How to Optimize Design with Lumion 2023 | Lumion

With an entirely redesigned render engine, Lumion offers architects a more reliable and intuitive visualization experience. The innovative new foundation supports a unified lighting system that works with ray tracing to give your renderings an instant boost in realism. Those without ray tracing-capable graphics cards will also see a lift in render quality, thanks to Lumion’s improved rasterization technology.

This guide will give you a handy overview of everything Lumion 2023 has to offer its new features and how to take full advantage of them.

Add Natural Light with the Ray Tracing Effect

Getting the lighting just right is key to creating a compelling rendering. The ray tracing effect was designed to help you do just that it allows for even greater realism, with even less effort. By calculating the real-world behavior of light, ray tracing instantly increases rendering quality, delivering ultra-realistic light, shadows, and reflections at the touch of a button.

With ray tracing enabled, you’ll instantly achieve natural-looking indirect lighting, non-screen space reflections, contact shadows, curved reflections, area light shadows, emissive surface shadows, and much more.

So, how do you switch it on? Start by checking you’ve got a ray tracing-capable graphics card, then open up Photo mode. Next, simply load either the interior RT style or the ray tracing photo effect. You’ll be able to manually control the quality and accuracy of the final output with four adjustable options: number of samples, number of bounces, enable denoiser, and firefly reduction. For more information on these, check out the Ray Tracing Effect guide on Lumion's website.

Take Advantage of the Full PBR Material Workflow

Lumion 2023 isn’t only about realistic lighting. It offers another easy way to breathe life into your designs - with textures and materials so lifelike you can almost touch them. With ray tracing enabled, you’ll see every detail of your textures in the highest quality as they interact with light. There are 98 new materials to choose from, which you can easily find using the new search function.

The material editor has also been revamped to allow for a higher degree of control over material settings. This includes new material maps that more closely represent natural physical properties through the accurate calculation of light conditions and new adjustable material properties. Here’s a glimpse of what’s new:

Lumion 2023 also recognizes 10 more materials assigned in your CAD software and automatically applies them to your scene’s surfaces to make your visualization experience as smooth as possible. For a more in-depth look at the updates and changes, take a look at the Lumion 2023 release notes.

Set the Scene with the Bigger-Than-Ever Lumion Library

Nothing helps set the scene of a design like realistic characters, furniture, car, and plant models.

Lumion 2023’s content library boasts 100 new static characters designed to help you add context to any rendering. It also comes with 66 new fine-detail nature items, including a selection of indoor plant models, to effectively convey the vitality of real-life gardens and landscapes.

For exterior scenes, there are 10 brand-new vehicle models, and for interiors, there’s a choice of 51 new objects and furniture items, including sofas and office chairs.

Stay in your creative flow with the improved scene editor

Building your scene should ignite your creativity and make you feel inspired. Lumion 2023 was designed to minimize interruptions and keep you in your rhythm, so you can see your vision take shape before your eyes.

With this in mind, the Lumion interface has been redesigned to prioritize simplicity and ease of use. Build mode now features a sharper and smoother interface; the new gizmo tool allows for easier model arrangement, and the improved AutoSnap feature lets you instantly align objects to surfaces. Fine-Tune Your Renders Without Leaving Lumion

Lumion 2023 aims to simplify your workflow as much as possible. So when you’re adding the final touches to your renderings, you can use Lumion’s updated post-processing stack without having to leave the software.

The new histogram lets you balance colors with greater precision, the refined depth of field subtly draws viewers’ attention to specific parts of a scene, and the improved bloom effect lets you control its haziness and color temperature with a simple slider.

Render in a Style That Suits You

With Lumion 2023, you can produce high-quality renders exactly how you want them.

If animations are what you’re after, you’ll find a video camera path for every scenario. Enjoy greater control by making use of the new follow object path, dolly shot path, orbit path, or your own custom one.

In photo mode, you can create the perfect composition by rendering directly in your preferred aspect ratio. Choose from a range of formats, including square and vertical, and save time cropping your photos and videos post-render.

Try Lumion 2023

With its multitude of new features, Lumion makes for a faster, easier, and more dependable way to render your ideas into reality. Plus, with its new updater tool, future software updates will be delivered much more seamlessly going forward.

Get started by trying Lumion 2023 for 14 days with a free Lumion Pro trial.