plug in which was fine then, and is what I use now, but I don't like the time I spend in post-render photoshopping the image.
I worked in Lumion some at an office where I interned and while I appreciate that the placement of entourage and control of environment was user friendly and kept our Revit Models less cluttered with those features, it was aggravating to have to update the Revit model, save, re-link, etc. I also found the multiple reflection options to be unnecessary and agree with the "everything should look as good as possible by default", as I am now a sole practitioner and do not really have time to fiddle with settings that do not yield outcomes worth the time it takes to achieve them.
A former colleague who spent many hours working in Lumion put me onto Enscape. I'm really enjoying it and looking forward to the expanded asset library. It is also far more affordable than Lumion, and the real-time updating in the model reflected in the Enscape window are invaluable to making minor changes prior to spending the time to output an image.
My favorite feature of Enscape is the ability to quickly change the time of day in the Viewer and how well Enscape engages artificial lighting in the model. This is something that frustrated me endlessly with the native Revit rendering engines, VRay, etc. as lighting fixtures seemed to have too much you had to do to get the desired effect.
My only gripe with Enscape (and this may be because I haven't used it enough to know) is that when I set a view in Revit, it is very exact in its size and scope of the view, and I wish Enscape would automatically detect the pixel width and height of the image rather than trying to assign a ratio in the Enscape Settings.
If time is of little concern to you, you might find expanded settings in Lumion or other rendering engines helpful, but time is a serious factor for me and I either don't care for or cannot afford 3rd party visualization services as of now. I'm pleased with the program and glad I did not go with Lumion.
I got my lumion license a couple weeks ago. ( ialso use Vray/corona with max) Enscape is realtime and Lumion use GPU to render....It could take from few seconds to few minutes to render one image... The asset library is over 5000 objects but to me the only ones with decent quality are vegetation/people/animals....Furniture are not very good...Lumion is expensive but I still like it.
To me the value of Enscape is during schematic design/design development to visualize my design in realtime and see it thru those vr-Glasses .....good tool to sell your project and chat with clients in front of the computer.
In terms of the nature of the rendering engine LUMION is baking rendering, ENSCAPE real-time ray tracing is rendering, look at the rendering quality is better than LUMION ENSCAPE, particularly in the close shot of industrial products, indoor and outdoor building small scene on the expression of more real, and the advantage of LUMION first is his contains a large number of after finishing effect good plant material, such as the big rich can quickly outdoor scene. Simply put, the farther away LUMION is, the better, and the closer ENSCAPE is
As an old, experienced architecture modeller, designer and renderer - I believe that description "semi-automatic" for ENSCAPE 3D stands completely! and you render in your native "weapon"/program, as a plugin contribution... Using 10+ different renderers in the past - I found that certain simplification of Enscape Team is very fast and smooth, without quality compensation. it makes production of "final rendering" time FEW TIMES faster than other tools, enabling you to fill the model/scene with additional assets/detail as a contribution to "immediate viewer impression task"...
My vote(s) go for Enscape rather than Lumion!!!
Has anyone found a way to re-sync the Lumion + Vectorworks file without losing all the materials on Lumion? Every time I have to re-sync a project (e.g. after a tweak to the vws masterplan), I loose all the materials I previously applied on Lumion, but I keep the objects (e.g. peoples and plants).
I have seen this mapping error happen before but not for a while. If you change the texture/color of an object in VW it breaks the material mapping in Lumion but the wholescale loss of mapping is a different animal.
Very frustrating - we have learned to work it into our time estimates that we will have to retexture the Lumion model 3 or 4 times while preparing a presentation. We have learned to save the lumion textures we create to speed up the process of re-applying - but still nothing worse than having to redo the same work over and over.
So I just graduated a couple of months ago, and I'm putting together my portfolio for a master's degree submission. My worry lies in the fact both universities I'm submitting to are among the highest ranked globally. I'm assuming this means a higher level of scrutiny of each portfolio.
Which brings me to my question: Could using a pirated version of Lumion cause problems at such institutions? I would've used the educational version, but the problem is individuals aren't eligible for the license. I also can't lie about this because the edu license adds a watermark to each render. If they figure out it's Lumion they'll know it's pirated.
this is the dumbest comment I have ever read. Admissions boards to universities have no stake or incentive to report students or applicants to corporations for using pirated software. The corporations that produce these softwares have no incentive to prosecute students for using these softwares. The "You gota pay to play so if you can't afford the licensing, don't bother applying" comment is possibly the most infuriating thing I have ever read.
You say you're applying to the highest ranked universities. If so, this Lumion vs. vray thing is a non-issue, as those schools tend not to like or care about slick renderings anyway. They don't care about your digital modeling and rendering skills or about what software you know. You could do your whole portfolio with free Sketchup or with Microsoft Paint for that matter, and it wouldn't hurt your chances and might help them. What admissions committees care about most is visual evidence of your thought process and a sense that you don't give up easily and will obsessively iterate. To that end a portfolio full of 20 hand-doodled views or crumpled-paper models of the same thing, with slight variations, is much better than one beautiful rendering. Reworking all your undergrad projects is probably unnecessary - and if you are going to do that you'd be better off recreating the "getting there" design process artifacts than reworking the end product.
While I agree, I do think it's funny. The advice is to NOT do another iteration of your project (which is the intent of what the schools want to see) but to focus on documenting as many iterations of the most flavorful part of your process (what the schools will actually look at). Imagine trying to actually document your process, not only would the portfolio be over 100 pages for each project, but 90% of it would be garbage... duh, that's why it didn't make the cut and that's why it's called trash paper. It's all about post-rationalization and curating the cream of the crop to look like you had a plan all along and were doggedly exploring the iterations of said vision.
Please, lets not scare the young people here. Schools do not have the capabilities to check for work done on pirated software, nor do they wish to spend the time and effort it takes to find that out. They already spend so little time on each portfolio submission as it is.
With that being said, however, please don't use images taken from Lumion. They're more times than not ugly and sterile. While these may work for commercial firms that care about the bottom line, you as a student should spend the effort to create images that are personalized to your design sense. You're better off taking screens from your model and desaturating the image and then overlaying that with make2d linework.